Green Ink: California’s Rethink, and China’s ‘Green Leap Forward’

Crude oil futures are nudging $84 a barrel thanks to colder weather and a weaker dollar, but industrial demand will be the real test, Bloomberg reports.

What’s next for U.S. policy on energy and the climate? Joe Romm argues that climate legislation actually enjoys surprising bipartisan support—but could be scuppered by the anti-science crowd.

Actually, even pioneering states are having a rethink. Meg Whitman is making opposition to California’s cap-and-trade plan a centerpiece of her gubernatorial campaign, in the L.A. Times. There’s even a ballot measure to nix the plan until unemployment falls, on the WSJ edit page.

And California is one of several states asking the EPA to go slow with new emissions rules, fearing that new regulations could hurt—not help—efforts to clean up the economy, in the WSJ.

Tom Friedman calls China’s “Green Leap Forward” the biggest event of the past decade, and says the U.S. response will be the key to American competitiveness. Chinese progress includes a huge new deal for concentrated solar power, in the NYT, and the world’s fastest high-speed rail, in MIT Technology Review.

The whole clean-energy fight is indeed a jobs battle, notes Jeff Ball in the WSJ—there’s little chance environmental legislation can pass if it doesn’t tackle double-digit unemployment. New government money for fuel-efficient cars is another way to spur job creation, also in the WSJ. And Ford is hoping to make the new Focus a poster-child of fuel efficiency, in the WSJ.

The U.K. announced contracts for even more offshore wind power than expected Friday—the plans for 32 gigawatts of wind farms will require a similar effort to the creation of the North Sea oil and gas industry, in the WSJ. Of course, all that wind also requires a lot of natural gas, which threatens the U.K.’s energy security, in the FT.

Here’s a canary in the coal mine: Coal production in Wyoming fell last year for the first time in a decade; whether that’s a blip of the sign of things to come remains to be seen, in the Billings Gazette.

Makers of green household products are ramping up their marketing efforts to take on mainstream rivals, in the WSJ.

Finally, the L.A. Times pays tribute to Art Rosenfeld, the father of energy efficiency, who’s leaving his job this week after decades of pushing California along the Rosenfeld curve.