Energy Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Energy Media Articles in Major Media

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Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

At hundreds of screenings this year of "An Inconvenient Truth," the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie. The producers of former vice president Al Gore's film about global warming ... certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). It seemed like a no-brainer. In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that ... they didn't want to offer "political" endorsement of the film; and they saw "little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members" in accepting the free DVDs. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp. That's the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers ... questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. NSTA says it has received $6 million from the company since 1996. Exxon Mobil has a representative on the group's corporate advisory board.

The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past. US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires. The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres. Although the team has not built and tested a system, computer models and mathematics suggest it will work. "Resonance" [is] a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied. "When you have two resonant objects of the same frequency they tend to couple very strongly," Professor Soljacic [explained]. Resonance can be seen in musical instruments. "When you play a tune on one, then another instrument with the same acoustic resonance will pick up that tune, it will visibly vibrate," he said. Instead of using acoustic vibrations, the team's system exploits the resonance of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic radiation includes radio waves, infrared and X-rays. The team from MIT is not the first group to suggest wireless energy transfer. Nineteenth-century physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla experimented with long-range wireless energy transfer, but his most ambitious attempt - the 29m [it was actually 187 feet] high aerial known as Wardenclyffe Tower, in New York - failed when he ran out of money. A UK company called Splashpower has also designed wireless recharging pads onto which gadget lovers can directly place their phones and MP3 players to recharge them.

Note: What the article fails to mention is that Tesla's experiments previous to the 1903 Wardenclyffe tower were quite successful, so much so that J.P. Morgan was willing to pour huge amounts into the tower. When he learned, however, that Tesla's intention was to make energy available free to the public, he pulled the plug on the project and many of Tesla's amazing inventions were buried and erased from the history books. For verification, click here and here. For lots more on suppressed energy inventions, click here.

In the quest for oil-free power, a handful of small companies are staking claims on the boundless energy of the rising and ebbing sea. The technology that would draw energy from ocean tides...is largely untested, but several newly-minted companies are reserving tracts of water from Alaska's Cook Inlet to Manhattan's East River in the belief that such sites could become profitable sources of electricity. The site that is furthest along in testing lies in New York's East River, between Manhattan and Queens, where Verdant Power plans to install two underwater turbines this month. If all goes well, New York-based Verdant could have up to 300 turbines in the river by 2008. The turbines would produce as much as 10 megawatts of power, or enough electricity for 8,000 homes. With 12,380 miles of coastline, the U.S. may seem like a wide-open frontier for the fledgling industry, but experts say interest will focus on only a few. Government and the private sector in Europe, Canada and Asia have moved faster than their U.S. counterparts to support tidal energy research. As of June 2006, there were small facilities in Russia, Nova Scotia and China, as well as a 30-year-old plant in France, according to a report by EPRI. Tidal power proponents liken the technology to little wind turbines on steroids. Water's greater density means fewer and smaller turbines are needed to produce the same amount of electricity as wind turbines. Wave energy technology is less advanced than tidal and will need more government subsidies...however, the number of good wave sites far exceeds that of tidal. But a few companies are working aggressively to usher wave power into the energy industry.

Note: To understand why the U.S. is moving slowly, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources.

