Congressional Quarterly Online reported this week:

The two senior House Democrats with jurisdiction over energy and telecommunications policies could swap gavels in the 111th Congress, with potentially dramatic implications for the shape of climate change legislation expected next year.

Since 2007, Rick Boucher of Virginia, the Energy and Commerce Committee’s fourth-ranking Democrat, has led the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee, which has taken the lead role in crafting legislation to address global warming.

But Boucher said in an interview Tuesday that he expects Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, No. 3 among committee Democrats in seniority, to bid for the subcommittee chairmanship. Boucher said he would “respect that decision” and stake his own claim for chairmanship of Markey’s Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

“I’m awaiting his decision,” Boucher said. Markey has not yet made up his mind, a spokesman said.

This would be almost as big a deal as Waxman defeating Dingell for committee chair. Just as Dingell-Boucher co-authored a House climate bill last session, one would expect that if this change occurs, Waxman and Markey would co-author a House Bill in this session. And it certainly wouldn’t be as lame (see “Q: Does Dingell-Boucher have meaningful auctioning of CO2 permits before 2026?“).

The story continues:

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As President Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all the time. Once again, the people running the Weblog Awards have been suckered into legitimizing anti-scientific denialism.

The finalist list is out for the 2008 Weblog awards “Best Science Blog,” and two of the ten finalists are anti-scientific websites primarily devoted to spreading disinformation (and noninformation) on global warming– just like 2007.

The 2007 “competition” ended up being yet another classic exercise in the right wing perverting an otherwise reasonable web idea — online voting for the best science blog. As Desmogblog explained in a post titled, The “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” beating “Vast Left Wing” Voting for Best Science Weblog, the right wing voted en masse for Climate Audit and the rational people all voted for Discover magazine’s excellent Bad Astronomy Blog. In the end, the process was so controverisal that the Awards folk simply called it a tie — saying each blog ended up with exactly 20,000 votes.

It would be ironic that the choice of best science blog was not made scientifically — except that the result was an anti-scientific website run by someone who isn’t even a scientist has for the past year posted on his website a “Best Science Blog” logo. That isn’t ironic. It is both tragic and farcical.

It would be like James Frey winning an award for Best Memoir — but not like Dick Cheney winning an award for being the best Vice President, since Cheney is actually a VP.

To quote Lincoln again:

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

And calling Climate Audit and Watts Up With That science blogs — or for that matter calling the Drudge Report and The Onion science blogs — doesn’t make them ones.

And that brings us to 2008.

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The world’s biggest solar tower will open early this year in Spain. The race for leadership in the next generation of solar power is taking off.

The UK Guardian reports that in the desert 20 miles outside Seville, the Spanish company Abengoa will be deploying over sun-tracking 1,000 mirrors — each “about half the size of a tennis court” — to superheat water to 260C to drive a steam turbine and generate 20MW of electricity.

Concentrated solar power (CSP) technology, as it is known, is seen by many as a simpler, cheaper and more efficient way to harness the sun’s energy than other methods such as photovoltaic (PV) panels.

Spain is placing a huge bet on CSP to meet their renewable energy and carbon targets:

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