The Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain was hacked yesterday, apparently by Russian black hats, and thousands of sensitive documents, including emails from climate scientists dating back a decade, were posted online. More here.

Officials at Hadley, a leading global-warming research center, have apparently confirmed to an Australian a Kiwi publication that the documents are genuine.

The whole affair has much of the blogosphere alight. Blogs skeptical of man-made global warming see blood in the water.

Some of the old emails from scientists made public apparently make references to things like “hid[ing] the decline,” referring to global temperature series and different ways to slice and dice climate data.

In all, it seems there are more than 3,000 files in the hacked folders, which have been reposted in various places on the Internet.

The big Copenhagen summit had lost a lot of its appeal in recent days, as world leaders kept dialing down expectations for the climate talks. Maybe this will spice things up.

So his take on America’s energy future is usually interesting. No exception in this recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, where he makes the case for why nuclear power will likely beat coal in a country still heavily reliant on the black stuff.

Coal has all sorts of issues, he says, not just carbon emissions. Coal plants produce other particulate emissions, create fly-ash dumps, and promote harsh mining practices:

Decarbonization of coal is just on top of that. If you asked me today based on current technologies–and assuming we have no advances in technology with respect to decarbonization of coal–I would say nuclear would trump coal because it produces zero greenhouse gases, it provides power 24/7, and, probably most importantly, it probably produces more jobs than even solar or wind on a per-megawatt basis.

Now, Mr. Rogers has been amping up his support for nuclear power since the summer, including a big op-ed in the WSJ. He’s often mentioned the jobs angle before, but rarely with such detail:

In an operation of a nuclear plant, there [are] .64 jobs per megawatt. The wind business–and we have a very large wind business–is .3 jobs per megawatt. In the solar business–and we’re installing solar panels–it’s about .1. But the difference in the jobs is quite different, because if you’re wiping off a solar panel, it’s sort of a minimum wage type of job, [with] much higher compensation for nuclear engineers and nuclear operators. If our goal is to rebuild the middle class, nuclear plays a key role there, particularly if coal is out of the equation.

Ever since last year’s presidential campaign, the energy debate has been largely a jobs debate—for better or for worse. With unemployment still creeping upward, will jobs—not joules—be the crucial element for America’s energy future?

Europe might dodge the bullet for now: Russia and Ukraine agree to a new gas deal meant to avoid natural-gas cutoffs, protect Gazprom’s market, and keep Ukraine as a viable transit country, in the FT.

The Senate has spent months working on different versions of a climate bill. Why, then, has John McCain gone awol from that debate?, in Politico.

The big Copenhagen summit is just around the corner. Grist offers a handy package ahead of the climate talks, including a primer on what it all means and how the world got here in the first place.

Heading into Copenhagen, nearly every developed country but one has already laid out emissions targets, notes the NYT. That doesn’t make the talks any easier.

Australia is inching closer to its own climate-change bill after years of bickering, Reuters notes. And if the bill doesn’t pass this time, it could mean snap elections and an even bigger majority for the center-left government, in the WSJ.

The U.S. and China just pledged to cooperate on electric-car development. But does China really need more cars—electric or otherwise—or a whole new model of urban development?, at Dot Earth.

Cellulosic biofuels makers find potential breakthroughs in the strangest places. The latest? Enzymes found in termite guts that can help break down crops and brew cleaner fuels, in MIT’s Technology Review.

After President Obama’s big smart grid speech in Florida, plenty of clean-energy buzz is on the future of transmission. One famous venture capitalist—Vinod Khosla—worries the smart grid isn’t a great investment, at Greentech Media. Another—Al Gore—thinks the smart grid is the key to everything, since it will let consumers know how much energy they use, at Earth2Tech.

Which might be risky—PG&E customers revolt after power bills spike from smart meters, in the WSJ.

So, what to make then of Aramco’s recent interest in supercomputers?

The biannual list of the world’s 500 fastest computers was released on Tuesday and Aramco had two new entries at No. 119 and No. 134. Both are Dell clusters, running Intel processors and both are very, very fast.

The oil industry uses Concorde-jet speed computing to aid it understanding underground reservoirs and to look for new sources of oil and gas. Aramco used another computer cluster to build a “full field model” of the Safaniya oilfield in 2008.

