EC was probably the best spot on the web for quick hits on matters energy/environment/policy.
We linked to it's predecessor, the WSJ's Energy Roundup on our blog's first day, Feb. 19, 2007. Three days later the site's proprietor, Mark Gongloff posted:
Blog Roll: E.Coli Edition
Toronto Star reporter Tyler Hamilton, writing in his Clean Break blog, offers a synopsis of his new story in MIT’s Technology Review about a Canadian company called CO2 Solution, which has found a way to capture carbon dioxide from power plants and factories using an enzyme extracted from genetically engineered E. coli bacteria.
Blogs We’re Reading:
– Mark Gongloff
I was so tickled I came back with:
WSJ Energy Roundup
We got a mention in Mark Gongloff's WSJ Energy Roundup yesterday.
The reasons we linked to the Energy Roundup from our first day?
"Gongloff, a master of any medium he chooses...Energy Roundup will be a case study of the craft."
-COLUMBIA BLOGGING REVIEW
"Energy Roundup has a lot under the hood, tight and fast".
-CAR AND BLOGGER
"Energy Roundup-It's a smash, number one with a bullet!"
-BlogBillboard
"Energy Roundup is intelligent; To use a tired cliche, a must read."
-NEW YORK REVIEW OF BLOGS
"Just two weeks on the scene, Mark Gongloff's WSJ Energy Roundup is redefining what a business blog should be."
-EDITOR & BLOGGER.
Seriously Mark, thanks for the link-back.
Edited 6:34 p.m: -and Kudos to the wsj.com staff.
In addition to being the blogmaster Mr. Gongloff was Markets Editor for the online Journal. He also hung out with his pal David Gaffen who headed up the Journal's marquee blog, MarketBeat.
Here's a quick overview of MarketBeat's first two weeks.
Mark either saw a spark of something or he was bemused by our [very -ed] amateur efforts.
We scored over a dozen spots on the ER's blogroll and a couple Hat Tips, all of which helped immensely in spreading the word about Climateer Investing.
When Mark left the Energy Roundup in January 2008 to go back to the paper we posted:
Farewell Energy Roundup; Hello Environmental Capital
When Keith Johnson took over we wondered about the quality of the blog going forward.After just under a year on the scene in it's Energy Roundup incarnation the WSJ.com's energy blog has evolved into Environmental Capital. We've done the name-change on our (admittedly short) blogroll.
Here's the Energy Roundup's first post:February 15, 2007, 9:05 amAbout This Blog
Posted by WSJ.com Staff
Welcome to the Energy Roundup, a new blog, where WSJ.com editors will compile and analyze the day’s news in the energy sector, including oil, alternative energy sources and the politics and policy of energy.
This blog replaces the Oil News Roundup, a popular feature on the site that began last April, when the price of oil was more than $70 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange and well on its way to a July peak of more than $77 a barrel.
Since then, oil has fallen to less than $60, and there are indications the oil market may be due for a long breather, if not a bear market. But energy will remain a hot topic for the foreseeable future, and WSJ.com’s Energy Roundup will endeavor to be an invaluable source for readers who want to know all they can about it.
– Mark Gongloff
Here's the announcement of the expanded focus:
ANNOUNCEMENT
No, your computer isn't misfiring. Welcome to a new Wall Street Journal blog, Environmental Capital. It replaces the Journal's former energy blog, Energy Roundup. Environmental Capital will track how the scramble for solutions to environmental issues such as climate change is creating new economic winners and losers. It will continue Energy Roundup's tradition of tracking daily energy news. And we hope it will go further, digging into how the energy world, and all of business, is adapting to mounting concern about the planet. We want Environmental Capital to separate green hype from reality -- and we want you to weigh in. Your existing link to Energy Roundup will bring you automatically to Environmental Capital. But do note our new email address: environmentalcapital@wsj.com. And do jump into the debate.
Here's our thank-you to Mr. Gongloff the first time he blogrolled Climateer Investing...
No worries. It became one of the sites we visited every day. The morning news roundup which was initially named "Energy Newstand" and later "Green Ink" was a must read.
Climateer Investing had dozens (hundreds?) of posts that either linked to an EC post or Hat Tipped for a lead.
In our April '08 post "U.N. Effort To Curtail Emissions In Turmoil" I said:
Regular CI readers may know the writer of this piece from our incessant linking to the WSJ's Environmental Capital blog, which he runs, along with Keith Johnson.Our first link to the new entity was on January 29, 2008 "Short the Ethanol Stocks? ( ADM; AVR; PEIX, GPRE; VSE)" which turned out to be a pretty good call.
From the front page of the Wall Street Journal...
Here's Mr. Johnson's last post, "So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish" (which title was also used by David Gaffen when he left Dow Jones for Reuters in April):
After more than two years and over 2,000 posts, Environmental Capital is closing its virtual doors.
It’s been, in equal measure, a fun, grueling, and educational ride.
Special thanks are owed to the folks who got it all started and kept it going—Mark Gongloff, Jeff Ball, and Russell Gold—not to mention all the Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal folks who fed the beast so well all this time.
Of course, the biggest thanks of all goes to our readers—both of you. You’re what got us out of bed in the wee hours every morning. Well, that–and the paycheck.
And you can still get your fix of environmental and energy news right here, at the WSJ Environment page and the Energy, Oil, and Gas page.
As usual I had commented on one of his posts earlier in the day:
Boiling Point: High Hopes for Geothermal Energy
And had linked to another in "Wind Jammers: More ‘Buy’ Recommendations for Denmark’s Vestas" (VWDRY; VWS.CO)".
There is a void to be filled (I'm talking to you Mayor Bloomberg) but in the meantime we'll be adding the Financial Times' "Energy Source" and the Houston Chronicle's "NewsWatch: Energy" blogs to the blogroll. Dow Jones has already pulled the link from other parts of their blog empire, we'll leave it up until the site goes black.
"So Long and Thanks For All the Fish" is the fourth Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book and is the message the dolphins left upon leaving the planet:
...The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Stephen Fry) narrates that the dolphins, the second most-intelligent creatures on Earth, attempted to warn mankind about the planet’s impending destruction, but humans interpreted the dolphins’ communications as tricks. The dolphins left the planet, leaving their final message to humans as “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”...There are eighty or ninety comments on that last post, take a gander to see the impact of a really good blog.
There definitely is a lot of potential.
As Al Gore said when interviewed by Conan O’Brien:
Conan:
” … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?”
Al:
“It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot ”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14kNtnJgXXM
Mr. Gore was brought in as a partner at Venture Capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers which is a major investor in geothermal tech company Altarock.
I’m guessing Mr. Gore was not brought in for his scientific expertise.