Photo: Rebecca Key

 Well, of course, we don’t know if it’s going to be a slugfest, but Pacific Gas & Electric is holding a symposium on carbon offsets Thursday, June 28, that could be quite interesting.

On that day, PG&E will begin offering something akin to an indulgence for carbon emissions, dubbed ClimateSmart. Customers can volunteer to pay extra every month — about $4.13 for the average residential customer — to neutralize their carbon output.

PG&E will take the extra money you kick in and use it to plant trees and buy forests so the trees can’t be cut down. This system is what’s known as a carbon offset — you spend money to offset your use of energy. Some folks think this is a good idea and some folks go into a foaming rage whenever it’s mentioned.

As part of the kickoff, the utility is having a symposium, “Voluntary Carbon Offset Programs: A License to Pollute or a Climate Change Remedy?” All kinds of interesting folk, from environmentalist group the National Resources Defense Council to UC Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, will debate the question at The Golden Gate Club in the Presidio, 135 Fisher Loop, Presidio, San Francisco. Should be interesting!  

<small>Photo: futureatlas.com</small>

Californians are buying less gasoline,  in the first continuing sales-decline trend since 1992, according to the state.  Yes, we purchased about 15.82 billion gallons last year, down from nearly 15.94 billion gallons the previous year, a state Board of Equalization report shows.

Previously, consumption had been increasing by hundreds of millions of gallons annually.

Motorists also have bought less in most of the last 12 months on record, from March 2006 to February 2007, than in the corresponding months of the previous year.  Some wild-eyed environmentalists advocate jacking up the price of gas even more to curb consumption, and these figures seem to suggest they’re at least correct about the cause-and-effect: Read the rest of this entry »

<small>Photo: Solaicx.com</small>

Who says you can’t go solar in rainy Oregon? Certainly not Santa Clara-based Solaicx, a manufacturer of silicon ingots and wafers for use in products such as solar roofs. The company signed a lease on a 136,000-square-foot facility in  Portland, Ore., Solaicx said Tuesday. The plant will have an initial run-rate of 48 megawatts, according to the company. (The photo on the left is Solaicx’s first single crystal silicon.)