Climate change threatens to destabilise the world, as the Pentagon itself recognises and 33 retired US bigwigs have written in an open letter. 
And just to show the American military is really serious, the US Navy is about to launch an eco-friendly fighting fleet powered by biofuels.

But why stop there. As Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently pointed out, the US Federal government spends less than $3 billion a year on clean energy research, compared with $80 billion on defence research and development.

Why not swap that around? 

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It's worth reading this interview with James Lovelock from a couple of months back in The New Scientist. The author of the Gaia Hypothesis - known for his bleak pronouncements on climate change - predicts 90 per cent of mankind will die in the next century from even two degrees of warming.

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I had a quick peak at a boat called Earthrace today - a bio-diesel powerboat that's currently touring the globe. Visually stunning, it certainly lives up to its billing as "the world's coolest boat".

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Along with many environmentalists, I'm not a fan of carbon trading. In my view it's unwieldy, too open to rorting and lobbying by industry pressure groups and it's ability to actually reduce emissions remains totally unproven. More likely, it will only serve to make some traders rich with little emissions reductions.

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Some big guns in the US are beginning to throw their weight behind renewable energy. Over there, the issue is often presented as "energy security" and reducing dependence on foreign oil imports, rather than reducing climate change, but never mind.

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