Clearly, Aramco is taking a sophisticated approach to understanding its remaining oil resources. And peak oilers will likely argue that Aramco’s interest in teraflops is a sign that it needs all the help it can get to ensure oil keep flowing out of its once mighty fields. After all, why bother throwing so much muscle into understanding the reservoir if there were no worries about its future performance.

We’re not sure who is right or wrong in the peak oil debate. But the oil industry’s interest in speed computing is intriguing. It’s not just Saudi Arabia turning to computers to find increasingly elusive oil. The world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer – Tianhe-1 in Tianjin, China – will be used in part for “petroleum exploration.”

And if burning all the oil that these prodigious processors are finding doesn’t increase the planet’s temperature, the computers used by people studying climate change will do the trick. On the list, supercomputers No. 89 and No. 90 belong to the United Kingdom Meteorological Office. They are using IBM-powered clusters to study and predict climate change patterns.

The Met’s supercomputer generates about 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, making it one of the worst greenhouse gas emitters in the nation.

But one thing in particular stands out: The role played by the rich world’s “offshoring” of manufacturing emissions to the developing world, especially China. The idea that rich countries are, fundamentally, responsible for a significant share of developing-world emissions just adds another wrinkle to global talks that are already going nowhere fast.

According to the paper, “Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide,” a big part of the emissions growth in developing countries is due to their manufacture of things for export—from flip-flops to iPhones.

In China, for instance, 30% of the growth in emissions from 1990 to 2002 is attributable to the production of exports, the paper says. In recent years, as Chinese factories ramped up production, that share has grown—accounting for 50% of Chinese emissions growth between 2002 and 2005.

Overall, the paper concludes, 30% of total emissions in China—the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases—came from “the production of exports” in 2005.

Not even Chinese officials have gone that far. In raising the issue earlier this year, Chinese government officials estimated between 15% and 25% of the country’s emissions came from the production of stuff the rich world no longer makes for itself.

This whole idea has a history. Academics have been arguing for years that part of China’s emissions growth should be chalked up to the Western consumers who buy the stuff. Indeed, the paper says that while U.S. domestic emissions grew only 6% between 1997 and 2004, “consumption emissions” grew 17%. “A key factor driving the growth of consumption-based emissions was the import of manufactured products from China,” the paper concludes.

And U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke sparked a brief firestorm this summer when he floated the idea that American consumers pick up part of the tab for those emissions, an idea the administration quickly squelched.

The point is—yes, China and the developing world are responsible for the overwhelming majority of new greenhouse-gas emissions, both in recent years and in years to come. But, as the paper notes, a “considerable share” of developing world emissions are now “associated with international trade.”

Which seems to suggest that not just the old Kyoto division between developed and developing countries is outdated—but also that the very idea that greenhouse-gas emissions carry a single passport in the first place is no longer totally valid.

All of which only promises to make already tortured climate talks an even bigger source of friction beteween the haves and the have-nots.

For all the talk of a clean-energy, low-carbon future, U.S coal producers might not have such a black future. That’s the take from a new HSBC report, “The Green Side of Black.”

The argument? Coal is and will remain a huge part of the electricity mix in the U.S., despite—or perhaps because of—congressional action on energy and the climate.

The only difference is that coal will probably get cleaner, if the economics of carbon capture and storage ever work out. And since coal plants that capture carbon emissions need more coal to produce the same amount of energy–because the technology that traps emissions uses up some of the energy–coal miners stand to come out ahead.

That means Arch Coal and Peabody Energy in particular, HSBC says. Both of those companies have loads of inexpensive, open-pit coal resources in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Peabody also has lots of Australian metallurgical coal which could feed the Asian market. Coal producers heavy on Appalachian coal, including Consol and Massey, don’t have as much upside, the bank says.

The idea that coal is both an irresistible force and an immovable object in the U.S. energy system is pervasive. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects coal to provide 47% of U.S. electricity in 2030—slightly more than today—the bank notes.

Which could happen—if carbon capture and storage does work out, which is anything but clear at this point. There are plenty of potential obstacles.

Clean-coal technology is only slowly being developed now around the world. The economics, now and in the foreseeable future, are dismal. The sheer scope of infrastructure investment needed to pipe and store millions of tons of CO2 underground is daunting.

And that’s not to mention what could be the biggest long-term threat to clean coal: If coal is neither cheap nor abundant, then it will be all the harder to make the case for extra investments just to clean it up. And there are plenty of worries about “peak coal” already.

