Queen Elizabeth strikes me more as a radical tweedie than a radical greenie. But apparently she’s quite the pioneer.

The chorus of clean-energy advocates is growing louder – and more politically powerful – now that farmers are singing along. And they have good reason: Energy crops. Raw materials such as corn, soy, wheat, trees and even animal manure can be processed into cleaner-burning next-gen fuels. According to a new article in Grist.org, leaders of 70 agriculture groups recently joined the ambitious 25 x '25 alliance. It advocates that 25 percent of U.S. energy supplies come from America’s working lands – either from their crops or windmills and solar panels installed on those lands - by 2025.

Wind power will be used to fuel the flame of Lady Liberty’s torch – a powerful symbol of the United States’ growing commitment to clean energy. The Bush administration’s U.S. National Parks Service is contracting a local energy supplier to supply three years’ worth of clean, green wind power from upstate New York to light up the patriotic statue, as well as the nearby Ellis Island museum and several other sites, according to GreenBiz.com.

If you could track the proliferation of self-powered homes back to one grassroots seed it would undoubtedly be Home Power magazine – the Bible for do-it-yourselfers committed to producing homegrown energy from solar, wind, and small-scale hydropower, and retrofitting their homes with efficiency measures. Read by off-gridders and city-dwellers alike, the magazine has been around for nearly two decades – since 1987 – and can safely be called a trend-setter.

The fossil fuel behemoth formerly known as British Petroleum has been ridiculed by some environmental critics for the new name it adopted several years ago, Beyond Petroleum, given the negligible size of its alternative-energy division. But detractors can’t laugh any longer: On Tuesday, BP announced that it would funnel a whopping $8 billion of R&D funds into clean-energy innovation—eight times the $1 billion it spent in this area over the past decade.

As heating bills soar, penny-pinchers are turning to a cheaper source of warmth: woodchips. According to an AP article on the growing woodchip trend, Mount Wachusett Community College campus in Massacusetts started the trend four years ago: Instead of spending the usual half-a-million-dollar annual heating bill, the college ponied up a mere $31,000 for the woodchips, meanwhile reducing its greenhouse gasses 19 percent.

Cold comfort it may be, but rest assured you're not the only one freaking out about sky-high heating bills this season. “How to Beat the Big Energy Chill,” in the current issue of Newsweek takes a fascinating look at the flipside of the heating-bill crisis: High oil prices amp up the economic argument for switching to alternative energy. Sure enough, as oil prices surpassed 60 dollars a barrel in recent months, investors have been seeing the logic in making the clean-power shift.