Gore, you see, is a prominent backer of Fisker's Fisker Automotive, which just last week got a $529 million government loan to build a hybrid sports car. Gore also is a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, another Fisker investor. The Department of Energy said the former vice president's involvement did not sway its decision, but his involvement with the company can't hurt the firm's credibility with investors in this down economy. Musk's electric car company Tesla, meanwhile, is backed by rival Valley firm Draper Fisher Jervetson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and is a media and celebrity darling. It got $465 million in government loans back in June.

Fisker once had an $800,000 contract with Tesla to design the Model S, the car central to the company's plan for profitability, and Tesla accused him in a lawsuit of stealing company secrets. Tesla also claimed Fisker did shoddy work, sabotaging their design and setting the company back three to six months, a delay that came during one of the company's darkest periods. Fisker won an arbitration ruling saying he did nothing wrong, but there's no reason to think that settled the grudge.

The government is now subsidizing both sides as they go head to head in the market for affordable electric-powered cars. Sure, one makes a plug-in hybrid and the other a pure electric, but the market for pricey, super-environmentally-friendly sedans is relatively small at this early stage. Not the best time to help the companies potentially undercut one another's profit margins. It would have been better to let Fisker get money from a government closer to where he'll be manufacturing the car, over in Finland.

After all, "I'm buying a Fisker!" probably doesn't sound nearly so dirty over in the European market.

Rose George, who wrote The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, thinks that urine diversion is the next big trends. Splitting our toilet bowls so No. 1 goes fore and No. 2 goes aft will spare our oceans and fertilize our farms, George writes. One small problem:

Then there's the sitting problem: in most urine-diversion toilets, a man must empty his bladder sitting down. This wouldn't be a problem in some countries - Germany recently introduced a toilet-seat alarm that admonishes standers to sit - but it has been in others. Professor Jenssen was flummoxed by one participant at a training workshop in Cuba who said firmly, "If a man sits, he is homosexual."

One doesn't have to be a victim of machismo to resist a change to long-ingrained toilet habits.

But get past the giggle factor in George's piss-poor solution to the sewage crisis, and you're faced with the real question: How did this ever make it into the paper of record? Could it be that we have simply run out of new new things? The state of nature is parlous, true. But have we become so desperate to find the one big fix that will allow us to stop thinking about Mother Nature that we'll give a soapbox to any green wingnut who comes along?

Tesla's lead investor, Elon Musk, installed himself as CEO last fall. That's just one of the many parallels between his story and that of Preston Tucker, the doomed automotive entrepreneur whose dream of an innovative new car died amid charges that he was taking people's money for cars he couldn't build. Musk's Tesla Roadster, a $109,000 sportscar which races from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 4 seconds, could be the next Tucker Torpedo.

In October, Valleywag reported that Tesla Motors was down to $9 million in the bank. Musk confirmed the company's cash position, and promised he would raise another $40 million in convertible debt from existing investors. But the fundraising is taking longer than planned. At a recent town hall meeting with customers, Musk reportedly told Tesla buyers that the company almost ran out of money in December, before it raised part of the round. Tesla is still seeking new funds.

And it has turned to existing customers as a source of those funds. The company is losing money on every Roadster sold, Musk says. Having already spent their deposits, Musk ordered a price hike on the $90,000-plus car's options, adding charges for everything from delivery to the car's electric charger to its sound system. (It is rather like Tucker's move to sell accessories to car buyers before he had even built one.)

Musk claimed he needed to raise prices to assure the company's viability. If the company does not look like it will make money soon, it will not be eligible for some $400 million in Department of Energy-guaranteed loans on which Musk has been counting to start production of a mainstream $50,000 sedan, the Model S, which has already been delayed until 2012.

But according to a Tesla tipster, Musk's decision to raise prices has caused severe damage to the company's operations. Production ceased while manufacturing waited to hear what options to install. And the company's salespeople were consumed by the task of calling back customers and asking for more money, rather than pursuing new sales. While cars stopped going out, money stopped going in. He also faces a real risk of customers asking for their deposits back; California's vehicle code provides strict consumer protections against such fiddling with prices. Tesla buyers, though, tend to be wealthy true believers, so they may well pony up more money — if they can still afford the car at all, that is.

Now Tesla has cancelled plans to build a factory in San Jose where it planned to build its Model S, a mass-market sedan. Musk is still planning to take deposits from Model S customers starting March 5.

This sounds exactly like the sort of trouble Tucker (left) found himself in, with an engineer accusing him of never bothering to buy production machinery for a factory he'd never bothered to build, while taking money from investors and customers.

Tesla and Musk may somehow pull through this. But he has already told customers they may lose any money they've given him. In November, he offered to personally guarantee the deposits of any Roadster buyer should the company fail. But at this week's town hall meeting, he told customers their deposit money would be at risk if they did not go along with his price hike and Tesla went bankrupt.