At their factory in southern France, father-and-son team Guy and Cyril Negre insist air power is no joke. Plain old air compressed in the tank, they say, cheap and non-polluting. Sound too good to be true? Says Cyril, “It's a real car. The other thing is it's a very zero emission car. You won't pollute, there won't be emission. You have a very economical car.” A car, says the Negres, that will cost just $2 for every 120 miles. The Negres have a long love affair with cars. Guy designed a Formula One race car engine. Cyril worked at Bugati. The technology for their car, they say, is relatively simple and safe. “When you compress the air...inside of the tank, this is like compressing a spring, and then the tank gives you back the energy of the air when it expands,” says Cyril. Compressed air in a carbon-fiber tank, something like scuba divers use, drives the pistons and turns the crankshaft. There is no combustion and no gasoline. That's why there's no pollution. You fill it up at an air compressor. It may sound far-fetched, but at his labs on the campus of UCLA, professor Su-Chin Chow is also exploring the power of air. The Negres say after years of delays...they have solved their technical problems. Another year, they say, and they'll be ready for large scale production, with a top speed of 55 miles-an-hour.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is quitting the hydropower and geothermal power research business -- if Congress will let it. Declaring them "mature technologies" that need no further funding, the Bush administration in its FY 2007 budget request eliminates hydropower and geothermal research. "What we do well is research and funding of new, novel technologies," says Craig Stevens, chief spokesman for the DOE. "I'm just astonished the department would zero out these very small existing budgets for geothermal and hydro," says V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. "These are very important resources for our energy future that could replace the need for a lot of coal-fired power plants." Indeed, the costs of lost opportunities from dropping such research could be enormous in the long run. Geothermal holds vast potential -- at least 30,000 megawatts of identified resources developable by 2050. Meanwhile, the more than 5,400 potential "small hydro" power projects could produce about 20,000 megawatts of power, a DOE study in January found. And most would require no new dams at all, shunting a portion of a small river's flow to one side to make electricity. Others would add turbines to dams that don't have them yet. Together, high-tech hydropower and geothermal resources could contribute at least enough power to replace more than 100 medium-size coal-fired power plants with emissions-free electricity.

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday. The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne. "If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices.

Note: The government has been developing potentially lethal "non-lethal weapons" for decades, as evidenced by released FOIA government documents. Don't miss our excellent summary on this critical topic available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/mindcontrol10pg#nonlethal and the in-depth Washington Post article on psychological manipulations available at http://www.WantToKnow.info/060123psyops.

These dynamic and personable businessmen from Dublin insist that they have found a way of producing free, clean and limitless energy out of thin air. So, as they prepare to demonstrate this wonder of science to me...I feel all the excitement of Christmas Day. There is a test rig with wheels and cogs and four magnets meticulously aligned so as to create the maximum tension between their fields and one other magnet fixed to a point opposite. A motor rotates the wheel bearing the magnets and a computer takes 28,000 measurements a second. And when it is all over, the computer tells us that almost three times the amount of energy has come out of the system as went in. In fact, this piece of equipment is 285% efficient. "We couldn't believe it at first, either," says McCarthy, chief executive of the company. "We wanted to improve the performance of the wind generators...so we experimented with certain generator configurations and then one day one of our guys...came in and said: 'We have a problem. We appear to be getting out more than we're putting in.'" That was three years ago. Since then, McCarthy says, the company has spent Ł2.7m developing the technology. Until their claims have been assessed by the jury, McCarthy says they won't be accepting any investor offers. So if this is a hoax, it would appear not to be a money-making scheme. The Economist ad alone cost Ł75,000. "We expected stick, and we're getting it already. We've had a lot of abusive emails and telephone calls -people telling us to watch our backs"

Note: To understand how this is possible, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources

Sacramento's Solar Cookers International, will take the global stage Friday in Florence, Italy. The nongovernmental organization, which is dedicated to saving the world with solar power, will receive an award from the World Renewable Energy Congress. The secret of the group's success is the "CooKit," a 3-by-4-foot piece of cardboard lined with aluminum foil that harnesses the sun's rays to cook food and pasteurize water. About 90,000 "CooKits" are heating up in Africa, where they are being manufactured and sold for $8 or $9. The group has helped introduce 500,000 solar cookers to 25 nations where people spend half their $1-a-day wages to buy firewood to cook their meals, said Bob Metcalf, a microbiologist who co-founded the group in 1987. Solar cookers allow them to spend that money on food instead of firewood, said Metcalf, who teaches at California State University, Sacramento. Metcalf says he hopes the award will get him 30 minutes with Bill Gates or some other investor to spread the gospel of the CooKit, which could be used by "2.5 billion people today" who rely on wood, charcoal or animal dung to cook meals. Metcalf also invented the Water Pasteurization Indicator -- a reusable sealed test tube with wax that melts when food or water has been pasteurized at 149 degrees Fahrenheit. "It takes about 90 minutes in the sun," he said. For more information, go to www.solarcookers.org.

