Equities and Economics Report writer Victor Gonçalves, in this exclusive interview with The Energy Report, talks with us about what he thinks "being green" means for energy. It's more than having a smaller carbon footprint, and more about using energy efficiently. He's enthusiastic about the prospects for rare earths, saying they are going to be a "huge phenomenon."

The Energy Report: Victor, your Green Money Report website focuses on the fundamental shift in the use of energy. I'm interested in your impressions of what's happened recently at the global climate conferences, specifically Stockholm, and if you think the world will ever come to some type of climate treaty in the next decade.

It's a digital world, and even aging power plants are experiencing the benefits of digital controls technologies. The following cover stories provide insight into the latest options and inspiration for your own plant controls projects.

The editors of POWER have spent the past few months working with industry experts and ISA POWID (see links below ) to bring you this special cover story series on advanced digital controls. Each article was selected for its unique perspective and helpful solutions to the digital control issues facing the power generation industry. Though each segment of the industry has its own peculiar challenges, many advancements should spill over, say, from the nuclear side of the industry to the fossil segment.

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Specializing in emerging markets, natural resources and global infrastructure, U.S. Global Investors is positioned so perfectly for the times that CEO Frank Holmes might have written its business plan and tag line-"Resourceful Investing for a Developing World"-this morning. All of these arenas of expertise at U.S. Global Investors play powerful but somewhat unpredictable roles in the evolving 21st century worldwide economy. Led by China and India, the emerging markets have placed unprecedented (and growing) demand on natural resources.

From gas and oil to copper and zinc, it takes vast quantities of those natural resources to build infrastructure to accommodate explosive growth in population, upward mobility, urbanization and industrialization. So as the other Holmes once said, "The game is afoot." Meanwhile, the developed world can hardly sit by and watch the action from afar. As Frank suggests in this exclusive Energy Report interview, the key to staying in the game-even as the rules are changing-may lie in adapting nimbly and rationally.

Excerpt from Penn State's Inquiry report

University Park, Pa. - An internal inquiry by Penn State into the research and scholarly activities of a well-known climate scientist will move into the investigatory stage, which is the next step in the University's process for reviewing research conduct.

A University committee has concluded its inquiry into allegations of research impropriety that were leveled in November against Professor Michael Mann, after information contained in a collection of stolen e-mails was revealed. More than a thousand e-mails are reported to have been "hacked" from computer servers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, one of the main repositories of information about climate change.