The Wall Street Journal launched a free business-meets-green blog called Environmental Capital. The blog's editor is Jeff Ball. The lead writer is Keith Johnson, who just moved back to the US from 12 years in Spain. The blog addresses the convergence of business and environment. It will include energy, water – anything that addresses how businesses are dealing with the new energy/environment paradigm. They expect to have 4-5 posts per day, and hope to differentiate from other similar media/blogs by taking a step back, highlighting trends and connecting the dots. If they deliver on that promise, it will fill a nice gap.

When first conceived, this was intended to be a new franchise like the D event Walt Mossberg does except focused on green. As part of that concept, the WSJ will also be holding its first ECO:nomics conference this year in March. I will be interested to see how that is different from the Brainstorm Green event planned by Fortune.

It was inevitable. Cleantech as a category is so gigantic that no one could possibly be an expert in everything. So its gratifying to see the market start to mature and various players start to narrow their focus. This is certainly true in the VC world. XPV Capital, for example, is a firm that is focused exclusively on water. Smart, when you realize that according to Booz Allen, $40 trillion will have to be spent on urban infrastructure over the next 25 years, with much of that headed to water. One Earth Capital is focusing on agriculture and distributed energy. Clean-ag also gets too little attention, so good to see someone raising their hand. Many others are also honing their thesis into one or two areas. But even those areas seem daunting in scope, and I wouldn't be surprised to see further layers being added as focus narrows even more. Media seems to be moving in that direction too – you now see Biofuels Digest and many others. Events as well are starting to diversify and get more specific. I'm personally far less interested in the broader events at this point, which seem to have the usual suspects in attendance and are more about being seen than being heard. Apparently I am not the only one who feels that way. I was recently contacted by a friend who now pretty much passes on the general Cleantech events. He is headed to Concentrated Solar Power Summit US instead. Another new CSP event is also happening in Europe a month later. Makes sense, and there is specialization happening in other areas under the Cleantech umbrella. Why would the CEO of Verdiem, an energy efficiency play involving PC power management (and client), want to go to a conference to hear about biofuels and coal-bed methane? (Rhetorical question).

In honor of Blog Action Day – aka BAD – I'm guessing that a lot the posts will be pretty depressing or somewhat sanctimonious, so I chose to explore the humor and absurdity of our eco-existential angst. What better way to represent that than a personal "Best of" list of environmental comedy – could there be anything more absurd than laughing at our self-destruction by using an overused cliché formulation? So I scrounged together some nuggets over the weekend while juggling two kids and my carbon footprint, and came up with random candidates in the categories of website/blog, novel, film and video/TV (English-language only for now). I was inspired by David Roberts' knock knock entry and the responses on Grist from 2005. Happily, Grist seems to finally be attracting some mainstream company in poking fun at our planetary predicament. Witness Comedy Central's recently launched  Address the Mess (the environmental best of Stewart, Colbert, South Park, etc), the first annual Environmental Comedy Festival that took place in Seattle this year or Earth to America on TBS. If you buy into the 5 Stages of Climate Grief outlined by Steve Running (one of the authors of the Nobel peace prize winning IPCC report), then comedy probably falls somewhere between depression and acceptance, which is a pretty good breeding ground for producing some twisted stuff. So here they are:  

Web/Blog

• Grist – the Onion of environmental humor, Grist is the king of the hill without a doubt.
• Cheat Neutral – Infidelity meets carbon. We are after all carbon based creatures. 
• Ideal Bite – "Sassy" is their buzzword, and they deliver. And the ladies who run this green Daily Candy are based in Montana. Need I say more?
• Crap at the Environment – Just for the title alone, this one gets a nod, although I have no idea what it does or if its funny.

Video/TV

• Will Farrell doing "W" doing Global Warming – this is almost as good as waste-to-fuel.
• History of Oil Propaganda by Plenty TV – the video version of Toxic Sludge is Good for You. How gullible are we?
• Store Wars – floating produce is hard to ignore.
• Green Pieces: an Eco-Comedy – good reviews on this Canadian offering, but I couldn't find a copy.
• The Meatrix – the While Rabbit meets red meat.

Film

• Blue Vinyl, a documentary by my friend Judith Helfand, maker of what she calls the Toxic Comedy. Who knew PVC could be so deathly funny?
• I Heart Huckabees – if a movie is shown in a theater, but no one is there to see it, is it still funny? Good question. I haven't seen this movie, but I think the answer is yes.
• Toxic Avenger – arguably the poster child of environmental misfits, Lloyd Kaufman's creation is so bad its good.

Novels

• This Other Eden, by Ben Elton, this is a surprisingly insightful (it came out in 1993), and frighteningly funny novel from the British stand-up comedian. Plastic Tolstoy and Jurgen Thor are characters to die for. Stark and Gridlock are other Elton works along similar lines.
• The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey, this is a bit dated (1975), but its still one of the funnier treatments of the environmental movement

Best Performance by a Family Member

Disposable Backpack – my cousin Nick made this at college. I couldn't resist.

As a follow on to my last post on cleantech media, GigaOM has also entered the fray with a new blog called Earth2Tech. Fellow Red Herring alumnae Katie Fehrenbacher and Adena DeMonte will be running the show at Earth2Tech. In discussion for more than half a year, Earth2Tech will move beyond the telecom, broadband world that GigaOM has traditionally plied, and look at the world of solar, biofuel, fuel cells, water etc. In a call with Katie, who is the blog's editor, she talked about "trying to fill the void" that exists between cleantech entrepreneurs, venture and technology. "You see a lot of consumer green blogs, where you can learn about how to cut down your carbon footprint, but not a lot of aggressive, cleantech business coverage," she said. To begin with, she expects about 7 posts a day, with a minimum 2 being original features. The other stuff will be more blog post style, aggregating commentary and news. Katie echoed a sentiment felt by many working in the cleantech space – that it is frickin' HUGE (my words). So she and Adena will be focused on "what's local and what's hot" in Silicon Valley, and not so much on what the big multinationals are doing, since "its more difficult to pry information from them". There will also be a regular post on cleantech related eco-web tools (such as a GPS tool that finds the nearest e85), as well as the occasional lifestyle piece by other bloggers such as Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee.

Lux Research did a quick and dirty Factiva search of media articles since 1996 using four keywords – "cleantech", "greentech", "clean technology" and "green technology" – and found a surge in 2005-2006. No surprise there. They calculated a 70% per year growth in press coverage of cleantech since 2004, with total articles in major publications numbering almost 3,500 last year. Lux's observation comes at a time when, also not surprisingly, new cleantech media and analyst outlets are popping up all over. Of course there are some of the more well-known ones – Inside Greentech, Renewable Energy Access, GreenBiz … but there are also many others coming on line. Greener World Media, Joel Makower's group which publishes GreenBiz, has expanded out with GreenerComputing and ClimateBiz among others; Cleantech Investor has appeared in the UK and Dow Jones is set to launch a Clean Technology Investor newsletter. Other traditional media like BusinessWeek, Business 2.0 (GreenWombat) and Red Herring are also increasing their coverage of the space, while CNET is dedicating more resources as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see something from the Wall Street Journal this year. The blogosphere is also sizzling with activity and new entrants (including mine), but I won't get into that here. On the analyst side, Greentech Media is about to launch a service, while Lux has taken its previous focus on nanotech and made it part of the broader cleantech umbrella (it just issued its first comprehensive market report on cleantech).