Note: For how to easily help several families a year pull out of poverty in third world countries, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/051023microcredit

A man who claims to have developed a free energy technology which could power everything from mobile phones to cars has received more than 400 applications from scientists to test it. Sean McCarthy says that no one was more sceptical than he when Steorn, his small hi-tech firm in Dublin, hit upon a way of generating clean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields. 'It wasn't so much a Eureka moment as a get-back-in-there-and-check-your-instruments moment, although in far more colourful language,' said McCarthy. But when he attempted to share his findings, he says, scientists either put the phone down on him or refused to endorse him publicly in case they damaged their academic reputations. So last week he took out a full-page advert in the Economist magazine, challenging the scientific community to examine his technology. McCarthy claims it provides five times the amount of energy a mobile phone battery generates for the same size, and does not have to be recharged. Within 36 hours of his advert appearing he had been contacted by 420 scientists in Europe, America and Australia, and a further 4,606 people had registered to receive the results.

Steorn has now posted a slick, five-minute video that features interviews with company CEO Sean McCarthy as well as the company's marketing director. For more background, see our earlier discussion. The video's slick, and not too heavy on scientific detail. But it's worth checking out. It does begin to explain the company's motivations for choosing to issue a challenge in the Economist. McCarthy: "The first roadblock is science. With the academic community, it might take five to seven years before being able to get to a consensus position. As a business, that makes absolutely no sense." The video explains that a "quiet" campaign was plan A. The direct marketing approach currently being taken is Plan B. McCarthy: "The claim does rail against so much thinking from ordinary people. We have to fight public opinion, we have to fight the scientific community and we have to fight the energy industry. We couldn't pick a worse battleground."

Note: For lots more on the many who have developed similar discoveries and how they have been either bought out or shut down, click here.

Brazil's new generation of cars and trucks adapted to run on alcohol has just hit the two-million mark. "Flex-fuel" vehicles, which run on any combination of ethanol and petrol, now make up 77% of the Brazilian market. Brazil has pioneered the use of ethanol derived from sugar-cane as motor fuel. Ethanol-driven cars have been on sale there for 25 years, but they have been enjoying a revival since flex-fuel models first appeared in March 2003. Just 48,200 flex-fuel cars were sold in Brazil in 2003, but the total had reached 1.2 million by the end of last year and had since topped two million, the Brazilian motor manufacturers' association Anfavea said.

Note: With sky-high gasoline prices and the fear of depletion of global oil supplies, why don't such cars exist in the U.S.? Why are the trains of almost every other developed nation far advanced from trains in the U.S.? And why isn't the U.S. media reporting on this important development? For possible answers, click here. The excellent movie Who Killed the Electric Car is also incredibly revealing.

Several small, independent automakers are juicing up electric cars. Among the companies trying to lead the charge: Tesla. Tesla Motors...is taking orders for a $100,000 electric high-performance sports car...billed as capable of a Ferrari-like zero to 60 mph in four seconds. The car was designed in California but will be built by Lotus in Great Britain. Its sophisticated lithium-ion battery will allow a range of 250 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 130 mph. Wrightspeed...hopes to produce its own, $100,000 high-performance car within two years. It will have about a 200-mile range. Ian Wright, who heads Wrightspeed...says the new breed of electric cars could have three times the energy efficiency of gas-electric hybrids. "You can build something that's seriously fast and a lot of fun to drive." Zap. At the other end of the performance spectrum...Zap last month started selling a three-wheel electric "city car" imported from China that it says is capable of a top speed of 40 mph. Priced at $9,000, the Xebra has a range of about 40 miles. Tomberlin Group...plans to sell three versions of electric cars. Prices will range from $5,000 for E-Merge E-2 to $8,000 for the four-seat Anvil. The electric revival comes as...Who Killed the Electric Car? has started playing in theaters. The movie alleges that big automakers, oil companies and the government sank promising electric-car technology. The film singles out General Motors for...having created a futuristic electric car that became a Hollywood enviro-darling. When leases ran out, GM collected its Saturn EV1s and sent them to the crusher.

