How to save the environment? Not just from mankind, but ultimately from nature itself? Those are tough questions, but we have to start somewhere, and where better than with cute cats? And after we've cloned these cute critters, we have many more technologies to use to save nature.

Yes, technologies to save nature. It's the forward-looking technos, not the backward-looking greens, who will literally immortalize the environment.

I don't share Matthew Simmons's angst, but I admire his style. He is that rare doomsayer who puts his money where his doom is.

After reading his prediction, quoted Sunday in the cover story of The New York Times Magazine, that oil prices will soar into the triple digits, I called to ask if he'd back his prophecy with cash. Without a second's hesitation, he agreed to bet me $5,000.

His only concern seemed to be that he was fleecing me. Mr. Simmons, the head of a Houston investment bank specializing in the energy industry, patiently explained to me why Saudi Arabia's oil production would falter much sooner than expected. That's the thesis of his new book, "Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy."

I didn't try to argue with him about Saudi Arabia, because I know next to nothing about oil production there or anywhere else. I'm just following the advice of a mentor and friend, the economist Julian Simon: if you find anyone willing to bet that natural resource prices are going up, take him for all you can.

I don't share Matthew Simmons's angst, but I admire his style. He is that rare doomsayer who puts his money where his doom is.

After reading his prediction, quoted Sunday in the cover story of The New York Times Magazine, that oil prices will soar into the triple digits, I called to ask if he'd back his prophecy with cash. Without a second's hesitation, he agreed to bet me $5,000.

His only concern seemed to be that he was fleecing me. Mr. Simmons, the head of a Houston investment bank specializing in the energy industry, patiently explained to me why Saudi Arabia's oil production would falter much sooner than expected. That's the thesis of his new book, "Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy."

I didn't try to argue with him about Saudi Arabia, because I know next to nothing about oil production there or anywhere else. I'm just following the advice of a mentor and friend, the economist Julian Simon: if you find anyone willing to bet that natural resource prices are going up, take him for all you can.

With oil near $50 a barrel, alternatives to gasoline are attracting more attention - including fuel cells, devices that convert hydrogen into electric current with no waste products except heat and pure water.

Fuel cells have found their way into power systems for laptop computers and into many experimental cars. The main drawback to automotive use of fuel cells, though, has been their cost, which at $100,000 can be 25 times the $4,000 for a gasoline engine of equal power. Lately, some companies, including Honda, have been trying to come up with cheaper versions of the most expensive part of a fuel cell: the membrane that takes the hydrogen fuel and separates it into protons and electrons.

This morning, a California company, PolyFuel, plans to announce that it has achieved a breakthrough in fuel-cell membranes by using an alternative material: a hydrocarbon that it says costs only about half as much per square meter.

Compared with the fluorine compounds that are the most commonly used for membranes in fuel cells now under testing, PolyFuel says that hydrocarbon membranes allow production of more electricity per square centimeter of membrane. That could mean that a fuel cell could produce the same power as a fluorine-membrane version, but would be smaller and lighter, further adding to efficiency, according to the company.

A recent advance in light-emitting diodes may illuminate the path to replacing light bulbs with LEDs within the next five years, according to researchers.

Fred Schubert, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, N.Y.), claims to have invented a 99-percent efficient reflector that promises to speed the replacement of light bulbs with LEDs.

"Until now, all lighting systems, especially incandescent bulbs, generated more heat than light. But our 99-percent efficient reflectors for LEDs makes them the first candidate for light-bulb replacement that generates more light than heat," said Schubert.

Environmentalist Paul Ehrlich has proved himself to be a stupendously bad prophet. In 1968 he declared: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." They didn't. Indeed, a "green revolution" nearly tripled the world's food supply. In 1975, he predicted that, by the mid-1980s, "mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity," in which "accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." Far from it. Between 1975 and 2000 the World Bank's commodity price index for minerals and metals fell by nearly 50%. In other words, we abound in "key minerals." Naturally, Mr. Ehrlich has won a MacArthur Foundation genius award--and a Heinz Award for the environment.

