Late last week the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE), made up of over 500 organizations (including Fortune 500 companies like Google, universities, non-profits, etc.), presented a letter to Congress encouraging them to extend the Production Tax Credit and Investment Tax Credit for renewable energy.

As we’ve noted, the tax credits are at risk to lapse, which would just be a generally bad idea – for the economy, for renewable industries, for the potential job creation, and for the greenhouse gas reductions that the impacted projects could be making.

Pulling a few points from their letter:

That in addition to the 116,000 wind and solar jobs at risk.

ACORE points out in its article an invasion I’d also like to emphasize – the first week of March, Washington, DC hosts WIREC – the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference. The utility and attendance of the event I could hardly begin to describe. DC will be flooded with information and opportunity on renewables, and there will be so much to do (between panels, exhibits, side events, etc.), I don’t know how one could begin to create a schedule.

That is the same feeling our Congress should feel – overwhelmed by the interest and opportunities of the future. Hundreds of companies and utilities have expressed their desire to see regulatory global warming legislation. And now hundreds more have signed on to encourage the solutions. Yet we still can’t seem to extend these credits – not even pass something new, just extend something that’s been around the last 7 years of this administration and beyond!

It is no joke that the missing ingredient is political will, and it’s spoiling untold amounts.

– Kari M.

Planktos, everybody’s favorite carbon offset company, announced today:

… the company has been forced to indefinitely postpone its ocean fertilization efforts once intended to restore marine plant life and generate ecological offsets for the global carbon credit market.

A highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders has provoked widespread opposition to plankton restoration in the environmental world, and has caused the company to encounter serious difficulty in raising the capital needed to fund its planned series of ocean research trials.

I wondered why my ears were burning. Darn that disinformation from leading ocean scientists writing in Science magazine (subs. req’d). Andy Revkin at the NYT has much more.

A recent issue of Scientific American featured a “Solar Grand Plan.” Its authors described a way for the United States to obtain nearly 100% of its electricity and 90% of its total energy, including transportation, from solar, wind, biomass and geothermal resources by the century’s end. Electricity would cost a comfortable 5 cents per kilowatt hour.

U.S. carbon emissions would be reduced 62% from their 2005 levels. Some 600 coal and gas-fired power plants would be displaced. The federal investment would be $400 billion over the next 40 years ($10 billion a year) to deploy renewable technologies and suitable transmission infrastructure.

If that future seems too good to be true, then look at two other studies during the past 13 months that have reached similar conclusions, one sponsored by the American Solar Energy Society, the other by the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. All three concur that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies can satisfy the nation’s demand for power without additional nuclear or fossil-fueled power plants.

If $400 billion seems unaffordable, consider: It’s less money than the federal government already has spent on the Iraq war, only a third of the $1.2 trillion that some experts now predict the war will cost, and only a sixth of the federal government’s current annual subsidies for fossil and nuclear energy.

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