I want to like Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. In  January, I even wrote a piece saying I trusted him more than I trusted President Bush and the Democratic Congress to keep us out of a real recession.

But since then, it seems like he’s gone from slow-to-react to panicky overdrive. In a front-page column in Wednesday’s Mercury News, I argue that the Fed runs a real risk of hurting taxpayers and damaging the economy with its recent series of actions: the $30 billion bailout of Bear Stearns, the government’s offer to swap solid Treasury bonds for shaky mortgage bonds and Tuesday’s three-quarter-point cut in interest rates.

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February has been a lousy month for renewable energy proponents.

First, we had the studies suggesting biofuels cause more global warming than oil.

Now we have an paper by UC-Berkeley energy guru Severin Borenstein  (left) arguing that solar power is an economic loser. “We are throwing away money by installing the current solar PV technology,” Borenstein told Matt Nauman of the Mercury News.

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Looking for a few stock tips in this choppy market? Check out my video interview with Kevin Landis, chief investment officer of Firsthand Funds, a San Jose-based family of tech mutual funds.

Landis discusses a few stocks that aren’t on everyone’s radar, including Corning (GLW) and Suntech Power (STP).

And check back Wednesday to read my column profiling the veteran fund manager, who has made a tremendous comeback after getting slaughtered during the tech bust.

(6:30 P.M. UPDATE: The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy profile of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last Sunday. Very interesting for those interested in the Fed.)

Hooray for the Fed. After mostly sitting on its hands as the credit markets melted down, it has jumped into the game in a big way with a three-quarter-point cut in interest rates.

As I discuss in my Wednesday column, rate cuts are much more likely than any fiscal stimulus package to avert or mitigate a recession. That’s because they’re fast and targeted at the main cause of this mess: the credit crunch caused by banks that made a lot of bad loans and are now writing off billions in losses.

As some of the commenters on my column noted, Fed cuts do have a big moral downside. They bail out borrowers and banks that made stupid decisions about risk in the first place. But in the real world, policy makers just can’t stand by as a disaster unfolds. And do you really want them to? (Would you have denied relief to Hurricane Katrina victims who didn’t have enough home insurance and were “stupid” enough to live in a city that could easily be flooded?)

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It’s official: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has denied California’s two-year-old request for permission to implement its own greenhouse-gas rules for automobiles.

We all knew the feds were going down this road – the Bush Administration argues that carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant, so it maintains that environmental regulators don’t have any authority to place limits on carbon emissions. (It doesn’t matter that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise — as we well know, George W. Bush believes the president is a law unto himself).

But California and 16 other states — which represent roughly half the market for cars sold in the U.S. — are seeking to curb auto emissions as part of their efforts to fight global warming. Under the Clean Air Act, California needs to get a waiver from the U.S. EPA before it can implement its own rules. Other states can then choose to follow the California rules or the federal rules.

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Nice of the Federal Reserve to notice that there’s a mortgage crisis going on.

On Tuesday, the central bankers decided to actually use their consumer-protection powers and proposed a new set of rules to curb some of the abuses in the subprime mortgage market.

But as I discuss in my Wednesday column, the new rules don’t do a heck of a lot. A lot of them are common-sense, such as requirements that lenders more fully disclose terms of loans.

Furthermore, the Fed is kinda late to the game — the subprime lending party is already over, and a lot of people who overindulged are now puking their financial guts out. (FYI, Edmund Andrews of the New York Times had a great piece Tuesday laying out how former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan repeatedly resisted calls to rein in mortgage abuses when it would have made a difference.)

So what should we do to deal with the real fallout of the crisis? I plan to visit that topic soon in another column and would love to hear your ideas.

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As I prepare to fly back to the cold, snowy embrace of the East Coast, I keep thinking about a marvelous article I read 10 years ago in Forbes ASAP that tries to explain why Silicon Valley’s technology industry is so much more dynamic than Boston’s. 

The author, Virginia Postrel, argues that California’s predictably sunny weather and the omnipresent risk of sudden destruction by an earthquake play a huge role in the valley’s psychology — and its success. Here are a few key excerpts from the piece:

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Like many people, I’d pretty much given up on the idea of Silicon Valley creating good manufacturing jobs like it had in the post-WWII defense boom or the early computer era. Too much competition from foreign countries and even other states that have cheaper land and labor costs. Our economy is largely an hourglass, with high-end corporate and R&D and sales jobs on one end and lower-paid service jobs on the other.

So I was amazed to discover a little pocket of the valley economy — companies that are trying to use a new material called CIGS to make solar cells — that are actually building manufacturing lines in San Jose and Santa Clara.

In my Sunday column, I look at five young companies that are building plants here and discuss why they decided that Silicon Valley — not China, not Oregon, not Texas — was the place to be. The answer in a nutshell: a supply of skilled workers eager to try something new, easy access to venture capital, the chance to mingle with the best minds and local governments that understand tech companies’ needs. Read the column to learn more.

Is the United States due for an economic recession? Maybe so. The Wall Street Journal’s latest survey of economists concludes that the U.S. has a 36 percent chance of a recession, defined as two quarters of a shrinking economy, in the next 12 months.

But even if we have a national slowdown, Silicon Valley is different.

I make the full case in my Sunday column, but it boils down to this: the intensely global nature of the technology business means we dance to a different rhythm. And right now, the global economy is doing pretty darn well.

A cut in interest rates by the Federal Reserve, expected Tuesday, should help the valley even more. It will reduce the cost of borrowing for mortgages and business operations and continue to drive down the value of the dollar, making our exports even more competitive against, say, Europe’s.

By the way, I discussed the state of the Silicon Valley economy Friday on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” program. You can watch a video clip of my appearance here.

In my Sunday column, I offer a couple of suggestions for improving the mortgage market following the recent meltdown:

1) Congress should raise the cap for what’s considered a normal, or “conforming” loan so that California and other high-cost states have cheaper access to the mortgage market.

2) Lenders need to improve lending standards to require more proof that borrowers can actually repay a loan. In particular, no-documentation loans, nicknamed “liar’s loans” because you can claim any income and assets you want without verification, make no sense at all.

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