Musk, a successful Web entrepreneur whose PayPal sold to eBay for $1.5 billion, is also in the business of building rocket ships through his other company, SpaceX. He's talked about carrying out a privately funded mission to Mars. At this point, that looks more likely than Tesla getting off the ground.

Eberhard and Musk have long feuded, even before Musk ousted Eberhard as Tesla's CEO. But I'd note that for once, they're not outright contradicting each other here.

It's far more common for Musk to have a version of events that conflicts with everyone else's accounting. His history of events at PayPal, the electronic-payments startup he cofounded, seems to be shared only by him. And Musk has been telling everyone who will listen that SpaceX, his rocket startup, has a "Nasa contract to build the Space Shuttle replacement after 2010." If you ask Nasa administrators, they'll say that's more than a stretch of the truth. (In fact, SpaceX is competing for a contract, but it has only hit some of the milestones; Nasa is currently planning to rent out space on Russian rockets to supply the International Space Station, and a future supply contract for SpaceX is a possibility, not a certainty.)

So Musk has a tenuous relationship with reality. Is this a handicap in his business? Apple CEO Steve Jobs is famous for his "reality distortion field" — a charisma that leads others to believe the most exaggerated claims, because the vision behind them is so compelling.

Of course, Jobs actually has brought his outlandish vision to life four times: With the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. Musk has realized the Roadster, and SpaceX has managed, after several crashes, to launch one lone rocket. He's also got SolarCity, a startup which installs solar panels on roofs.

If in 2011, we live in a shiny future where we drive Tesla cars powered with clean electricity from SolarCity panels, and SpaceX's Falcon1 rockets are supplying orbital space stations, then we will be living in a reality of Musk's making — much as Jobs envisioned the iPod in the dark days of October 2001, and then, three years later, saw them everywhere on the New York subway.

There's another possibility, however, which would also make Musk like Steve Jobs — the Jobs of two decades ago, who was forced out of Apple by the CEO he hired. Tesla could go under, SpaceX could fail to win the Nasa contract, and SolarCity could get beaten down by rival cleantech startups. And then Musk, driving his Roadster on the lonely roads of Silicon Valley, would find himself facing a reality not constructed in his mind. An unpleasant thought, that. Far easier just to succeed.

Apple has devoted an entire page to the MacBook's environmental merits. The company has taken considerable steps to lower the amount of energy used by the MacBook's display, hard drive, and processor. But Apple is vague about the energy consumed by making the MacBook's laser-carved unibody, and recycling the wasted aluminum. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that 3 percent of the world's electricity goes towards manufacturing aluminum — and China, where most of Apple's manufacturing is done, gets most of its electricity from dirty coal plants.

In a bankruptcy, holders of Tesla's debt will have priority over all holders of common and preferred stock in the company — including the Valley celebrities like Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll who have invested in Tesla. Raising this round of debt, followed by a bankruptcy filing, could be Musk's way of squeezing out other shareholders — especially cofounders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Employee with unexercised stock options will get wiped out in such a scenario.

Current shareholders will have a right to invest in this debt round according to their current share — but Musk may well be counting on the short 30-day offering period and tight financial markets to shut out anyone who doesn't have the cash handy.

Why do I think this is a likely scenario? Because Musk has done something similar before.

When Musk briefly served as PayPal's CEO, he'd run the company's bank account to six weeks' worth of cash. PayPal insiders say Musk was pulling "financial machinations" to maintain his control of the company — but the board fired him instead and replaced him with cofounder Peter Thiel, who steered the company to its $1.5 billion purchase by eBay.

Unfortunately for Tesla, there's no obvious white knight like Thiel on the horizon.

In many parts of Silicon Valley, it seems misguided to regard the U.S. economy as reliant solely on Wall Street. The future still depends on entrepreneurs and innovations — and green-tech businesses getting “traction.” Most of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s ventures are long-term investments. And entrepreneurs are still bringing new ideas through the door at a steady pace. “I don’t expect the credit crunch will change that,” said partner John Denniston.

Some of the firm’s fledging green ventures are evolutionary improvements on current technologies that will soon hit the market, like the electric Think car. Others promise to revolutionize various aspects of the energy economy — solar power or biofuels — much as Netscape or Google remade the Web, or Genentech ushered in the biotechnology era.

Kleiner was not the only venture firm that had suddenly seen the future and decided it was green. But Kleiner’s past success tends to legitimize the prospects of business ideas that in many cases have spent decades on the economic fringe.

The most challenging aspect of Kleiner’s endeavor is for green tech to expand into the markets more rapidly than any energy technology has done before. Academics sometimes call this process the diffusion of technology. Diffusion can go very fast, with personal computers or Facebook. But in the field of energy, new technologies have moved quite slowly into the mainstream. It has been 54 years since the silicon solar cell was invented in New Jersey at Bell Laboratories. A front-page article in the Times heralded the breakthrough – in 1954 — as something that promised to revolutionize the world.