Note: I've heard that Who Killed the Electric Car? is an excellent, revealing film. For lots more on why car mileage has not significantly increased since the days of the Model T (which got 25 miles to the gallon), see http://www.WantToKnow.info/050711carmileageaveragempg

As motorists continue to pay more at the gas pump, two of the nation's largest oil companies on Thursday reported second-quarter profits of nearly $18 billion. The huge profits come at a time when refiners are marking up wholesale gas prices to levels seen during the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, reigniting concerns about the possibility of price gouging. Exxon Mobil Corp. said Thursday that its second-quarter profits increased 36 percent to $10.36 billion, the second-largest quarterly profit ever for a U.S. publicly traded company. Royal Dutch Shell, which operates 155 gas stations in Colorado, reported earnings of $7.32 billion, up 40 percent from a year ago. Including earnings from BP and ConocoPhillips, which reported earlier this week, four of the nation's five largest oil companies netted more than $30 billion in profit during the second quarter. National gross profit margins for refiners have hovered around $21 a barrel this week, compared with about $12 a barrel a year ago. Amid outcry from lawmakers about its profits, the oil industry this week paid for advertisements in 14 newspapers - including The Denver Post, The New York Times and The Washington Post - that insist oil companies' earnings are not exorbitant. The national average price of regular unleaded gasoline is $3 a gallon this week, according to AAA. The price would be about $2.60 a gallon, factoring in taxes and transportation and other costs, if the refiners' gross profit margin had remained at the same levels from a year ago.

Note: At the bottom of this article is an excellent, revealing graph showing the extent of profit margins for oil refiners since January 2005. Very few other major media have been willing to show the hard data in this article.

It's a dream that's been pursued for years: Mass-producing affordable hydrogen-powered cars that spew just clean water from their tailpipes. So Shanghai's Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies decided to start small. Really small. This month, it will begin sales of a tiny hydrogen fuel-cell car, complete with its own miniature solar-powered refueling station. The toy is a step toward introducing the technology to the public and making it commercially viable. Though prototype hydrogen cars exist, they're far from practical or affordable. Horizon's H-Racer and fueling station solve those problems on a very small scale. The price: $80 for the set. The toy's fuel cell, like those envisioned for real cars, relies on an electrochemical reaction...that powers the gadget's electric motor. The only byproducts are electricity, heat and water. The fuel is supplied by its alarm clock-sized refueling station. A small electric current, generated by the solar cells, extracts hydrogen from water. With the flip of a switch, the car takes off and runs for 4 minutes on a full tank. At Horizon's headquarters...Wankewycz and former Eastman Chemical Co. colleague George Gu demonstrated prototypes of a hydrogen-powered electric bicycle and a golf caddy they are converting from lead acid batteries to hydrogen power. "We're working on the smaller things until the infrastructure is ready," he says. On the Net: Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies: http://www.horizonfuelcell.com

Note: If governments and car companies poured millions into researching this technology, rapid progress could be made. For why this cutting-edge company is located in Shanghai and why they have only $3 million to work with, take a look at http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources

