Beginning with the Obama administration’s $70 billion commitment to ramping up the U.S.’s reliance of wind, water and solar power (not to mention hybrid vehicles) in February through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and ending with December’s international climate conference in Copenhagen, this year promises to be pivotal in the worldwide development and adoption of renewable energy sources. Pivotal in the sense that 2009 could go down as the moment the green revolution gained substantial footing thanks to a swelling of political and financial support or as a colossal missed opportunity due to power grabbing and misguided policy.

Recovery and Reinvestment Act and ending with December’s international climate conference in Copenhagen, this year promises to be pivotal in the worldwide development and adoption of renewable energy sources. Pivotal in the sense that 2009 could go down as the moment the green revolution gained substantial footing thanks to a swelling of political and financial support or as a colossal missed opportunity due to power grabbing and misguided policy.

Controversy has been swirling around the proposed Copenhagen conference climate-change treaty (pdf) intended to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on Wednesday, Janet Albrechttsen, a columnist for The Australian, criticizes the treaty as being "convoluted." She cites an address given by England’s Lord Christopher Monckton earlier this month at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn., in which he warned that the treaty’s aim is to set up a transnational "government" with the power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all the nations that sign the proposed Copenhagen treaty.

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