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Two fellows named Ed lit up the cause of wildlife last Wednesday night, a cause a clean energy policy can advance. I sat right between them at the Defenders of Wildlife dinner. One Ed was genius at humor, the other Ed in sciences. Together, this duo would inspire the most jaded to join the environmental effort.

We lost a battle but won a war against the Bush Administration’s refusal to address global warming on Tuesday, August 21, 2007. The battle means little. The war could mean a lot.

As a congressman from Seattle I joined Senator John Kerry and other plaintiffs in supporting a lawsuit to force the Administration to issue the statutorily required national scientific assessment of global warming. Tuesday, Federal District court Judge Sandra Brown Armstrong ordered the Administration to comply with its legal duty to provide the American people a full and fair assessment of the science underpinning this national threat, as the law requires.

My message to Tony Blair yesterday at the Bundestag was clear – don’t go wobbly on us on global warming. Blair, despite his titanic mistake on Iraq, has been right on global warming and was instrumental in putting it on the G-8 agenda, over the objections of President Bush. Now we need him to be aggressive, diligent, and persuasive when the G-8 meets in Germany this week.

Here are two good pieces of news from Germany. First, we congressmen escaped from being stuck in a hot and crowded elevator in what was once East Berlin, built, we were told, by communist technology. No wonder the Soviet Union collapsed. Second, everybody in Europe agrees about the cap and trade system. They all agree it has worked however they all agree that a few things went wrong - pretty much like their elevator system.

On Wednesday, we met with a wide spectrum of Germany’s leadership from the Environmental Minister, to the Economic Advisor to Merkel, to the Foriegn Affairs Office. Since they are of different parties, it was a bit surprising to find such consensus.

We saw the brilliance of the Danish energy policy on Tuesday in the farm fields of Germany as we drove south from Berlin headed for the world’s first coal fired plant that may sequester CO2. Those fields were sprouting a great crop of 250 foot tall Vestas wind turbines slowly spinning in a very light wind. It is funny how a decision by the Danish parliament ended up planting wind turbines in German fields. I will bet the German framers make more per acre on their crop of turbines than on their picturesque crops of oats and rye.

While in Copenhagen this past weekend, I enjoyed seeing smiling Danes out on a weekend stroll past the Little Mermaid, while I enjoyed the vista of the line of 250 foot tall wind turbines spinning in the harbor. Later in the day, the Danes who were briefing our congressional delegation mentioned that according to several studies, the Danish people are the happiest on earth. Maybe it is because of their advanced energy policy. Actually, it is more likely to be because of their great cheese and kippered herring, but their forward thinking energy policy hasn’t hurt them either.

Good things in the world of clean energy often can happen by pure accident. As a perfect example, I read yesterday about Engineering Professor Jerry Woodall of Purdue who had a little surprise awhile back when he washing some lab equipment and stumbled on a reaction that could just possibly make fuel cells workable.

It seems that while Professor Woodall was doing his routine lab cleaning, he inadvertently mixed water, aluminum, and gallium together and discovered what you get is hydrogen gas, a gas that literally went ‘poof” right in his face. It seems he had chanced upon the discovery that the addition of gallium to hydrogen and water allows the well known reaction of water and aluminum to be sustained in producing hydrogen – thus the little explosion in his face.

This week has seen an avalanche of clean energy in the House. Tuesday, the Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, appeared before our global warming committee and briefed us on the amazing work his country has done in developing a clean energy economy. He showed what an industrialized country can do with a bit of leadership. His first bit of good news was that Sweden has reduced its CO2 emissions by 7% since 1990 while its economy has grown. So much for the doomsayers’ prediction that moving on energy will wreck an economy.

Last Friday, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, stood up for clean energy on the banks of the Duwamish River in Seattle, Washington. I joined her at the small manufacturing plant run by Imperium Energy, formerly known as Seattle Biodiesel, a company that will soon be operating the largest biodiesel plant in North America. We gathered there for a forum on clean energy and were joined by a great collection of new businesses from the Seattle area that are doing well by doing good.

What was going on the street outside of the Rayburn House Office Building in D.C. hearing room last week may be as important as what was going on within that august chamber. Inside, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held the sixth in its series of hearings about how to tackle global warming. Just outside on South Capitol Street, the future of the auto industry pulled up and parked at the curb in the form of the first commercially available plug-in hybrid car to arrive in the capital.