President Barack Obama tours the ZBB Energy Corporation with CEO and President Eric Apfelbach and Edward Zanger in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin today in order to tout the government’s incentives to promote green energy in the stimulus bill.

President Barack Obama said government incentives to expand clean-energy industries will help restore jobs, citing a battery maker in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, where he is highlighting the impact of the economic stimulus.

Obama used the example of ZBB Energy Corp., which is using a $1.3 million loan from the legislation to keep 12 workers on staff and eventually hire 80 more as it expands production.

“We expect our commitment to clean energy to lead to more than 800,000 jobs by 2012,” Obama said after a tour of the ZBB factory. “And that’s not just creating work in the short term; that’s going to help lay the foundation for lasting economic growth.”

It’s terribly disappointing that we have not been able to pass a comprehensive energy policy, as Republicans and coal-state Senators block progress.

After being bombarded by countless anti-smoking campaign commercials, most people probably get the picture that smoking can be hazardous for your health. The news isn’t good for those people that continue to inhale the smoke, tar and other damaging things that cigarettes have to offer.

Countless schools across the United States have banded together to spread their message that smoking isn’t cool. Restaurants and nightclubs across the nation have banned the smoking of cigarettes within their facilities, as the news for those that smoke continues to worsen.

With the healthy segment of the populations saying no to smoking in public places, the need for alternatives to smoking continued to grow until news of smokeless cigarettes came along to fill a need.

The water-vapor dispelled from these new cigarettes is not harmful and doesn’t contain the tar, and carcinogens that make regular cigarettes so unhealthy. Thus, the news for these new and improved smokers delights has been received quite nicely.

No longer does a driver need to air-freshen the car before picking up passengers on the way to work. No longer does the 10:15 smoke break leave an employee reeking of cigarette smoke throughout the day. No longer does the running enthusiast have to cough throughout their morning jog, and no longer do mom and dad have to hide their smoking habit from the kids.

An alternative to regular cigarettes was inevitable, as people across the country continue to smoke despite the warnings, (even on the label) that smoking can be hazardous to one’s health. With hundreds of people addicted to regular cigarettes, the news that a new and improved form or smoking is causing quite the stir. Smokers still receive their desired rush of nicotine, while those around them aren’t affected in nearly the same manner.

And that’s good news for all of us!

It’s fascinating to see how Chinese officials are becoming obsessed with energy efficiency and global warming. It worries some in America, as we see China making the investments in clean energy we should be making. In a competitive world, America should be leading the green revolution and thus creating new jobs. While the Obama administration has made great progress, Republicans and Midwest Senators are standing in the way of a new energy bill.

Meanwhile, climate activists fear the impact of China, but have to be somewhat please that Chinese officials are being proactive.

Premier Wen Jiabao has promised to use an “iron hand” this summer to make his nation more energy efficient. The central government has ordered cities to close inefficient factories by September, like the vast Guangzhou Steel mill here, where most of the 6,000 workers will be laid off or pushed into early retirement.

Already, in the last three years, China has shut down more than a thousand older coal-fired power plants that used technology of the sort still common in the United States. China has also surpassed the rest of the world as the biggest investor in wind turbines and other clean energy technology. And it has dictated tough new energy standards for lighting and gas mileage for cars.

That said, China may be fighting a losing battle. As millions of Chinese citizens become real consumers, they will gobble up even more energy. It’s great for the world economy, but terrible from a climate perspective.

Aspiring to a more Western standard of living, in many cases with the government’s encouragement, China’s population, 1.3 billion strong, is clamoring for more and bigger cars, for electricity-dependent home appliances and for more creature comforts like air-conditioned shopping malls.

As a result, China is actually becoming even less energy efficient. And because most of its energy is still produced by burning fossil fuels, China’s emission of carbon dioxide — a so-called greenhouse gas — is growing worse. This past winter and spring showed the largest six-month increase in tonnage ever by a single country.

It’s a real dilemma, but perhaps it will motivate the Chinese, and hopefully the American government, to do even more. Green energy can be the fuel that the world economy needs. It can also ease world security in the long run by making all of us less dependent on sending billions to volatile regions of the world. So it’s good to see the Chinese get religion on green energy. Let’s hope it helps fuel a worldwide movement.

This is a very encouraging story. Serious early-stage investors are taking a close look at what many are calling Agriculture 2.0. Trends like urban farming have tremendous potential, and innovative trends like that can accelerate with the backing of Silicon Valley.

