Clean Start: September 16, 2011

Welcome to Clean Start, ThinkProgress Green’s morning round-up of the latest in climate and clean energy. Here is what we’re reading. What are you?

Rising seas forecast from climate change will likely wash away some of California’s most iconic beaches by century’s end, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate, roads and tax revenues, a new study found on Wednesday. [Reuters]

Last year, the Chinese government provided more than $30 billion to their solar companies. [NPR]

A federal judge on Thursday began hearing from both sides in the legal battle over whether the Tennessee Valley Authority should pay damages for a huge coal ash spill that fouled a riverside community. [AP]

A subsidiary of Alpha Natural Resources is suing four strip mining protesters who staged a 30-day tree-sit this summer at the Bee Tree mine on southern West Virginia’s Coal River Mountain. [Boston Globe]

Two men have died following an oil rig explosion that occurred in North Dakota Wednesday afternoon. [Minot Daily News]

A new poll finds that 83 percent of Americans believe the fact that the Earth is warming, and 59 percent believe the fact that global warming is manmade, a strong increase over a year ago. [Reuters]

The blanket of sea ice that floats on the Arctic Ocean appears to have reached its lowest extent for 2011, the second lowest recorded since satellites began measuring it in 1979. [Science Daily]

The Democratic-led Senate on Thursday sent the House of Representatives a measure to fund climate disaster aid by $6.9 billion, twice as much as the House wants to spend — laying the groundwork for another political showdown. [Reuters]

The Army Corps of Engineers estimates it will cost more than $2 billion to repair the damage to the nation’s levees, dams and riverbanks caused by this year’s excessive flooding, a sum that dwarfs the $150 million it currently has to make such repairs. [AP]

Elite firefighters from the western U.S. arrived in the northern Minnesota wilderness Thursday to try to contain a month-old forest fire that has grown to nearly seven times the size of Manhattan. [WSJ]

Phish, the Burlington-bred jam band, played a benefit concert Wednesday in Essex Junction for those affected by flooding from Tropical Storm Irene, which killed four people and damaged hundreds of roads, bridges and homes across Vermont. [Burlington Times-Union]