Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune is roadtripping through Colorado this week to launch the Our Wild America campaign, designed to draw increased attention to America’s wild places in need of protection.

Xcel Energy has filed with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission for approval of a project that would produce electricity by burning dead wood and using the steam to turn an electrical turbine.

As the world’s glaciers melt, the runoff contributes as much to sea rise as melting ice sheets, according to a study led by Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The City of Boulder is holding two events on May 18 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the East Boulder Community Center, 5660 Sioux Drive, to cover some summer concerns: water restrictions and a noxious weed eradication program.

If passed by the House, SB 252 would require rural cooperatives with more than 100,000 meters to obtain 25 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020. To help compensate for extra costs, the bill would also allow co-ops to tack on an extra 2 percent to customer bills, rather than the 1 percent that gets added now.

The Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, is joining forces with more than 20 craft breweries to campaign for clean water.

Jeffrey David Gunselman of Texas has been sentenced to 15 years in federal prison after admitting to defrauding the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by acting as a business owner of a bio-diesel fuel production company in order to generate renewable fuel credits — then selling them to brokers and oil companies, according to the EPA.

Boulder-based photographer James Balog will discuss his work, which captures the effects of climate change on glaciers around the world, at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 1, at the University of Colorado’s Macky Auditorium.

NASA has announced that a recent rock sample taken from Mars indicates the planet could have once supported living micro-organisms — just as the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado announced it has crossed another milestone in building NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN).

A field study conducted by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) shows that dust and microorganisms help spur precipitation, which California counts on for its water supply.