At the first annual meeting of the Long Term Investors Club in Paris a few months ago, Professor Rajenda Padchauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and, as such, co-recipient, with Al Gore, of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007) mentioned a remarkable development project called Lighting a Billion Lives.

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The lighting was the final stage of the project.

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The Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club had also sued Kern County last October over its green-lighting of the 300-megawatt North Sky River project.

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Besides lighting a fire under the public side of the project, this technique enabled Dr Venter and his collaborators to publish the first complete genetic sequence of a living organism, a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae.

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The Los Angeles project is of a piece with a larger shift to LED street lighting.

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The multi-million pound project, which began in April, will see improvements made to paving, lighting and crossings.

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