Amid a growing call for reducing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to 350 parts per million, a group of economists maintains that striving to meet that target is a smart investment — and the best insurance policy humanity could buy.

In the wake of a new report revealing that a clean-energy grant program in the stimulus has paid out more than $1 billion to foreign manufacturers, U.S. Senators Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), Bob Casey (D-PA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jon Tester (D-MT) urged the Obama administration Wednesday to suspend the program indefinitely until the law can be fixed so that funds only flow to projects that will create jobs in the United States.

Job creation. Innovation. U.S. competitiveness. In the eyes of the top CEOs in the U.S., before these goals become reality, the foundation of policies and comprehensive climate and energy legislation needs to be laid by those who reside in Washington D.C. As such, more than 80 CEOs from U.S. businesses, from eBay to PG&E to Virgin America, have sent a letter to President Obama and members of Congress asking them to create the impetus to achieve these goals by enacting climate and energy legislation.

The debate surrounding global climate change has been a very hot button issue for the past few years. In most cases the average person doesn’t know enough about the science behind this issue to make an informed decision. The fact is that climate change will become a major issue within the next two decades and will have a host of environmental as well as economic impacts in the United States. Climate change will play a major role in the way our economy functions as well as the way our legislators make decisions.

Culture and Local Governance / Culture et Gouvernance Locale is now accepting manuscript submissions for its ‘Culture and Sustainable Communities’ special issue to be published in September 2010. Papers are invited across a broad range of theory and practice of cultural sustainability planning within the municipal context. Potential themes include, but are not limited to, case studies of municipalities that incorporate culture within sustainability planning, new strategic approaches and frameworks of incorporating culture within sustainability initiatives, theoretical examinations and adaptation of cultural considerations within the sustainability paradigm, and the interplay between diversity and sustainability in municipal cultural plans. Culture and Local Governance is a peer-reviewed open access online journal publishing original work, both theoretical and empirical, on the relation between culture and local governance. This special issue takes as a foundational understanding that culture is by nature diverse and evolving, and intercultural realities and relationships must be incorporated as integral to any understanding of culture and sustainability in contemporary cities and communities. These varied, distributed efforts reflect a quickly emerging field of inquiry and practice, which this special issue hopes to reflect.

Earlier this month, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced the decision to create a NOAA Climate Service line office dedicated to bringing together the agency’s climate science and service delivery capabilities as a way of addressing the growing demand for climate data vital to planning and operations. NOAA is also unveiling a new Web site – http://www.climate.gov – that serves as a single point-of-entry for NOAA’s extensive climate information, data, products and services.

After feed-in tariff legal uncertainty, a January 2010 report by the National Regulatory Research Institute finds that states can successfully and legally implement feed-in tariff programs to accelerate renewable energy projects.

There has been growing talk about a clean-tech race between China and the U.S., often cast in ominous tones. But the quest to develop and implement renewable energy can be one where both nations win.

Imagine a world where the concept of “waste” does not exist. A world in which nothing gets discarded, every industrial product gets reassembled into something useful, each unit of energy is offset and anything and everything is a renewable resource. This is the design principle and environmental philosophy of “zero waste”.