The question of the month – how come no one thought of this before? Dutch company Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV has brilliantly landed on the most obvious attractor for solar energy – asphalt.

The company's Road Energy System has collected solar energy from a 200-yard stretch of road and a small parking lot to heat an apartment building, and an industrial park of about 160,000 square feet is warmed in the winter with heat stored during the summer from 36,000 square feet of pavement. Plus, it's also heated an air force base hangar with the runways.

The possibilities are endless – our airports could be heated from the runways, our malls could be powered by the parking lots, etc. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle describes how the system works:

A latticework of flexible pipes, held in place by a grid, is covered over by asphalt, which magnifies the sun's thermal power. As water in the pipes is heated, it is pumped deep under the ground to natural aquifers where it maintains a fairly constant temperature of about 68 F. The heated water can be retrieved months later to keep the road surface ice-free in winter.

Though it doubles the cost of construction, the system is designed to provide longer life for roads and bridges, fewer ice-induced accidents and less need to repave worn surfaces.

But the same system can pump cold water from a separate subterranean reservoir to cool buildings on hot days.

It is usually necessary to heat the water a bit more when it is retrieved later, and the installation costs are pricy, but lowered heating bills and a 50 percent decrease in carbon dioxide emissions make up for all that.

Mercury is found in dental fillings, thermometers and fish, just to name a few sources, and is a very dangerous pollutant to the environment. So Norway banned it in the manufacturing and import and export of products, beginning at the start of 2008. Sweden announced a similar ban and dentists in Denmark will no longer be allowed to use mercury in fillings after April 1.

While the European Union and the United States haven't introduced such bans, they may come soon. According to the Mercury Policy Project, the House of Representatives in October approved a mercury export ban that would go into effect by 2010. One Colorado county is already fighting against mercury – in the dead. The county won't allow morticians to work without installing a smokestack filter on crematories, or agree to pull the teeth of the dead because of the mercury that is emitted from cremated bodies. In the United States that's only about 1 percent, but in places where crematory rates are higher – such as the United Kingdom, where 70 percent of the population chooses to be cremated – about 16 percent of mercury emissions come from dead people's fillings.

I guess limiting dangerous pollutants wherever and whenever possible is always a good move, but the amount of mercury pollution from dental fillings does seem a bit trivial. Of all the mercury pollution in the United States, 85 percent of it is released by coal-burning power plants and municipal and medical waste incinerators.

I wasn't surprised when the EPA rejected California's request for a waiver so that it could set more stringent rules limiting CO2 emissions from vehicles than the federal government requires. That's because tying the argument to global warming is scientifically hard to prove and because of the way greenhouse gases mix in the atmosphere it is more of a global than local problem.

However, just when California needed a study to emphasize the local effects of CO2 on human health for its lawsuit against the EPA, a Stanford researcher provides that exact ammunition. The study confirms that rising CO2 levels increases human mortality because it exacerbates the problem of ozone and other air pollutants.

This is the argument that California needs to make: people in the state are becoming ill and dying because of CO2, and autos are a major contributor to that problem. To be fair however, California should also be looking at concrete production as a contributor to the CO2 problem.

CO2 is also injurious to those with asthma, emphysema and other < a href="http://www.respiratoryreviews.com/jun04/rr_jun04_breathing.html">respiratory problems, which should be high up on the California complaint as well.

Hopefully the next administration will make the changes that California and 15 other states are asking for so that we don't have to spend more taxpayer dollars on fights between the states and the federal government.

My family and I recently spent 9 days at the lovely FDR Pebbles family resort in Falmouth, Jamaica. One of the reasons we picked this hotel was because of its stated environmental policy. The best news for travelers is that you can't tell the difference in quality, service, comfort or cost.

The hotel, which is a member of the Green HotelsAssociation and has been Green Globe 21 Certified, has environmentally friendly policies including:

* using gray water from showers and sinks as well as rooftop water used for irrigation
* solar thermal power to heat the hot water
* low energy lighting fixtures
* used cooking oil is saved and used as animal feed
* plastic bottles are recycled
* low-flow toilets
* the restaurants and gym are all open air, so air conditioning is not required
* recycled paper and rolls are used in the kids' activity center

Not one of these policies had a negative impact on our enjoyment of the hotel. The hotel primarily uses glass for drinks instead of plastic, and only silverware instead of flatware, which benefits patrons as much as the environment. The sewage system also does not put pollutants into the crystal-clear ocean, unlike some other island resorts where I have stayed. FDR Pebbles also surpassed my expectation for friendly service, cleanliness, and creating activities and a fun environment for the entire family.

More and more travelers will be considering a hotel's green stance before their traveling, which should create even more competition. Luxury does not have to compete with environmental policies -- they go hand in hand.

Matter Network partner site Inhabitat is hosting the Greener Gadgets conference in New York on February 1. The event focuses on the green design and technology innovations that will open new business opportunities and shape the future of the consumer electronics industry.

Big screen TVs, DVRs, set-top boxes and home entertainment centers are becoming huge energy sucks, and this conference will highlight the companies that are developing products that minimize the energy needed to make and operate consumer electronics devices. The conference will include vendors HP, Nokia, Sony, Philips, and Intel among others.

Check out the event in person, or stay tuned for more information about virtual coverage of the tradeshow.

A startup has joined the chorus of solar companies developing technology to concentrate solar power and make it available when the sun isn't shining.

Hamilton Sundstrand has joined with US Renewables Group to start company SolarReserve to commercialize a molten salt storage system developed by Rocketdyne.

The technology uses mirrors to focus solar heat onto a tower that can heats up molten salt that can be released later to create steam to power a turbine.

The concentrating solar power (CSP) technology isn't fully cooked (so to speak) as a high volume energy producer, but the lab results have been so promising that companies including Skyfuel and Solucar Power are also planning to build CSP plants.

This technology avoids the primary limitation of solar power -- that it is by nature intermittent and so can't be called on when needed. If CSP pans out, it could attract a number of utilities in the Southwest US, which has the perfect environment for solar thermal power.