Europe is finally cottoning on to the costs of tackling climate change, says the WSJ edit page, as economic fears lead to backsliding on the environment: "In other words, Western European leaders are the latest to discover that climate-change talk is cheap, but carbon-emissions regulation is expensive." So how to fight climate change?

Crude oil futures inched upward for the first time in a week to about $65 a barrel thanks to a weaker dollar, Bloomberg reports. U.S. regulators will unveil today new commodities regulations aimed at cracking down on energy speculators, in the WSJ.

Europe's big Nabucco natural-gas pipeline will take a big step toward completion next week in Turkey, also in the WSJ.

This week, the action's in the U.S. Senate, which starts sinking its teeth into the energy and climate bill. Democrats are still about 15 votes shy, the WaPo notes, and the horse-trading required to muster more support could end up further watering down the bill and enraging enviros.

Europe is finally cottoning on to the costs of tackling climate change, says the WSJ edit page, as economic fears lead to backsliding on the environment: "In other words, Western European leaders are the latest to discover that climate-change talk is cheap, but carbon-emissions regulation is expensive."

So how to fight climate change? One new proposal floated by Princeton professors aims to make the middle and upper classes in all countries foot the bill, in Time. Don't put too much faith in technology doing the trick, says Ezra Klein-Malthus was right in the long run.

T. Boone Pickens is canning plans for the biggest wind farm, and hopes to build a series of smaller wind farms instead, in the Dallas Morning News. He better hustle-turbines will arrive in 2011, and "I don't have that big a garage to put them in, so I've got to start getting ready to use them," he said.

The fastest-growing renewable-energy source might just be little wooden pellets burned in coal plants. The U.S. is busy exporting them to European utilities who find them a cheaper way to go green than buying wind or solar power, in the WSJ.

Then there's the forgotten renewable-big hydropower-which gets a raw deal from Congress, says Geoff Styles. One place big hydro has a future is Siberia. Russian rivers could one day power part of China, in the FT's Energy Source, but the problem of transmission lines looms as large as the landscape.

The coal industry fears climate regulation will spell the valley of death, because "clean coal" is still far off and fraught with uncertainty, in Green Wire. Nukes are back on the German election docket after another plant shutdown over the weekend, in AP.

Finally, Robert Bryce takes aim at U.S. energy policy, which penalizes oil and gas, over-subsidizes ethanol, and ends up making the country less-not more-energy independent, in the WSJ.

Web link: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/07/...