Following a “60 Minutes” piece last week, promoters of new technology called the Bloom Box, will unveil their latest technology today. It’s basically a box that can be placed in your front yard to power your house. Sounds great and revolutionary, but will it help the environment?

A San Francisco Chronicle blog looks at that question with skepticism:

It’s not the Holy Grail of clean energy: It eliminates combustion, which is great, but it will only be as clean as the fuel it runs on. And if use becomes as widespread as its inventors hope, the boom in deforestation to produce biofuels for the boxes could be catastrophic. And, if the boxes don’t last for a long time, they will wind up as that much more toxic material into landfills.

Right now these boxes are huge (they power 100 houses) and expensive (they cost $700,000) but they eventually will cost $3,000 and just power your house. It’s a leap forward in technology that has been tinkered with for at least a century. And it’s the start of something that could eventually be developed into eco-friendly electricity.

It comes on the heels of last week’s proposed step ahead in nuclear waste recycling, which also came from the private sector. This means that despite the world’s governments dropping the ball in last year’s Copenhagen conference - and despite climate change naysayers pointing to weather to prove they’re correct - we still have smart, motivated people actively working to help stop climate change and solve the energy problem.