U.S. President Barack Obama has made climate change legislation one of his top goals and has pushed for more clean, renewable energy like solar and wind power.But back in 1979, when another Democrat was in the White House, 32 solar panels graced the roof above the Oval Office.Part of an initiative called “Solar America,” the panels turned sunlight into electricity that heated water in the staff kitchen — which President Jimmy Carter often used. They were removed during Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1986.Now, one of those presidential solar panels has joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.”The White House solar panel is evidence of an American president leading by example to promote his administration’s agenda,” Harry Rubenstein, chair of the museum’s division of politics and reform, said in a statement. “It displays how President Carter reinforced his policies through a personal gesture taking place in his own home.”Unity College donated the panel to the museum this summer. The college in rural Maine got the panels in 1991. It refurbished some of them and installed them on top of the college cafeteria, and the panels heated water there until they maxed out their life span in 2005.We were wondering if readers would like to see Obama install solar panels on top of the White House again?It would certainly send a message — similar to the example set by First Lady Michelle Obama when she planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn to promote healthy eating.– Writing and reporting by Laura Isensee(Photo Credit: United College and GreenBang/President Jimmy Carter inspects solar panels installed on top of the White House on June 30, 1979)

Southern California — home to Disneyland, the mother of all amusement parks — welcomed a new attraction this month. But this theme park has no Mickey Mouse or roller coasters and is housed inside a mall instead of spread out over a swath of space.Called Environmentaland, it is more of an interactive museum that has taken the environment as its theme.The goal is to show there are “no free rides in life,” said Eric Ritz, executive director of Global Inheritance. The nonprofit opened the self-proclaimed first environmental theme park this month in Hollywood.”We promote more along the lines of common sense rather than being green,” Ritz said.Visitors can ride a see-saw on an energy playground to power up their cell phone, putt on a desert mini golf course and fly airplanes from recycled paper. This past weekend, visitors could arm wrestle a polar bear in a climate change quiz challenge for a chance to win prizes.Ritz, a 36-year-old former advertising executive and long-time activist, started Global Inheritance in 2002. The nonprofit has passion projects, like Environmentaland, but pays the bills through working with companies like Walt Disney’s ESPN and on events like Fox’s Teen Choice Awards.Ritz admits the name Environmentaland is “kind of preposterous.”"But that’s the point,” he added.He said that the name is a play on words that takes on the idea of theme parks, that are the “poster child of excessiveness,” he said.Visitors who show a bus or subway pass get free admission; otherwise, there is a suggested donation of $3.Environmentaland is open at the Hollywood & Highland shopping center in Los Angeles through October 2009. In the spring, the nonprofit hopes to take the theme park on the road to malls in cities like Chicago, New York and Boise.”When we’re placed on the Earth, we have a certain responsibility to give back or evolve in a very positive way. People go and they take and take and take and they don’t give. If that’s what we do, we’re going to be in a very bad shape very soon,” Ritz said.(Writing and reporting by Laura Isensee)(Photo credit: Courtesy of Global Inheritance. The nonprofit displayed alternative energy golf carts at Coachella and Stagecoach festivals this year.)

Sometimes, even electric vehicles aren’t good enough for the die-hard green car set.An electric car advocacy group on Tuesday criticized California’s influential air quality regulator, the California Air Resources Board, for allowing BMW’s one-year pilot program of electric Mini Coopers to earn the same credit towards the state’s clean vehicle program as standard production cars.California is requiring that automakers, collectively, put 7,500 zero-emissions vehicles, or ZEVs, on its roads.But Plug In America on Tuesday said there is a “gaping loophole” in the program that “could deal a blow to the proliferation of plug-in vehicles.”Specifically, the group targeted BMW’s leasing program of 500 electric Mini Coopers, which it calls MINI Es.”CARB is allowing BMW to game the system by accruing the maximum number of ZEV credits with the least amount of effort,” Plug In America legislative director Jay Friedland said in a statement. “In order to receive full credit, these vehicles must be offered for sale.”CARB plans to revisit the regulation next year and will be looking at ways to accelerate the commercialization of electric vehicles, according to spokesman Dimitri Stanich.In the meantime, “we’ve urged BMW to consider extending that one-year lease,” Stanich said.BMW officials were not available for comment.

