The Washington Post has a good piece on the Herculean effort the new heads of the EPA and Interior Department will face in dealing with the mess the Bushies made. This mess is comparable to the one Hercules cleaned up in his fifth labor when he diverted an entire river to clean up the Augean Stables.

The article also includes the long list of the names that have been floated so far for both agencies

Few federal agencies are expected to undergo as radical a transformation under President-elect Barack Obama as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which have been at the epicenter of many of the Bush administration’s most intense scientific and environmental controversies.

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The Politico noticed the “overheated” response to their journalistic blunder (see “Politico pimps global cooling for Hill deniers“). To their credit, they partly acknowledge they made a mistake:

Editor’s Response from Politico’s Jeanne Cummings:

Giving voice to the losing side of a national debate is often fraught with peril. It requires navigating a terrain littered with grudges, slights, insults and hard feelings.

To do that without becoming ensnared requires extraordinary care. In Politico’s case, we slipped.

The article in question was never intended to offer a sweeping examination of the scientific support for or against climate change.

It set out only to provide an update on the last hold-outs against global warming given the dramatic shifts — both electorally and in public opinion — against their position.

Politico found them still feisty and readying for a fight despite their diminishing odds.

That’s the part we got right.

Here’s where we slipped: The headline overstated what was in the story. That’s a chronic problem in the industry that might have been mitigated if the article had plainly stated its narrow intent, which it didn’t. It also should have included the challenges to the cited scientific data.

Indeed, the headline was especially bad: “Scientists urge caution on global warming.” But so was the whole story, which Politico is still reluctant to accept:

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[JR: The story doesn't say, but I assume the solar from the Mojave would be solar baseload aka CSP.]

In Los Angeles on Monday, Mayor Villaraigosa’s office presented a ground-breaking plan to generate 1.3 GW of solar electricity by 2020. But this effort is just one of many initiatives that LA has taken as a leader in urban sustainability and green policies.

The LA Times reports the specifics of the solar plan that Mayor Villaraigosa’s office is hoping to put into action in coming months:

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