Environmental business and the business of environmentalism.

The New York Times has a special business section all about the connections and collisions between business and environmental issues. In true Times style, it's broad and thorough, with in-depth reporting on renewable energy projects on a massive scale, truth in labeling regarding products' environmental impact and what environmental law could mean to the legal profession. There's a terrific story about investors and what some call. . . okay, what the Times calls "Energy 2.0" The section offers a complete look at where business and the environment are right now in the world's largest national economy: closer than ever in a lot of encouraging ways.

Elsewhere in the Times, the Gray Lady's Tuesday Science section had a good story about the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism, an initiative to get developing countries to move ahead with renewable energy that was a product of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It's a kind of good news/bad news story; most of the Clean Development Mechanism projects are being launched in China -- that's the good news. The bad news is that other countries that are supposed to be getting Clean Development Mechanism projects and money aren't. It's a story about bureaucratic skill and economic opportunity as the engines helping China tackle climate change.

Still on the business  and money front, anybody who's followed media titan Rupert Murdoch (he described himself as a "billionaire tyrant" on an episode of The Simpsons) knows he tilts to the right politically at a pretty steep angle. But as this item from New York Magazine puts it, maybe Mr. Murdoch's latest move is another indication that "maybe John Kerry's right, and environmentalism truly isn't a partisan issue anymore. How else to explain the latest passenger on the bandwagon, Rupert Murdoch, who has just promised to take his News Corporation carbon-neutral within four years?"