Lots of things happening here — some of them are reasonably clear.

Imagine a car wrapped in the stuff. You could make a hybrid sedan, or give the Tesla sports car a genuine 200-mile range. Now imagine skyscrapers and apartment buildings wrapped in the stuff. Even the least efficient buildings could generate a large chunk of their own energy. At the very least it would relieve a lot of stress on our aging power grids.

The Commerce Department imposed slightly lower but still robust tariffs on Chinese solar panels, alleging that subsidies undercut US prices and violate international trade laws.

Muhammad Yunus is visionary economist and Noble Peace Prize winner who believes in the essential goodness of humanity. Stepping down from the ivory tower of academia, Yunus visited the poorest villages of Bangladesh in 1976 and made a personal loan of $27 to 42 women in the village so they could build and sell bamboo furniture. The loan was paid back with interest, and the women took out a larger loan. Thus microfinance was born. In the past 30 years, microcredit has spread to every continent and has benefited over 100 million people. Yunus’ Grameen Bank (literally “village bank”) has loaned money to 1 out of 1,000 people on earth, at 98% repayment rate.

In Bonsai People, The Vision of Muhammad Yunus, Holly Mosher follows the founding of a Grameen Bank branch and several of the women aided by loans.

Mitt Romney released an energy plan yesterday that some outlets report sets a goal of energy independence by 2020. That’s not quite right. The goal expressed here is “North American energy independence” by 2020, and when you consider that one of our biggest if not our biggest energy trading partner is Canada, and that Mexico ships a fair bit of oil as well, that really says very little.

The white paper shifts back and forth between “North American” energy independence and just “energy independence,” seeking to blur that distinction. But one of the key elements of the plan is a “North American Energy Partnership,” which mainly consists of approving the Keystone XL pipeline and any other pipelines Canada and Mexico want to build. There’s also a whiff of the idea that we should gouge Canada and Mexico and purchase their oil at a discount. The white paper makes this outlandish statement that “America still imports more oil from OPEC than it does from Canada and Mexico,” when OPEC consists of practically every oil producing nation on Earth, with much greater capacity than the two North American countries, and yet it’s STILL pretty close, with the US getting 37% of its oil resources from Canada and Mexico, compared to about 50% from OPEC.

Neoliberals and conservatives will get to trot out their favorite phrase, “trade war.” And to be sure, there’s a jobs vs. environment question to be asked about this latest move by the Obama Administration. But the Commerce Department has moved ahead with slapping high tariffs on Chinese solar panels.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claims to be soldiering on with a new set of jobs bills, necessary because the GOP has become defined by their attention to culture war issues rather than what brought them to the House majority. But these plans are either small beer or just another manifestation of the “tax cuts forever” ideology that’s so fashionable in Washington.

A “level playing field” sounds inherently fair, so why should domestic solar manufacturing have to suffer for the sins of legacy energy production?

Sen. Bernie Sanders has a new bill out to kill fossil fuel subsidies that come in the form of tax breaks for the oil and gas industry. Instead, Sanders would redirect those funds to generate 10 million solar roofs in America, which would create installation jobs and significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption.

The President showed up unscheduled at a White House briefing today to excoriate House Republicans for fouling up a Senate deal on a stopgap measure to extend the payroll tax cut, unemployment benefits and a doctor’s reimbursement fix. But there are a number of other measures that also will not get extended into next year, including the production tax credit for wind energy.