Have you seen these “night-shining” clouds everyone is talking about this week? And could they be an index of (what else) global warming? Read on for that and a lot of cool green tech news (including electricity from onions) in this edition of Coolness:

1. Renewables now make up 13 percent of all electricity generated in the United States — while coal-fired generation has fallen 13 percent in the last year, reports Electric Power Monthly. (Hat tip: Clean Technica.)
2. Wal-Mart’s announcement yesterday that it wil measure the social and environmental impact of everything it sells — and share that info with consumers — has greenies like Hank Green at EcoGeek all atwitter. “A bunch of hippy enviros loving on Wal-Mart because they’re the only ones with the power to do what needs to be done,” he muses. “What is the world coming to?”
3. It’s coming to this: London now has six hybrid double-decker buses, reports Good Clean Tech. Jolly good!
4. Onions into electricity? A new system by Gills Onions, an onion farming company in California, can convert up to 30,000 pounds of onion waste into juice, reports Martin LaMonica at Green Tech. It’s enough to bring us to tears…
5. Have you seen glowing clouds in the night sky? Wired Science reports such ice-based, noctilucent (”night shining”) clouds have been seen all over the mid-latitude Northern Hemisphere over the last week — and “they could portend global changes caused by global warming.”

(Image: Noctilucent clouds taken from a plane at 40,000 feet. Credit: zzathras777 through a Creative Commons license.)

Posted: July 17th, 2009 under Climate Change, Cool Green Morning, Energy, Europe, Green Living, United States.
Tags: Clean Technica, Climate Change, coal energy, coal power, Eco-Geek, Electric Power Monthly, Gills Onions, global warming, green tech, Hank Green, hybrid double decker, London, Martin LaMonica, night shining cloud, noctilucent, noctilucent cloud photo, onion electricity, renewable energy, Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart sustainable, Wired Science