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The White House on Monday won a key endorsement for its proposal to boost U.S. electricity generation by clean energy sources as the head of the Senate’s energy panel said he could back the idea of including nuclear power in the fuel mix.

In his State of the Union speech to Congress last week, President Barack Obama proposed the United States produce 80 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources, such as wind, solar, “clean” coal and nuclear, by 2035.

Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he supports including nuclear power in the White House’s clean energy standard as long as renewable energy sources like wind and solar also benefit.

“If we can develop a workable clean energy standard that actually continues to provide an incentive for renewable energy projects to move forward, and provide an additional incentive for some of the other clean energy technologies, nuclear being one, I would like to see that happen,” Senator Jeff Bingaman told reporters…

Bingaman said he has been in discussions with the White House over the last week on how to come up with a legislative proposal that would win bipartisan support in the Senate…

Such a bill would have a more difficult time clearing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives…

Analyst Christine Tezak said the best way for a clean energy standard to pass Congress is for the president to address some of the energy concerns of Republican lawmakers, such as expanding oil drilling and speeding up government approval of permits for energy exploration…

Yes, let’s don’t forget the traditional bosses of the Republican Party. Take your history all the way back to Standard Oil, watch the oil barons nudge their buddies from Wall Street finance aside while they exercise royal prerogative and demand opposition to any alternatives to fossil fuel profits.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

With the Vancouver Games nearly over, officials here are breathing a sigh of relief that no major doping scandals have overshadowed the events. Still, they say, it would be naïve to think that every athlete who competed here did so with natural talent alone.

To determine just how clean the athletes at these Games have been might take eight years, Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, said Saturday, on his way to watch the final day of speedskating.

“The final verdict on the Vancouver Games will be in 2018,” he said. “We cannot test everything today. That’s why we keep the samples for eight years time.”

When the Games close Sunday, more than 2,000 tests would have been conducted on athletes’ urine and blood samples. Those samples are then placed into storage.

If a new scientific test to detect doping becomes available — perhaps for transfusing your own blood, a doping method which is currently undetectable — those samples can be retested. If positive tests come back, an athlete can be sanctioned. If he or she had won an Olympic medal, that medal can be stripped from them.

Several athletes from the 2008 Beijing Games learned that the hard way…

Before the Games began, the World Anti-Doping Agency said that more than 30 athletes were barred from competing in Vancouver after violating antidoping rules. The agency did not identify the athletes or the sports they compete in. Additional information about those athletes did not emerge during these Olympics.During the Games, nearly everything went quiet on the doping front…

“There is nothing sensational to report,” Arne Ljungqvist, head of the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission, said Thursday of the doping testing here.

Bravo!

People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor. The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.

Katie Liljenquist…is the lead author on the piece in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science…

“Companies often employ heavy-handed interventions to regulate conduct, but they can be costly or oppressive,” said Liljenquist, whose office smells quite average. “This is a very simple, unobtrusive way to promote ethical behavior.”

He’s very clean…!

The study titled “The Smell of Virtue” was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.

The first experiment evaluated fairness. As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic “trust game.” Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly…

The second experiment evaluated whether clean scents would encourage charitable behavior. Subjects indicated their interest in volunteering with a campus organization for a Habitat for Humanity service project and their interest in donating funds to the cause…

“Basically, our study shows that morality and cleanliness can go hand-in-hand,” said Galinsky of the Kellogg School. “Researchers have known for years that scents play an active role in reviving positive or negative experiences. Now, our research can offer more insight into the links between people’s charitable actions and their surroundings…”

Har! I could relate some of my adventures on the BYU campus back in the day – right about here. But, our site would probably be relegated to the “Adult” bin.

Cleantech investment is on the rise again, according to two reports released this week, hitting $1.2 billion in the second quarter. “Cleantech venture investment has rebounded moderately after free-falling for two consecutive quarters,” said Brian Fan, senior director of research for the Cleantech Group, in a press release…

The Cleantech Group, which tracks deals in North America, Europe, China and India, said Wednesday that cash was distributed among more companies, too: 94 compared with 82 in the first quarter. Meanwhile, Greentech Media put the number of deals in the second quarter at 85 vs. 59 in the first…

The similarities in the reports also shed light on areas of investment in cleantech trends in the second quarter. Aside from agreeing that cleantech venture capital grew, both groups listed transportation technologies, including vehicles, biofuels and batteries, as among the top investment categories in the second quarter.