At a glittering Los Angeles party, an ambitious new car maker declared the electric car alive and well. The Tesla Roadster, which can go from 0 to 60 mph in 4 seconds doesn't come from Detroit, but from high tech Silicon Valley aiming to do what Detroit couldn't -- make a commercially successful car that doesn't burn gas. "Electric cars don't have to be little, pathetic commuter cars," says Martin Eberhard, CEO of Tesla Motors. "They can be quick and they can be desirable." Eberhard made millions in the computer industry, then convinced other high tech investors like Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, to put in big money. Musk expects huge rewards if Silicon Valley can break Detroit's grip on the U.S. auto industry. "It's batteries, it's drive electronics, it's electric motors," says Musk. "Those are skills that are present in Silicon Valley and not present in Detroit." There's a quick charger for the Tesla's lithium batteries but the car can be plugged in anywhere. It'll go 250 miles on a single charge -- at a cost the company says, of just 1 cent a mile. Tesla expects to quickly sell its first 100 cars for $100,000 each. But, don't give up. The company also has plans for a car for the rest of us. Tesla promises a less expensive four-door family car within three years. For now, however, it's the rich and famous who are getting a charge out of this electric car, such as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who tried out the car and had two words to say: "Very Nice."

Note: Don't be surprised if this technology inexplicably disappears as so many others have, like the once heralded 100 MPG Toyota Eco Spirit back in 2002. For lots more reliable information on the suppression of new energy inventions, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergyinformation.

Though the 100 mpg car sounds like a myth, it turns out that such vehicles do exist -- only they're built in your neighbor's garage, not a giant production plant. Known as plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles ... they’re basically Priuses or similar hybrids that have been equipped with extra batteries, so that they rarely use their gasoline engines at all. "People are salivating for plug-ins," says Bradley Berman, editor of the site HybridCars.com. A hybrid vehicle today like a Prius has both a gasoline engine and a battery, which is fed by the braking energy produced by the car. It can’t be plugged in. A plug-in hybrid keeps those components, but essentially gets an extra fuel tank, in the form of an added battery bank ... that allows the car to run exclusively off battery power for most driving. Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Initiative, a nonprofit group that promotes the use of high-efficiency, low-emission cars, owns the first consumer plug-in in North America. Not surprisingly, he loves it. "Many days I use no gasoline, because I go at neighborhood speeds for under 30 miles, and I’m just all-electric all day," he says. And the mileage? "At highway speeds, you can easily get over 100 mpg." Other plug-in owners offer up similar results. "I used to fill up every 400 miles or so," he says ... "and now I fill up every 800 miles or so." Advocates estimate that it costs less than $1 per gallon to replenish a plug-in hybrid. "Our goal is to have a $3,000 kit," CalCars' Kramer says. (That number, coincidentally, is also what many plug-in evangelists think that the technology would cost for Toyota to add to its hybrids.)

Note: If people are doing this in their garage, why aren't the auto makers already producing them? In fact, a similar vehicle was produced to be marketed in 2002, but then pulled off the market. To find why average car mileage has remained virtually unchanged for 100 years, click here.

Chris Paine´s documentary film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" argues convincingly that there was indeed a market for the cars — and a devoted one, ... but that GM [General Motors] squashed the EV1 because, quite simply, it threatened the livelihood of the entire automotive industry. The car used no gasoline, no oil and no mufflers, and it required only sporadic brake maintenance. Each of these components represents billions of dollars in profits for the industry. GM, the oil companies and various government agencies argued that the car wasn´t practical, didn´t have enough range for consumers and was less promising than the apparently imminent hydrogen technology. The reality was exactly the opposite, Paine´s film suggests — the viability of hydrogen as an automotive fuel source alone is in fact almost comically optimistic. The whisper-quiet EV1 was designed by [an] aviation pioneer, Paul MacCready of AeroVironment. In the 1970s, MacCready built the only successful human-powered aircraft, the Gossamer Condor and the Gossamer Albatross. His solar-powered electric car Sunraycer, built for GM, won the 1987 World Solar Challenge Race in Australia. His corporate mantra is "do more with less" — that is, focus on creating vehicles that require less energy to operate, not on finding ways to pump more power into inefficient systems. His team´s battery-powered EV1 was a triumph of engineering and a joy to operate.

