New insights, new potential discoveries with wide-ranging applications in clean energy and clean manufacturing processes seem to be happening every other week or so. It is simply amazing to read about the regular and rapid advancements and progress being made in areas such as wind energy installations, recycling of waste, portable ovens powered by the sun, photovoltaic solar energy cells, the harnessing of tidal waves for energy, and so forth. It is also distressing to hear and read about continuing "accidents" that cause spills of oil and gas into the environment. In the spring of this year in Arkansas, a burst underground oil pipe owned by Exxon Mobil spilled toxic oil into the homes and properties of hundreds of homes. Many of these homes are not fit for residence and will need to be razed down, if this hasn't happened already. This is just one of many burst oil pipes that are occurring in the U.S. and Canada on a regular basis. There are several websites that list and display where and when these failures are happening, the Sierra Club being one of them.
So, what definitely is unfolding in front of the nation's eyes is a dramatic opposition between the old world's dirty energy practices and beliefs and dogma and the new world's clean energy emerging and demonstrated technologies, beliefs, and creeds. The evidence for the severe shortcomings and injurious risks of the old world's energy dogmas is ample: the continuing oil pipeline spills, the huge BP oil spill in 2010, the massive coal ash spill in Tennessee a few years ago, and the list goes on and on. The evidence for hugely-increased risks of grave damage to the environment is being demonstrated by the multiple barrages of anti-environmental legislation being levied by the rabid, pro-pollution congresspersons in our Congress. They are coming out with drastic cuts to the EPA, huge and wide exemptions for polluters to increase their polluting activities, and reducing if not eliminating any accountability for their pollution and continuing accidents.
On the other hand, we are seeing this new wave of exciting and promising developments that is rapidly opening doors to a clean energy economy that can be, and is being, established now. One of these latest developments is an environmentally-friendly battery made from wood upon which  sodium ions are set within a base of tin on the wood. These sodium ions apparently can conduct electricity just as well as lithium ions, without the destructive environmental impact that lithium has. And the wooden base is supple and flexible, able to hold the sodium ion-laden water much better than the stiff bases seen in the batteries of today. If you would like to read more about this, here is a link to the scientific article: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl400998t

Think green, think clean! (TM, 2013)