The Cleantech Group said that transportation, boosted by stimulus funding and increased attention on the automotive industry, raised the most cash – with $236 million for vehicles, $206 million for biofuels and $165 million for advanced batteries. Greentech Media put transportation deals in second place at more than $202.5 million and clumped biofuels, gasification and cleaner coal together in third place, with a total of more than $195 million. The energy-storage category, including batteries and fuel cells, came in fourth with $181.5 million.

Meanwhile. the “new whine in an old bottle” crowd – you, know, the dweebs who claim to be legitimate skeptics about climate change with their fingers crossed behind their collective backsides – have been claiming that Wall Street and Venture Capital are walking away from Green investing. I think they know less about investing than they claim to know about climate science.

No one was surprised when Greentech investing diminished during the screaming meemie days of mid-recession. Only a fool and followers of same would claim that Greentech was singled out for a reduction in investment. Those of us who follow tech markets in general knew the difference – and it’s nice to see knowledgeable sites like earth2tech.com record the changes taking place.

Click photo for a closeup that scares small children

According to the American Trucking Association, there has been a 41 percent increase in registered large trucks and an 84 percent increase in miles traveled by large trucks from 1986 to 2006. That equals lots of diesel fuel consumed. Fortunately, a new report from Coordinating Research Council and the Health Effects Institute shows that pollution from heavy trucks and buses is actually improving at a faster rate than automobiles.

Impressively, today’s big rig engines produce 98 percent less carbon monoxide, 10 percent less nitrogen oxide, 95 percent less non-methane hydrocarbons and 89 percent less particulate matter than required by EPA’s 2007 diesel engine emission standards. Diesel engines manufactured in 2010 will perform even better as new regulations mean the powerplants will cut nitrogen oxide emissions by another 50 percent.

This study is the first installment of the Advanced Collaborative Emissions Study (ACES), which will continue to test diesel engines and the related health effects of burning diesel fuel over the next five years. Click here to view the official test results and to keep future tabs on the testing results.

Diesel for passenger cars here in the States is decades behind the rest of world – especially Europe. There are unique reasons on each continent; but, the primo excuse here is incompetent GM product rolled out decades ago. Smelly, leaky, inefficient, crap.

Now, if we only could get someone with the brains and courage to turn out U.S-built small turbo-diesel cars and light pickups, I might get serious about getting a new ride.

Clipboard in hand, Debra Anderson spent three hours one recent sunny morning trooping through a field of romaine lettuce looking for trouble.

She searched for animal tracks at the Church Brothers field, watched picking crews wash their hands and sampled rinse water to make sure it had enough chlorine to kill germs. Though she is a California state employee, Ms. Anderson was working on behalf of the food industry, part of the latest experiment in improving safety.

Am I supposed to feel safer knowing that an unregulated amount of chlorinated water is being sprayed on the leafy greens headed towards my table?

With huge losses from food-poisoning recalls and little oversight from the federal Food and Drug Administration, some sectors of the food industry are cobbling together their own form of regulation in an attempt to reassure consumers. They are paying other government agencies to do what the F.D.A. rarely does: muck through fields and pore over records to make sure food is handled properly.

These do-it-yourself programs may provide an enhanced safety level in segments of the industry that have embraced them. But with industry itself footing the bill, some safety advocates worry that the approach could introduce new problems and new conflicts of interest. And they contend that the programs lack the rigor of a well-run federal inspection system.

“It’s an understandable response when the federal government has left a vacuum,” said Michael R. Taylor, a former officer in two federal food-safety agencies and now a professor at George Washington University. But, he added, “it’s not a substitute” for serious federal regulation.

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Ready for the latest in spa pampering? Prepare to dunk your feet in a tank of water and let tiny carp nibble away.

Fish pedicures are creating something of a splash in the Washington D.C. area, where a northern Virginia spa has been offering them for the past four months. John Ho, who runs the Yvonne Hair and Nails salon with his wife, Yvonne Le, said 5,000 people have taken the plunge so far…

He said he wanted to come up with something unique while finding a replacement for pedicures that use razors to scrape off dead skin. The razors have fallen out of favor with state regulators because of concerns about whether they’re sanitary.

Ho was skeptical at first about the fish, which are called garra rufa but typically known as doctor fish. They were first used in Turkey and have become popular in some Asian countries.

Customers were quickly hooked. [Har.]

Ho believes his is the only salon in the country to offer the treatment, which costs $35 for 15 minutes and $50 for 30 minutes. The spa has more than 1,000 fish, with about 100 in each individual pedicure tank at any given time.

Hey – I would give it a try.