In the end, the outlook for big coal producers looks a little like Warren Buffet’s bet on railroads that serve the Wyoming coal fields. If clean coal comes to pass, great. If coal chugs along on today’s course, great too.

But what happens to the big coal miners if coal’s cleaner future gets eclipsed by other sources of low-carbon energy?

It’s that time of year again: Europe and Ukraine start planning to deal with a Russian gas outage this winter, in the FT.

Is there yet another Plan B for climate legislation in Congress? There seems to be some support for a cap-and-trade bill that would only target power plants, leaving the rest of the economy untouched for now, in Green Wire. That comes as one big group—evangelicals—ramp up their support for tough action on climate change, in The Guardian.

Stop dithering: Even though the Senate has yet to act, President Obama can still make a pledge on emissions in Copenhagen, argues the WaPo edit page. Getting some sort of commitment out of the summit is crucial to make sure that developing countries don’t lock-in decades of dirty energy, in The Guardian.

Russia’s doing its part—sort of—with a pledge to curb emissions 25% from 1990 levels by 2020, which still leaves room for emissions to grow, in the FT. Can’t cut what you can’t measure: The U.S. and China agree to work on measuring Chinese greenhouse-gas emissions, a key first step toward any sort of international agreement, in the WaPo.

A sign of how appealing China’s domestic green economy is becoming: Sovereign wealth fund CIC, which has been snapping up resource assets abroad, makes its first clean-energy investments at home, in the WSJ.

For all the hand-wringing over foreign companies landing stimulus money for clean-energy projects, they are putting up the cash. Portugal’s EDP pledges $4 billion in renewables investments over the next three years, following a $6 billion promise from Spain’s Iberdrola, in Reuters.

California announces new energy-efficiency standards for flat-screen TVs, in a bid to curb power consumption of appliances that use as much juice as refrigerators, in the WSJ and the L.A. Times.

If electric cars are such a brilliant idea, why do electric-vehicle promoters need more than $100 billion in government support?, wonders Geoff Styles.

Finally, Mad Men indeed: Grist uncovers a 1962 ad for Humble Oil, now Exxon, touting the company’s ability to produce enough oil to melt glaciers.

The idea that the U.S. is falling behind in Asia, and especially China, when it comes to clean tech isn’t new. It keeps Tom Friedman in business, for starters. And it keeps cropping up in congressional hearings in Washington on energy and climate legislation.

The U.S. hasn’t actually fallen too far behind yet. It’s the future that the Breakthrough Institute is worried about. Specifically, the next five years, when China, Japan, and South Korea are expected to spend about $500 billion to directly promote clean-technology development and depolyment, compared with about $170 billion in the U.S.—and that’s including energy legislation that passed the House and shoaled in the Senate.

The Breakthrough folks start with a familiar premise: Clean energy will define the energy future, and he who makes it shapes it. “The United States lags far behind its economic competitors in clean technology manufacturing. Should this gap persist, the United States risks importing the majority of the clean energy technologies necessary to meet growing domestic demand.”

What’s interesting about the report, beyond its exhaustive analysis of what Asian countries are doing differently, is the link it draws between government investment in clean energy (which isn’t the same as a cap-and-trade program) and private-sector investment. The former doesn’t crowd out the latter—but attract it:

Dollar for dollar, the direct and targeted public investments of China, Japan, and South Korea are likely to attract substantial private investment to clean energy industries in each country, perhaps more so than the market-based and indirect policies of the United States.

China, of course, is the dragon in the room. The country’s top-down policies to promote not just clean energy but a clean-energy industry threaten to become a steamroller, the report argues. Plenty of folks note that China has yet to become an export powerhouse in the more technologically-challenging aspects of clean energy. Don’t be so sure, the report cautions:

China is poised to replicate many of the same successful strategies that Japanese and South Korean governments used to establish a technological lead in electronics and automobiles. Those governments supported nascent companies with low-interest loans, ndustry-wide R&D, government procurement, and subsidies for private purchase of advanced technologies. China is now employing similar tactics in emerging clean technology industries such as electric cars and low-carbon power generation.

At the end of the day, all the worries about the clean-tech race boil down to a much broader question: Does America’s energy and economic future depend on retooling its ailing manufacturing sector, or does the future of manufacturing depend on retooling energy policy?

