In California’s high desert, a solar gamble

The California Owens Valley, the scene of decades of intense environmental hostilities and the subject of the famous Roman Polanski film “Chinatown,” once more finds itself at center stage. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which turned Owens Lake into a dry wasteland and created one of the most prodigious polluters in America, wants to turn its lake bed into one of largest sources of solar power in America.

There’s wind in their (renewable) sales

Zotos International, Inc., of Geneva, N.Y., a company begun years ago as a maker of hair dyes, in July announced plans for a $7 million, 3.3 MW on-site wind power project, 30 percent of which is to be funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The retrofitting of suburbia

“We tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that. But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should somehow remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to. It’s time to let them grow up.”

Way up north, another kind of oil controversy

Not many people have heard of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, nor the Athabaskan Tar Sands. Not these days, anyway, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. But in Fort Chipewyan, the ongoing effects of bitumen oil extraction continue as the top news of the day.