Note: For lots more on key suppressed automotive and energy inventions, click here.

A poignant new documentary asks who killed GM's promising electric car project? A new documentary released June 28 in New York and Los Angeles, appropriately titled Who Killed The Electric Car? tries in Clue-like fashion to figure out why GM pulled the plug on its EV1 electric vehicle program, which by most accounts was approaching success when the first prototype was introduced in the mid-1990s. "It was a revolutionary, modern car, requiring no gas, no oil changes, no mufflers, and rare brake maintenance," according to a synopsis of the film. In the 1990s a strict clean-air mandate introduced in California that called for zero-emission vehicles was what led GM to introduce the EV1. Eventually that California mandate got watered down from "zero" to "low" emissions, and the automakers decided to literally blow up their EV programs. GM, which leased out the EV1 cars it produced, called them all back after California changed its policy. The cars were crushed and shredded. Who were the people leasing these vehicles? Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson and Ted Danson, among others, many of whom appear in the movie and talk favourably about their electric cars. If the implications of an advance means loss of future business to a paradigm, the key players of that paradigm will lobby to kill it. The paradigm? Big oil. Similarly, the auto industry has an interest in perpetuating the manufacture of vehicles that require routine, costly maintenance.

Note: For more information and showing times on the highly revealing Who Killed The Electric Car, visit www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com. For even deeper information www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources

A team of engineering students from The University of British Columbia has built a vehicle so efficient that it could travel from Vancouver to Halifax on a gallon of gasoline. The futuristic-looking, single-occupancy vehicle won top prize at a recent international competition, marking the UBC team's fourth win in as many years. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Supermileage Competition took place June 9 in Marshall, Michigan. Forty teams from Canada, the U.S. and India competed in designing and building the most fuel-efficient vehicle. 'We achieved this level of efficiency by optimizing many aspects of the vehicle design, including: aerodynamics, light-weight construction, a small displacement engine (54 cc), and conservative driving habits,' says Team Captain Kevin Li. The UBC design...achieved 3,145 miles per US gallon. Supermileage...is an annual student competition that challenges students to design, build, and drive a single person vehicle (powered solely by a gasoline engine) to achieve the best fuel mileage possible. The vehicle must be powered by only an internal combustion engine, with no assistance from electric motors or human propulsion.

Note: Why don't we see articles like this in the mainstream media? Even if this vehicle is ultra lightweight and has a top speed of only 30 mph, why can't we design heavier, faster cars which get just 10% of what this car got? For answers to this question, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/050711carmileageaveragempg

A few years ago a little-known US Energy Department program helped produce a design technology for lightweight cars and trucks that in 2004 alone saved the nation 122 million barrels of oil, or about $9 billion. So, with energy prices spiking and President Bush pushing for more energy research, the ITP would seem a natural candidate for more funding. In fact, its budget is set to get chopped by a third from its 2005 level. It's one of more than a dozen energy-efficiency efforts that the Energy Department plans to trim or eliminate in a $115 million cost-saving move. If Congress accepts the Energy Department's proposed 2007 budget, it will cut $152 million - some 16 percent - from this year's budget for energy-efficiency programs. Adjusting for inflation, it would mean the US government would spend 30 percent less on energy efficiency next year than it did in 2002. One energy-efficiency program on the chopping block...helps improve the fuel efficiency of heavy-duty trucks, one of the nation's biggest oil consumers. That program is "zeroed out" in the 2007 budget request. The same fate awaits the $4.5 million Building Codes Implementation Grants program. It helps states adopt more energy-efficient requirements for new buildings, the nation's largest consumer of electricity and natural gas. The $8 million Clean Cities program has helped clean-fuel technologies, like buses that run on compressed natural gas, get to market. But it's slated for a $2.8 million cut.

Note: To better understand why this is happening: http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.