“Sustainable agriculture is a space that looks as big or bigger than clean tech,” said Paul Matteucci, a venture capitalist with U.S. Venture Partners in Menlo Park, Calif. “Historically, we have not seen a ton of entrepreneurial activity in agriculture, but we are beginning to see it now, and the opportunities are huge.”

A catch-all phrase for environmentally beneficial farming, sustainable agriculture has long been the province of organic enthusiasts. But venture capitalists say a growing awareness of conventional agriculture’s contribution to climate change and concerns over its consumption of water and energy are creating markets for technological innovation to minimize those effects.

The Johnny Appleseed of what is being called Agriculture 2.0 is a 33-year-old former Wall Street investment banker named Janine Yorio. Her New York firm, NewSeed Advisors, brings together sustainable agriculture entrepreneurs and investors.

At the Four Seasons hotel in East Palo Alto, Calif., last month, NewSeed Advisors attracted a crowd of well-dressed investors from some of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms. They packed a ballroom to hear entrepreneurs pitch start-ups developing everything from nontoxic pesticides and analytical tools for soil analysis to indoor urban farming systems.

I think the urban farming trend in particular has huge potential, particularly in Rust Belt cities like Detroit and Cleveland.

Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, which is celebrated April 22 every year. We’ve come very far in 40 years in terms of individuals making a positive impact on the environment, particularly on cleaner air and water, but in many ways the challenges today are even greater.

Adam Rose has a great posted on Wired.com about the significance of the original Earth Day.

Larry Carroll offers up Earth Day lessons to be learned from the movie “Avatar.”

BusinessWeek explains how “air like split-pee soup” in LA helped spur the first Earth Day.

USA Today asks if at 40 Earth Day has gone too corporate.

There are tons of great articles out there, and frankly this is an exciting time as new technologies and a new commitment from government is spurring a real effort to accelerate the changes made over the past 40 years.

One of the great developments in the green energy revolution is the notion of mobile energy sources. In our new mobile world, running out of power for our devices is to be avoided at all costs. Now, we have plenty of new options for mobile power such as battery packs, but new devices that rely upon kinetic energy maybe the coolest developments yet. Here’s a recent review of such a gadget:

Set to release later this year, the nPower PEG keeps your gadgets charge while you roam Gotham’s rooftops. The PEG harnesses the kinetic energy of your movement to keep any device that can be charged via USB at full. The thing that sets the PEG apart from other kinetic chargers is its shape and size. It fits perfectly into a backpack or satchel. If you’re in a pinch you could always just stuff this bad boy in the front of your superhero garb. Is that a PEG in your pants?

This will definitely be one of the coolest green products of the year.

Get ready to hear about the Bloom Box. Beginning with this segment tonight on 60 Minutes, Bloom Energy, a fuel cell company backed with roughly $400 million in venture capital, is unveiling a product that it’s CEO claims can help make the energy grid obsolete. The entire segment is fascinating. On Wednesday the company will have a big press event in Silicon Valley to show off the technology.

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According to Bloom Energy, a Bloom Box is like a small power plant located in your back yard. One of the more fascinating parts of the segment had CEO K.R. Sridhar hold a small stack of plates that he claimed could power a typical American home. If you stack up more of them, you get the Bloom Boxes we saw in the segment that are now being tested by companies like eBay and Google. If everyone has a Bloom Box or something like it, the electrical grid is no longer necessary. That may seem to be far-fetched, but having this option would revolutionize the production of electricity here and around the world.

One innovation seems to be the use of oxygen as opposed to hydrogen, which differentiates this from fuel cells offered by other companies. We’ll probably learn much more in the weeks to come as the world begins to digest the claims being made by the company. How does it work?

Hydrocarbons such as natural gas or biofuel (stored in an adjacent tank) are pumped into the Bloom Box – ceramic plates stacked atop each other to form modules that can be assembled into a unit of any size – and out comes abundant, reliable, cleaner electricity. The company says the unit does not vibrate, emits no sound, and has no smell.

Sridhar, an India-born PhD who once led a team of NASA scientists trying to develop the technology to sustain life on Mars, holds one of the modules in his hand. Stacking them into a bread loaf-sized unit, he says, can produce one kilowatt of electricity, enough to power an American home. Sridhar explains that it has taken so long to produce this contraption because he is building not just a company but an entire industry. “You are used to market sizes that start with a ‘B’,” he told venture capitalists when the company launched in 2002. “This is a market size that starts with a ‘T’.”

