Brilliant Politics

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced this week that public lands in several Western states are under consideration as sites for major solar power projects.

Mr. Salazar, appearing in Las Vegas with Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, said that 670,000 acres of lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (an agency within the Department of the Interior) would be studied to determine whether they could support large solar power arrays.

Twenty-four tracts of land in six states — Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah — are under review. Maps of the land will be published shortly in the Federal Register.

The Climate Change bill passed yesterday in the House of Representatives, 219 to 212:

At the heart of the legislation is a cap-and-trade system that sets a limit on overall emissions of heat-trapping gases while allowing utilities, manufacturers and other emitters to trade pollution permits, or allowances, among themselves. The cap would grow tighter over the years, pushing up the price of emissions and presumably driving industry to find cleaner ways of making energy.

It might not be a perfect bill, but it is an important starting point, as Matt Steinglass notes:

This is the bill we have. The question is whether it will go through or not. That’s the only question. If the bill fails, it will mean victory has gone to those forces who are quite literally working to destroy Planet Earth. That is all that is happening here. There is no room here for skeptics and doubters and cavillers and doomsday-morning quarterbacks. This is it. The bill is on the table. You pass it or you don’t. And if it’s not tough enough to save the world, you come back again next year and the year after and the year after that and fight to make it tougher.

In this deeply moving video we see the Iranian people protesting and marching to free themselves from tyranny. Our hearts are with them. We hope that they are as successful as we were in the American Revolution. Music by the Waterboys, words by W.B. Yeats. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

A new report on the impact climate change is already having on the United States was recently released by the Global Change Research Program. The key finding is that climate change is already affecting the United States, and the impact of climate change is projected to grow over time:

Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow.

The impact of climate change on water resources in the U.S. will become increasingly apparent:

Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies. Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage.

The National Resources Defense Council has a series of short videos on people who have green jobs:

Fox News anchor, Shepard Smith, points with alarm to the volume of hateful emails he has been receiving and the increasing threats of violence in those emails, identifying it as “hatred not based in fact.”