New underwater turbines could be cheap and eco-friendly.

A British company has invented a simple tidal power system that is relatively easy to install and has little impact on its environment. The device could soon be added to our range of renewable energy resources, and be used to bring power to remote seaside locations.

The TidEl system uses floating turbines that are anchored to the seabed by chains. The underwater windmills drift back and forth with the tide, so they point in the best direction to get power from the spinning blades.

The future of manufacturing will be built on industrial-strength ecology, says architect William McDonough. The first step: Turn Ford's legendary River Rouge plant into a lean, green profit machine.

A sign up ahead reads WARNING: SLAG HAULER CROSSING. Sitting in the back of a sedan, architect William McDonough is riding through Ford's aging River Rouge factory complex in Dearborn, Michigan. At 1,100 acres, it's the largest industrial site of early- to mid-20th century America, a testament to the scale of Henry Ford's vision. The Armani-clad McDonough surveys the ruins strung along the dark, slack river, cruising past eye-level piles of black, powdery ash heaps, a spindly gas tower, and the proto-industrial blast ovens. A red oxygen furnace belches as it haltingly refines coke into steel.

It hardly looks like the site of the next industrial revolution, yet that is exactly what McDonough intends to make it. In late 2000, the Ford Motor Company hired McDonough, a designer cum environmentalist, to blueprint the site's 20-year, $2 billion redesign. The centerpiece will be a vast but energy-efficient truck assembly plant, not far from a new low-emission paint plant. Company CEO William Clay Ford Jr., Henry's great-grandson, says that the goal is nothing less than transforming River Rouge into "the model of 21st-century sustainable manufacturing."

Green architecture is an emerging field, and McDonough, who was trained at Dartmouth and Yale, spent most of the '80s experimenting with it. His highly lauded Herman Miller factory in Zeeland, Michigan, and Gap corporate offices in San Bruno, California, are designed to maximize natural lighting and air circulation. At Oberlin College, in Ohio, he built a solar- and geothermal-powered facility for the environmental studies department designed to generate more energy than it uses.

You can‘t get something for nothing, physicists say, but sometimes a radical innovation can come close.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories — exceeding the predictions of a 100-year-old law of physics — have shown that filaments fabricated of tungsten lattices emit remarkably more energy than solid tungsten filaments in certain bands of near-infrared wavelengths when heated.

This greater useful output offers the possibility of a superior energy source to supercharge hybrid electric cars, electric equipment on boats, and industrial waste-heat-driven electrical generators. The lattices’ energy emissions put more energy into wavelengths used by photovoltaic cells that change light into electricity to run engines.

A unique group of oxide materials that readily gives up and accepts oxygen atoms with changes in temperature could be the basis for a small-scale hydrogen production system able to power fuel cells in homes -- and potentially in automotive applications. Scientists have long known that oxides of the rare earth elements cerium (Ce), terbium (Tb), and praseodymium (Pr) can produce hydrogen from water vapor and methane in continuous "inhale and exhale" cycles. By doping iron atoms into the oxides, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have lowered the temperatures at which these "oxygen pump" materials produce hydrogen, potentially allowing the process to be powered by solar energy.

BERKELEY, CA — Researchers in the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with crystal-growing teams at Cornell University and Japan's Ritsumeikan University, have learned that the band gap of the semiconductor indium nitride is not 2 electron volts (2 eV) as previously thought, but instead is a much lower 0.7 eV.
The serendipitous discovery means that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight -- from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet -- to electrical current.

OSLO, Norway — In a novel use of clean energy, the world's most northerly town will soon be the first to get electricity from a sub-sea power station run on tidal currents tugged by the moon.
Gigantic forces in the oceans — waves, currents, and tides — have often proved too costly or awkward to harness, compared to wind or solar power, in global efforts to cut reliance on nuclear power or on fossil fuels blamed for global warming.

Environmentalists insist that humanity really has overshot the earth's carrying capacity this time.