This Forbes article goes on to explain that there’s still some healthy skepticism about Sridhar’s claims and they note that the company has lost millions, but that really isn’t relevant. The key here is cost, and if these boxes produce energy cheaply, the sky is the limit.

There are all sorts of rumors about a huge government contract and big orders from other companies, along with possible DOE stimulus funds.

This part of the 60 Minutes segment tells me that the Bloom Box can be a game-changer.

Another company that has bought and is testing the Bloom box so Sridhar can work out the kinks is eBay. Its boxes are on the lawn in the middle of its campus in San Jose.

John Donahoe, eBay’s CEO, says its five boxes were installed nine months ago and have already saved the company more than $100,000 in electricity costs.

“It’s been very successful thus far. They’ve done what they said they would do,” he told Stahl.

eBay’s boxes run on bio-gas made from landfill waste, so they’re carbon neutral. Donahoe took us up to the roof to show off the company’s more than 3,000 solar panels. But they generate a lot less electricity than the boxes on the lawn.

“So this, on five buildings, acres and acres and acres,” Stahl remarked.

“Yes. The footprint for Bloom is much more efficient,” Donahoe said. “When you average it over seven days a week, 24 hours a day, the Bloom box puts out five times as much power that we can actually use.”

If costs are that low, the impact might be close to the Company’s aggressive claims.

We waste a significant amount of electricity due to an outdated and inefficient electric grid in the United States. Thus, this investment is significant.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday will announce $3.4 billion in government grants to help build a “smart” electric grid that will save consumers money on their utility bills, reduce blackouts and carry power supplies generated by solar and wind energy, the White House said.

It marks the largest award made in a single day from the $787 billion stimulus package approved by Congress, and will create tens of thousands of jobs while upgrading the U.S. electric grid, according to administration officials.

The grants, which range from $400,000 to $200 million, will go to 100 companies, utilities, manufacturers, cities and other partners in 49 states.

This investment is only the first step, and part of the criteria here was the speed with which companies could implement the changes, as this money comes from the stimulus package. For example, the grants will not be used to build new power lines, but improve the capabilities of the electrical system. The funds will be used for a variety of projects, including approximately “18 million smart meters that will help consumers manage energy use in their homes, 700 automated substations to make it faster for utilities to restore power knocked out by storms and 200,000 smart transformers that allow power companies to replace units before they fail, thus avoiding outages.” Companies had to bid and compete for the funds, and the winning companies secured an additional $4.7 billion in private money to match their government grants, resulting in a total of $8.1 billion in total investment in the smart grid.

The smart meters are critical, as they encourage consumers to use electricity more efficiently. If you can see on your meter that running the dishwasher costs you more during the day, you will consider running it at night instead when rates are cheaper. If you’re costs are spiking during the day, you might realize that you can open the windows instead of running the air conditioner.

Democrat John Kerry and Republican Lindsey Graham don’t agree on much. The above photo from FOX News Sunday shows the two Senators sparring in the fall of 2008.

The two Senators, however, have teamed up to write a compelling Op-Ed in today’s New York Times in which they argue for a bi-partisan approach to addressing climate change legislation. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about this issue, and it could offer some real momentum for an issue that many believe will be stalled in the Senate.

If Lindsey Graham is on board, one would think that he could bring along more Republicans. One reason Graham is on board, and there’s hope to bring along more Republicans, is the emphasis on using nuclear power as one of the options. The left needs to become pragmatic over nuclear power, and realize that it offers the key to obtaining broad support.

Kerry and Graham also signal that a compromise is needed on domestic drilling. The clean energy revolution will not happen over-night, and if we need to rely in the short term on some fossil fuels, it’s better for the U.S. economy to use more domestic oil. We certainly shouldn’t subsidize it, but in the context of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, permitting more domestic production makes tons of sense, particularly given the current economic crisis.

Hopefully, this can be the starting point for a grand bargain on energy.

Read this article about the battle between natural gas and solar power in Colorado and you’ll get a great idea of the complexity surrounding the clean energy issue. Over time, this stuff will get sorted out, and the subsidies for clean energy clearly have a positive impact. That said, there’s legitimate concern that all the competing interests will create a nightmare set of regulations once Congress gets through with the new climate bill.

This presents another compelling case for a simple carbon tax over cap-and-trade legislation.