Bloomberg LP announced today its acquisition of New Energy Finance, a U.K.-based provider of news, data, and research related to the clean energy sector and carbon markets. Bloomberg didn’t disclose the amount.

Oh boy, there’s certainly a lot of work to do.

So says PricewaterhouseCoopers, which put out an analysis looking at how well the world is doing toward reaching emission cuts required by 2050. It concluded that, on average, the world is off track by 10 per cent with regards to staying within its carbon budget for the period between 2000 and 2050. This is based on a global carbon budget of 1,300 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, which aims to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees C (relatively to pre-industrial levels). “At current rates of carbon intensity improvement, the world will already have exceeded its estimated global carbon budget for the first half of this century by 2034, 16 years ahead of schedule,” according to PwC. “Such a ‘business as usual’ scenario could result in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations exceeding 1000ppm CO2e by the end of the century with potentially disastrous implications for the climate system and the global economy.”

Just a reminder: the aim is to stay below 450ppm, and some believe that 350ppm is what’s really required. Translation: Yikes!

Based on this analysis, Canada needs to reduce its emissions roughly 90 per cent from today’s levels to get back on track toward the 2050 goal. On a global basis, PwC estimates that to get back on track the world must reduce its carbon intensity by 3.5 per cent a year by 2020, or 35 per cent “cumulatively” between 2008 and 2020.

We’ve got our work cut out for us… time to roll up our sleeves.

Bloom Energy, a semi-stealthy investment of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has been making more noise lately about its fuel-cell technology. The company, in a recent BusinessWeek article, claims its system — about the size of a refrigerator and capable of supplying both heat and power to a home — will come down so much in cost over the next three to five years that it will hit grid parity. It’s not like the technology that Bloom’s product is based on is new. Solid-oxide fuel cells have been around for years and several startups have combined heat and power products based on the design. But Bloom, obviously, has figured out a way of making it reliable and cheap enough to deploy widely — or so we’re led to believe. The system would run on natural gas or a selection of renewable feedstocks, such as ethanol, offering a way for natural gas companies to indirectly become power utilities. I compare it to the battle between telephone and cable companies, which have infrastructures based on different technologies but eventually began competing in each other’s market for the same services — phone, cable, Internet. Utilities — gas or electric — will soon just be called energy utilities, capable of providing a package of electrons and BTUs.

Like many secretive Kleiner Perkins investments — EEStor, for example — let’s hope the hype and promise leads to something truly disruptive. Speaking of EEStor, tick, tick, tick… the end of the year fast approaches.

Okay, so 64 per cent of Canadian respondents to a new survey believe that industrialized nations should have more ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions than developing countries. Most want to see a binding agreement result from Copenhagen, and 81 per cent said Canada needs to make its own commitments independent of what the United States decides to do. Another poll conducted last week found that two-thirds of Canadians see climate change as the planet’s defining crisis.

The position of most Canadians couldn’t be farther apart than the position of their federal government. Britain’s Prime Minister, meanwhile, is intent on raising the bar on action.

Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice keeps repeating the line that the federal government will not put jobs, the economy, investments, and the standard of living of Canadians at risk during negotiations in Copenhagen. It’s an obvious thing to say, regardless of what country you’re representing, but implicit in Prentice’s comments is the belief that reducing greenhouse gas emissions necessarily requires a sacrifice to jobs, a sacrifice to the economy, and a lower standard of living. Now, nobody is saying there won’t be some pain as we shift our provincial economies, but let’s get one thing straight: lowering greenhouse gas emissions, even in Alberta, can create jobs, can attract investment, can boost the economy. When Prentice talks, he’s specifically talking about the jobs of the fossil-fuel industry, the impact of this industry on Canada’s economy, and the standard of living of the people who profit from this industry. What he fails to mention is the jobs that can be created once investment is shifted to other clean-energy sectors, and the economic value this can bring. It’s not an all or nothing proposition, yet the Harper government continues to imply that it is, and in doing so is misleading the Canadian public by not accurately describing the opportunities that do exist, if we only choose to pursue them. This language is divisive, as it’s pitting Alberta against the rest of the country.

Interesting, Prentice — again, the environment minister — doesn’t mention the need to protect the environment or public health. But you will hear him talking about the federal government’s commitment to have 90 per cent of electricity in Canada emission-free by 2020. This is an interesting target, since the federal government has absolutely no control over electricity policy, which is provincial jurisdiction. But it sounds nice, right? Even if it does equate to taking credit for efforts in province’s such as Ontario and British Columbia.