Yet another fine idea from the bright minds of Cambridge, MA. Why do individual energy audits of houses when you can take a page from Google and do the whole city, town, or whatever, from the comfort of your scientifically equipped truck? Read all about it here. I am so intimidated!

On our way from Germany to Iceland, we flew over Scotland and I looked out the window at all the wind turbines. You can see pretty far from 34,000 feet. The turbines look like flowers from up that high. There's been a lot of talk lately about birds getting chopped in half by those giant pinwheels, which is why I cracked up when I read this story. Meow.

Nice to see the Scots taking advantage of the tides on this project. There's a similar project going on in New York's East River, which isn't actually a river. But then Boston College isn't a college; and it isn't in Boston. But I digress.

Hey, I'm all for sustainability and I love all this new science and engineering, but I think that if you're buying this sort of wood floor for that reason alone, you're just being silly. Sure, it looks pretty, but how'd you like to be the radiant-heating contractor putting the tubes under that wood? And how do you think that floor's gonna look after a few drinks? Watch your step!

Just as Iceland prepares to tap into a volcano, make lots of electricity from the resulting steam, and then export the power to the U.K. through the world's longest extension cord, the Brits are starting to do their own drilling for hot rocks. Aren't these interesting times?

And probably because of their unusual approach to it (they used per capita). Click here to see the list of the Top-10 States for LEED-certified green buildings last year. Nice to see them looking at this stuff in regards to human beings instead of square footage.

Subscriber, Stan Young, wrote to me a few weeks back after I offered a link in this newsletter to an article about fracking. Stan wrote, "I just wish there was a middle ground, like clean fracking, and recently I heard about a company that "SAYS" they have the answer.  It's a small company called GasFrac, in the Midwest of US or Canada. Don't have their web address, but they are publicly traded in the US under GSFVF.PK.  Their method is to use LPG believe it or not, for fracking. Then when the LPG floats to the surface they can recover it and keep reusing it. They're calling it Green Fracking. They're well beyond experimental, with a number of operation sites, mostly in Canada, and are currently growing rapidly. The process is in operational field trial stages by several of the majors. I have no idea about the veracity of their naturally optimistic claims, the costs relative to water fracking, or the potential safety constraints using LPG. So while you now have the extent of my knowledge, I know you are a super pro at internet research. If this seems to you like a valid middle ground that will facilitate fracking, a follow on article would be very interesting to me, and I bet to many of your readers."

Thanks, Stan. Here's the follow-up, and a link to GasFrac's Web site. Let's see what the other subscribers have to say.

Thanks, to subscriber, Clif Heeney, who lives in Estonia and always has wonderful stories and fun stuff to share with me. He recently sent me a link to this video, which combines brilliant ingenuity with what appears to be a pretty serious death wish. Don't try this at home. Or anywhere else.