John Doerr: “To get solutions at scale, we’re going to have to find answers that are economic for all people everywhere. We’ve got to use policy to harness innovation to make sure that the right thing to do is a profitable thing to do — so it becomes the probable thing to have happen.”

Al Gore believes when the governments of the world assign a price to carbon—within a year or two — demand for carbon-free electricity will explode.

Partner Randy Komisar says the energy market is large and outdated: “I’m not very good at hitting the bull’s-eye. I need a big target. And this is the biggest target I’ve ever seen in my life.”

(Photo by Ausra)

I went through the same thing when I got my 8-core about a month ago. I called AppleCare and they were very concerned at first. They wanted me to take the unit to an Apple Store, but since the nearest one is over an hour away, I started the DOA process. On the recommendation of a second level tech, I took it to a nearby Authorized Service Center to be checked out before they declared it DOA. They guy in the service center said that every Mac Pro he has set up has the smell at first, so it appears to be normal in his experience. He thinks it is caused by a protective resin coating on the RAM PCB's and/or RAM riser card PCB's and should diminish over time as it burns away. It's been about 3 1/2 weeks now and the smell has almost totally gone, though I still get a whiff every now and then.

A relative just got a MacBook and I set it up for her. During the first few hours of use I noticed a smell and I got lightheaded. I opened some windows and let the machine run for a few more hours and it seems to have dissipated. Try putting the machine through a "burn-in" period to burn off any original residues.

Since my previous post from the end of June, the smell has diminished a little bit... but not too much (still enough to give me a dry throat after 2 hours).Our local Apple Authorized Repair Center could not give me any timeframe when they could check the system ("because we have so much to do") and since I need my Mac nearly every day, I am not sure when I can take it to repair

(Photo by rudolf_schuba)

Make no mistake: Khosla intends to overturn oil-based transportation, and make a bundle while doing so. He is a skeptic of corn-based ethanol, but favors biofuels made from cheaply grown biomass like switchgrass. But he also thinks combustion engines can be improved to reach 100 miles per gallon — a "diesel Prius," he calls. Electric cars? Too burdened with heavy batteries, too costly to ever make up a large portion of our transport. Oh, but just in case he's wrong, he's got a couple of long-shot startups in his portfolio which could make them practical.

(Photo by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media)

GE owns vast rights of way for the electrical grid, which could potentially aid Google's efforts to build their own Internet backbone infrastructure — even over the transmission lines themselves. And of course, less demand for electricity combined with stable supply means cheaper juice for Google's giant datacenters. The real question is, what's in this for Immelt and GE? (Photos by AP/Phelan M. Ebenhack, Mark Lennihan)

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed told the New York Times 1,000, but the company suggests the factory will only employ 400 to 500 says the Wall Street Journal, with 250 current employees moving to the new headquarters once complete. Contrast that to General Motors and Toyota's joint-venture Nummi plant in Fremont, Calif., which employs about 5,500 workers. (Photo by Emil Rensing)

• Your best bet is to move to Nevada. There you'll find affordable, sunny space to prototype, a pre-existing tech culture in the Reno area, and no state income tax.
• The disruptive tech in solar power is curently thin film, or copper indium gallium selenide. It's used to make thin, flexible panels unlike the thicker, heavier silicon panels currently found on roofs around the Valley. Thin film cells are currently less efficient than silicon, but the technology is ripe for breakthroughs in design and manufacturing. That's why VentureWire reports at least three companies that landed $200-300 million in funding in the past two months. Lux Research estimates that $671 million of the $2 billion invested in solar thru July went to thin film technologies.
• TreeHugger's metaresearch suggests that solar is pricier than wind power to get the same electrical output from an installation. For you, that's good!

Wales says he didn’t create green Wikia so much to fulfill his passion for green living, but more to help deliver the truth of eco-info, which he says is sorely lacking: “I’m really passionate about having objective information in this area. It is really hard to get clear information on green issues.”

Doesn't Wales sound just like an oil-company executive insisting we need more research before we can really say if carbon emissions are responsible for global warming?

SmartPlanet catches Wales in a similar hypocrisy, asking him if Wikia has taken concrete steps to reduce the electricity used by its servers. The short answer: It hasn't.

Finally, there's this charge aired on the Wikipedia Review: That Wikia Green has taken copyrighted content without permission from other pro-environment sites.

But why should this be any surprise? Wikia Green, like so many of Wales's efforts, isn't an offshoot of some deeply held belief, besides his core principle — that other people should do the work that makes him popular and rich.

But it will give Wales something to chatter about the next time he runs into Bono or Sir Richard Branson at a party. We'd bet his celebrity friends are too polite to ask the notoriously cheap Wales if he's actually springing for carbon offsets to make up for all of the emissions he generates through his nonstop round-the-world jet travel. Oh, and should we get into the contribution to global warming he makes through all the hot air that issues from his lips?