San Jose Mercury News: The Hidden Workforce Expanding Tesla's Factory

When Gregor Lesnik left his pregnant girlfriend in Slovenia for a job in America, his visa application described specialized skills and said he was a supervisor headed to a South Carolina auto plant.

Turns out, that wasn’t true.

The unemployed electrician had no qualifications to oversee American workers and spoke only a sentence or two of English. He never set foot in South Carolina. The companies that arranged his questionable visa instead sent Lesnik to a menial job in Silicon Valley. He earned the equivalent of $5 an hour to expand the plant for one of the world’s most sophisticated companies, Tesla Motors.

Marin Independent Journal: College of Marin Gets Tesla Batteries for Solar Power Storage

The high-tech Tesla battery installations that could save College of Marin about $10,000 a month popped up on campus last week.

The energy storage system with home, commercial and industrial applications, is designed to store and distribute electricity generated by the school’s solar arrays. The project took nearly 18 months of planning and will be completed at the end of May.

“This partnership between College of Marin and Tesla reduces the carbon footprint,” said Greg Nelson, vice president for finance and operations. “It helps us, helps Tesla and it helps save taxpayer dollars.”

Mother Jones: Environmentalists Hate Fracking. Are They Right?

What if President Barack Obama's biggest achievement on climate change was actually a total failure?

That's the central argument of a recent story in The Nation by Bill McKibben, a journalist and environmental activist. "If you get the chemistry wrong," McKibben writes, "it doesn't matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong."

For many environmentalists, including McKibben and 350.org -- the organization he co-founded -- Obama's "bridge" theory is bunk. That's because it ignores methane, another potent greenhouse gas that is the main component of natural gas. When unburned methane leaks into the atmosphere, it can help cause dramatic warming in a relatively short period of time.

ClimateWire: China Will Start the World's Largest Carbon Trading Market

When it comes to learning about emissions trading, China has had a leg up.

The world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases has spent 15 years scouting the globe to learn from the mistakes of other nations and find the best ways to build a trading system of its own, which could become the world's largest.

One of China's earliest mentors was Dan Dudek, an agricultural economist and vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), who, early in his career, got into an argument with its president, Fred Krupp, over whether China might be a big piece of the puzzle the group was exploring: Was there a way to use economics, rather than politics and regulations, to shift the world's businesses away from polluting the environment toward protecting it and to reward low-cost innovations that do that?

PV Magazine: World Bank to Provide $750 Million for Solar in India

While India’s solar market has been dominated by large utility-scale projects to date, the nation’s rooftop sector is about to get a major boost from the World Bank. On Friday, World Bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) approved a US$625 million, 20-year loan to fund rooftop solar PV across the nation.

The bank has also approved a 40-year co-financing loan of $120 million and a $5 million grant from Climate Investment Fund’s Clean Technology Fund.