It will take 90,000 solar energy plants and 3.8 million wind turbines, according to an analysis by Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi in Scientific American. Actually, there are lots of ways to get to a more sustainable energy future, but Scientific American focuses on new energy technologies that don’t themselves generate greenhouse gases. This approach puts the kibosh on biofuels, on clean coal (which our reporter Matt Blake is taking a closer look at this week), and even on natural gas. Jacobson and Delucchi don’t look much into distributed energy generation — where people generate solar and wind energy where they live instead of relying on massive plants — and they don’t talk much about energy efficiency. But the specific plan they lay out is just the kind of thing America and the world need to be looking at if we’re going to make decisions and start actually doing something. -NH

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