You're a DC politician.  You want to do something to promote jobs growth.  You want to do something to make a reduction in carbon emissions more feasible and rapidly implementable.  And you'd love the idea of being able to give some kind of tangible value to your constituents.

Thus, Home Star is born.  The idea would be that homeowners would (either directly in the form of a voucher, or via overseeing programs, or via tax credits) get significant financial credit toward the cost of accredited home energy efficiency retrofits.  Stopping up air loss, improving insulation, upgrading appliances, etc.  It's not rocket science, but it takes someone pretty knowledgeable to do it right.  And...

Long-time readers will know that in my spare time (ha) I've been serving as President of the Renewable Energy Business Network, a non-profit I and Andrew Friendly of ATV officially co-founded last year (although read below for more backstory)...

Yesterday we were extremely pleased to announce that REBN and the Clean Economy Network have joined forces, with the REBN network of chapters and leaders being integrated into the Clean Economy Network Foundation. 

It's an exciting move that will mean bringing a lot more professional leadership to the combined effort, with the existing REBN leadership team (both organizational and chapter-level) joining forces with the very strong CENF team. ...

Some random links and observations on a Friday:

• Apparently not every reader picked up on the fact that my last post was tongue-in-cheek.  Guess you had to be there.  Fortunately, Scott was in fact there...

• David Gold wrote recently on some of the same issues, wondering why solar and the like have gotten so much attention from VCs while technologies like geothermal have gotten much less attention.  His answer is that in large part "much of the bias has to do with the fact that not many VCs have strong networks of geologists, drilling technologists, heat pump engineers and steam turbine power generation experts to build great geothermal companies".  I'm directionally in alignment...

I had the pleasure of speaking as part of a panel this morning at the Mid-Atlantic Capital Alliance's conference in Philadelphia.  Here's a taste of what I told them:

1.  Cleantech only happens in Silicon Valley and MIT.  If you look at the dollars flowing into cleantech from venture capitalists, and read the sunday NYT, that's the natural conclusion you would draw.  So my apologies to everyone in Philly (or the rest of the country outside of northern California and Boston), there's clearly very little good entrepreneurial activity in cleantech in your region.

2.  Cleantech is really only solar, "smart grid", biofuels and electric vehicles. 

3.  Cleantech is really only about capital...