In honor of Earth Day I am posting my weekly Friday blog on Thursday.

The day provides a good point for reflection on all that i have seen and learned since the sun was last in roughly the same point in space in relation to the earth - i.e. one year ago.

I visited the Schwarze-Pumpe facility close to the German-Polish frontier, where Vattenfall is successfully extracting a stream of carbon dioxide from a coal-burning power generation plant. I mugged around with some fellow journalists near a great big hose, ready to dispatch the CO2 to trucks for eventual storage. It is all being done with existing technology. But it is small scale. The challenge remains ramping it up significantly, and solving the conundrum of where to keep oceans of the gas safely stored underground.

I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Don Sadoway, a materials chemistry genius at MIT, speak about what can eventually be achieved in the field of energy storage. Picture a huge storage facility - an array of batteries - as large as a power plant itself. That may be coming - soon. And it will jet-start ever more reliance on what now are intermittent sources of renewable power - wind and solar. Don this week agreed to take part in a discussion about renewables in the next EnergyBiz Leadership Series webcast noon EDT on May 20. Click here to learn more and reserve a seat.

I spent some time in Oregon checking out solar panels installed along Interstate 5 to help light a stretch of freeways - one of the first efforts of its kind. And I descended into the bowels of a Depression era turbine at Bonneville Dam to learn more about new designs to boost output and efficiency while preserved the treasured salmon of the Columbia River.

I have heard government officials of high rank, captains of our largest energy companies, scientists and experts. The culture they reflect is vastly different than the era that spawned Earth Day - an age when rivers were so polluted they caught fire and smokestacks emitted nasty stuff that would land an emitter in jail today.

The culture, the business imperative, the force of our politics all seems pointed in one broad direction. There may be skirmishes on the fringes about global warming. But there is broad agreement that tapping clean and inexhaustible energy resources within our own borders is the thing to do. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, who represents Kansas City in Congress and is its former mayor, made clear the sweep of the revolution when he gave an inspiring talk in the closing hours of this  years EnergyBiz Leadership Forum in Washington last month. [CLICK HERE and go to Session 3 Panel D for more. ] He wants to take a section of blighted urban core and renew the housing stock with renewables and energy efficiency, creating jobs for chronically unemployed folks. It is the smart grid in real time. And it is happening right here, close to the geographic and population center of the United States.

This being the hometown of Hallmark, I call Cleaver's Green Impact Zone effort an Earth Day greetings card to the rest of the world.