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Senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Jim Webb of Virginia this week introduced the “Clean Energy Act of 2009,” which skips all the contentious bits of current energy legislation—like a cap-and-trade plan to curb greenhouse-gas emissions—in favor of directly promoting low-carbon energy, with special fondness for nuclear power.

The idea is to double nuclear power generation in the U.S. over the next 20 years, in addition to launching mini-Manhattan Projects for other clean-energy sources, such as solar power, electric cars, and biofuels.

“If we were going to war, we wouldn’t mothball our nuclear navy and start subsidizing sailboats. If addressing climate change and creating low-cost, reliable energy are national imperatives, we shouldn’t stop building nuclear plants and start subsidizing windmills,” said Sen. Alexander in a press release.

But the biggest problems with new nuclear construction are the same they’ve ever been: time and money. New plants take a long time to build, and as a result are very expensive, which threatens to strain the balance sheets of even the biggest U.S. utilities. Thus the emphasis in the new legislation on expanding loan guarantees for the industry.

If new nuclear is problematic, what about squeezing existing nuclear plants harder? That’s the idea behind nuclear uprates, or overhauls to existing plants to make them produce more electricity. John Rowe, chairman of Exelon, told Congress last month that the U.S. could squeeze an extra 8 gigawatts of power out of its existing nuclear fleet through uprates.

As an industry, “we’ve put so much emphasis on new build, we’ve kind of overlooked this low-hanging fruit,” Chip Pardee, chief nuclear officer at Exelon Nuclear, told us.

Not all uprates are created equally. Some are fairly quick and cheap to do—tweaking plant efficiency, for example–but add little additional power. Others, involving a “soup to nuts” overhaul of reactor equipment, could boost nuclear plant output by up to 20%, but are also much more expensive.

Which is where the government comes in, as it tends to do with all things nuclear. The fanciest upgrades “aren’t economic with power prices today, with natural gas around $5,” says Joe Dominguez, Exelon’s public affairs chief.

That’s why the company wants this additional source of nuclear power to be on the same footing as renewable energy such as wind and solar power.

The big uprates cost about $2,400 per kilowatt on average, though for some older plants they’ll never make sense. That cost is in the same neighborhood as wind power—which is supported by tax credits and clean-energy mandates. And, Exelon says, this “incremental nuclear power” runs 24/7, unlike wind or solar power.

In the end, uprates alone won’t meet America’s need for clean energy—a full-court press on uprates would still add less than 1% of the country’s installed electricity capacity.

But now that the Senate has given itself another four months to sort out energy and climate legislation, will the nuclear question elbow its way into the mix?

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A few new developments out of—where else—California this week illustrate the perennial collision between new energy and old interests, varied as they may be.

For instance, should homeowners be allowed to put up any kind of solar-power installation, or should the rules of their community take precedence over any green rush? That’s been an issue all over the U.S., and even overseas: New British government planning rules are specifically designed to promote clean energy over local reticence.

But in California, the issue has gone to court—Los Angeles Superior Court—in a case that pitted a homeowner’s association against a rogue neighbor. The verdict? The jury just ruled against the homeowner who refused to remove panels that violated the community’s rules.

“This verdict is a vindication of the right of homeowners associations to protect the communities they manage and to balance the need for renewable energy with the integrity of their communities,” said Ricardo Cestero, lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

In that case, it wasn’t a blanket rejection of solar power per se, but about the limits of green zeal. As the press release from the victorious lawyers notes, “While the HOA had allowed other homeowners in the 1,100-home community to install solar panels, the defendants’ installation was rejected for reasons of safety and aesthetics.”

California has long styled itself a national leader in the clean-energy push, but it’s also got more than its share of NIMBYism. Take the never-ending debate over solar projects in the Mojave Desert, long a nightmare for Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

BrightSource’s 440-megawatt solar-power project for the desert just got a thumbs down from San Bernardino County Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, according to the L.A. Times:

“Obviously, there is a lot of political pressure to get this project expedited and under construction,” Mr. Mitzelfelt said. “But its impacts in San Bernardino County and sensitive and scenic Mojave Desert environment are not worth the benefits.”

All of which raises the question: Since NIMBYism isn’t going away, and is in fact expanding beyond “backyards,” isn’t it time for a new acronym?

NIMHOA–Not In My Home Owner’s Association—has a soothing Polynesian lilt. And for the much broader and pitched battle over whether to promote solar power or protect desert tortoises, how about NIMROD–Not In My Range Of Desert?

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