IBM’s latest green venture is a highly efficient supercomputer that uses water to siphon off  waste heat, and then uses the excess energy to warm up a building.High-tech giants from Microsoft to Google are eager to cut the huge amounts of power used to run their data centers, particularly now that the recession has companies leaving no stone unturned to slash costs and global warming is driving them to think green.Developed by IBM jointly with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) — a sort of Swiss version of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — the new supercomputer’s microchips avoid cooling with energy-sucking air conditioning.Thanks to a network of water-carrying “micro-capillaries” that take water very close to the microchips, the system is cooled at a temperature of 60 degrees Celsius, rather than a “normal coolant” that requires a temperature of about 20 degrees Celsius, or air at around 6 to 12 degrees Celsius, according to IBM researcher Dr. Thomas Brunschwiler.”Typically you would use air conditioning, which is very intensive, and this is eliminating that by using water to take the heat and transfer it away from the chips,” Brunschwiler said.According to IBM, the computer, dubbed Aquasar, will reduce overall energy consumption by 40 percent and save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide a year, about the same as driving an average car around the world 10 times.In addition, the excess heat from the computer will be piped into the building’s heating. The 25 kilowatt system will account for just “a small fraction” of the building’s overall energy demand, but researchers said future applications are promising.”In a future system if you run an entire data center in this mode then it will be a large fraction of the energy demand of an entity like this,” said Dr. Bruno Michel of IBM Research in Zurich.It could be a while, however, before that happens. The ETH supercomputer won’t start operation until 2010, and the company would not estimate how much it will cost to build except to say that it will be more than a supercomputer with a traditional cooling system. The return on investment, however, is within one year, IBM said, given the system’s efficiency.Photo Credit: IBM (A water-cooled blade used in IBM’s Aquasar supercomputer. The two microchannel coolers at the center are attached directly to the processors.)

Shares of U.S. solar company First Solarhave dropped about 7 percent this week on concerns about a federal review of the company’s recent acquisition of rival OptiSolar, which was first reported by the Los Angeles Times on Monday.

However, in a note to clients on Wednesday, Pacific Crest analyst Mark Bachman called the story “sensational, at best.” A day earlier, Cowen and Company analyst Robert Stone said “the issue looks overdone.” Both have “outperform” ratings on First Solar.

According to Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Jan Bedrosian, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s inspector general is probing whether OptiSolar’s applications to develop 136,000 of public land were included in the value of the $400 million deal.In the event of an acquisition, applications can be transferred from one company to another, Bedrosian said, though no value can be attached to them.

“There is no value associated with a mere application, which could be rejected by us for a variety of reasons,” Greg Miller, renewable energy program manager for the Bureau of Land Management office in Moreno Valley, told the Los Angeles Times, saying the agency was trying to weed out speculators who are snapping up land only to turn around and sell it for a quick profit.

“American Idol’s” Adam Lambert surprised and awed fans all season with his unique brand of vocal gymnastics and dramatic flair, but nothing shocked “Glambert” followers more than when he placed second to low-key Kris Allen in the ultra-popular singing competition on Wednesday night.

Lambert himself, however, appeared unfazed by the loss of the “Idol” crown. Backstage after the show, he said he looks forward to making an album, and blew off the suggestion that his sexuality had anything to do with the season’s outcome.

“First or second– it doesn’t matter to me,” Lambert, who was clad in a black Roberto Cavalli jacket with a flashy brooch, told reporters. “For me it’s not really about what happened tonight, it’s about tomorrow. It’s about next.”

It was a bad week to be planning a coal-fired power plant in the United States.

The industry suffered its second blow of the week on Friday with the cancellation of a plant in Michigan. The move by power plant developer LS Power marks the ninth such plant to be dropped in the United States so far this year, according to a count by environmental group the Sierra Club.

The company blamed regulatory uncertainty and the weak economy for the cancellation, which environmentalists cheered because coal-fired power plants are responsible for more than 30 percent of the United States’ global warming emissions.

The Michigan plant cancellation wasn’t the first blow to coal this week, either. On Tuesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency withdrew a permit for a massive coal-fired plant in New Mexico that would have been built on an Indian reservation.