Environment

These days, everybody's an environmentalist. But as the new year begins, we ask whether in this dismal market it's possible to safely invest in green companies and funds. The call to "go green" seemed to be reaching a fever pitch just a few months ago. Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was pledging to promote industries that were environmentally minded and invest federal money in creating green technology.

By day, Patti Marcotte is a working mom -- dealing with the balancing act created by a 5-year-old daughter, a demanding job, a split-level house and a willful boxer puppy. Come the post-dinner hour, however, Marcotte begins operating in the shadowy world of smuggled soap.

In mid-spring, when the prospect of a global warming bill passing Congress seemed like an Al Gore pipe dream, President Obama invited Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) down to the Oval Office. "He realized that this was a very tough bill to get through," Waxman remembers.

A federal appeals court dealt a blow Friday to oil and gas industry efforts to allow drilling in the fertile energy-producing regions in the icy seas north of Alaska. The Bush administration had started to auction off leases in the Arctic waters along Alaska's coast, which are expected to produce billions of barrels of oil. But a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel in Washington ruled that the Interior Department had failed to properly assess the environmental impact of the leases.

An oxygen-depleted "dead zone" the size of New Jersey is starving sea life off the coast of Oregon and Washington and likely will appear there each summer as a result of climate change, an Oregon State University researcher said Thursday. The huge area is one of 400 dead zones around the world, most of them caused by fertilizer and sewage dumped into the oceans in river runoff. But the dead zone off the Northwest is one of the few in the world -- and possibly the only one in North America -- that could be impossible to reverse.

The gunk on the water had thinned to a gray scrim in front of Mike Thomas' riverfront home -- a small sign of progress one week after one of the worst coal ash spills in American history. But as Thomas drove along the bluff over the Emory River, he pointed to big piles of sludgy, dark gray ash, a byproduct of coal combustion, that had been accidentally disgorged by the nearby electricity plant. The heaps jutted from the water's surface like ugly volcanic islands.

Arnold Klann has a green dream. It began 16 years ago in a sprawling laboratory in Anaheim. This year, he hopes, it will culminate at a Lancaster garbage dump. There, in the high desert of the Antelope Valley, Klann's company, BlueFire Ethanol Fuels, plans to build a $100-million plant to convert raw trash into an alcohol-based fuel that will help power the cars and trucks of the future. It's just the sort of improbable concoction that California is now demanding.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is set tonight to announce a groundbreaking agreement by California's biggest timber firm to begin marketing its vast forests as a weapon in the fight against global warming. The announcement comes less than a week after the Schwarzenegger administration pushed through new rules that allow Sierra Pacific Industries to sell its trees' ability to absorb harmful carbon dioxide from the air. Environmental groups immediately raised questions about the timing, so soon after the administration pressed the California Air Resources Board to approve the new protocols.

A Texas oil company's campaign to drill the first new wells in 40 years off the California coast continues despite setbacks in both the Legislature and at a key regulatory agency. The measure, which passed the state Senate but failed in the Assembly in August, would authorize drilling from an existing maritime platform in state waters off the northern Santa Barbara County coast. Supporters now hope for action this fall. Boosters of the project say state government stands to get an estimated $14 billion in potential new money to run schools, build prisons and strengthen a tattered social-welfare safety net. But opponents say they worry about the possibility of an oil spill that could threaten the California coast, an internationally renowned tourism magnet.

When Greg Nickels became Seattle's mayor in 2002, global warming was hardly at the top of the municipal agenda. New York's World Trade Center had been attacked, and officials had to figure out how to protect their own city from terrorism. Boeing was laying off 30,000 machinists, so there was the declining regional economy to deal with. Surely the federal government would worry about climate change. Then came the winter of 2004, when the Cascade Mountains snowpack was so disastrously low that ski resorts -- facing their worst year on record -- laid off most of their employees.