Mainstream Media Gets It: Clean Energy Can Be Profitable; So Does Mark Zuckerberg

The LA Times is reporting: activist environmentalists advocate censorship -- our way or the highway.

The 28-year-old billionaire co-founder and chief executive of Facebook has funded a political advocacy group called Fwd.us that has come under fire for spending millions on television ads that support expansion of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Fwd.us is trying to give political cover to conservatives such as Democratic Sen. Mark Begich in Alaska and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina to support immigration reform. The ads underscore the conservative credentials of the lawmakers who may be vulnerable in 2014. But the controversial strategy is not sitting well with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups.

The AP is reporting: (By Jonathan Fahey, AP Energy Writer)

Technology created an energy revolution over the past decade — just not the one we expected.

By now, cars were supposed to be running on fuel made from plant waste or algae — or powered by hydrogen or cheap batteries that burned nothing at all. Electricity would be generated with solar panels and wind turbines. When the sun didn't shine or the wind didn't blow, power would flow out of batteries the size of tractor-trailers.

Fossil fuels? They were going to be expensive and scarce, relics of an earlier, dirtier age.
But in the race to conquer energy technology, Old Energy is winning.

Oil companies big and small have used technology to find a bounty of oil and natural gas so large that worries about running out have melted away. New imaging technologies let drillers find oil and gas trapped miles underground and undersea. Oil rigs "walk" from one drill site to the next. And engineers in Houston use remote-controlled equipment to drill for gas in Pennsylvania.

The result is an abundance that has put the United States on track to become the world's largest producer of oil and gas in a few years. And the gushers aren't limited to Texas, North Dakota and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Overseas, enormous reserves have been found in East and West Africa, Australia, South America and the Mediterranean.

The AP is reporting: (By Jonathan Fahey, AP Energy Writer)

A decade ago, large investors in so-called clean technology had a straightforward goal: finance companies that would help eliminate the world's dependence on oil, natural gas and coal.

But as profits from wind, solar, biofuels and other alternatives consistently fell short of expectations — and as the fossil fuel business boomed — things got complicated. [Complicated? Not really. Those companies mostly went broke.]

Venture capitalists and other investment funds started stretching the definition of clean technology almost beyond recognition in an effort to make money while clinging to their environmental ideals.

Today, clean technology investment funds are not trying to replace the fossil fuel industry, they're trying to help it by financing companies that can make mining and drilling less dirty. The people running these funds acknowledge the apparent hypocrisy, but defend a more liberal definition of clean technology.

The bad news: it took five years of an Obama presidency for things to turn. The good news: it only took five years. 

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The top ten holdings of an activist environmentalist:

1. Evergreen Solar 
2. SpectraWatt
3. Solyndra 
4. Beacon Power 
5. A123
6. Nevada Geothermal
7. SunPower 
8. First Solar
9. Coda
10. Fisker

The top ten holdings of a progressive investor:

1. ChevronTexaco
2. ExxonMobil
3. ConocoPhilips
4. OXY USA
5. Chesapeake
6. Continental Resources
7. Whiting Petroleum
8. Kodiak Oil & Gas
9. Oasis Petroleum
10. Enbridge

To see how that have done over the past year, go to Yahoo!Finance.