The press release from the office of Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Chair of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, reads:

The legislation contains significant investment in areas critical to the development of clean, efficient, made-in-America energy, which will save consumers money and create millions of jobs.

Chairman : “We tried to hit the sweet spot of helping our economy recover while promoting clean energy. This bill does both.”

Here are the details of the green spending and tax provisions:

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Announcing that “the time for reform has arrived,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar set aside the Bush administration’s “midnight timetable” for offshore drilling. “On Friday, January 16, its last business day in office,” Salazar explained in today’s press conference, “the Bush Administration proposed a new five year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing.” The Bush plan called for the completion of meetings and hearings by March 23. Salazar decried this “broken process”:

It was a headlong rush of the worst kind. It was a process rigged to force hurried decisions based on bad information. It was a process tilted toward the usual energy players while renewable energy companies and the interests of American consumers and taxpayers were overlooked.

Salazar announced he “will extend the public comment period by 180 days, get a report on offshore energy resources, hold regional conferences and expedite rulemaking for offshore renewable energy resources.”

Salazar made it clear that his definition of “energy independence” does not mean a “drill only” future. He rebuked the “oil and gas or nothing” approach of the Bush administration, who ignored the Energy Policy Act of 2005′s mandate to develop regulations for offshore renewables:

I intend to do what the Bush Administration refused to do: build a framework for offshore renewable energy development, so that we incorporate the great potential for wind, wave, and ocean current energy into our offshore energy strategy. The Bush Administration was so intent on opening new areas for oil and gas offshore that it torpedoed offshore renewable energy efforts.

Salazar, who comes from a long line of Colorado ranchers, is famed for wearing a cowboy hat as often as possible. Now it’s clear why he always wears a cowboy hat — Salazar’s the new sheriff in town.

My daughter Antonia (aka “Tua”) is two years old today:

Yes, last year I said “Only one baby photo per year,” and then she made my list of The top 10 things to give thanks for. But this is a video, which strangely enough the Congressional Budget Office does not score as a baby photo. Go figure!

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If the U.S. media refuse to make the connection between record breaking wildfire, drought, and heatwaves and human-caused global warming, why would anyone be surprised if the U.S. public doesn’t put it as a higher priority or make the connection itself (see “NYT’s Revkin seems shocked by media’s own failure to explain climate threat“)?

Australia knows it’s facing climate-driven impacts that threaten it with complete collapse. AFP (French international media) get this: “Australian wildfire ferocity linked to climate change: experts.” So does Reuter’s Climate Change Correspondent in Asia: “Australia fires a climate wake-up call: experts.”

I saw the CNN and ABC stories, and you can read the AP’s stories, which have been published in the Washington Post and NY Times (though the NYT redeemed itself, see below). The media love a good calamity of Biblical proportion:

“Hell in all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria,” Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters as he toured the fire zone on Sunday.

But for the vast majority of the U.S. media, you won’t find any mention of global warming driven heat wave or drought as the underlying cause of this calamity. ABC’s Charles Gibson said “the worst wildfires in Australian history” were “part natural disaster” and “part man-made crime” because arson is suspected in some of the fires. No, Charlie, the natural disaster is not entirely natural, so this is mostly a man-made crime.

The AP story in the Washington Post ends lamely:

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In a front-page story that struck me as having relevance for climate regulations, the Washington Post reported today:

The Virginia House of Delegates approved a plan for a ban on smoking covering most of the state’s restaurants and many of its bars Monday, marking a significant political and cultural shift for a state whose history has been intertwined with tobacco for centuries.

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Wind power is coming of age as the U.S. becomes the global wind leader and probably the biggest source of new jobs in the energy industry.

ITC Holdings announced Monday plans to build a $10 to $12 billion power transmission network to move 12,000 megawatts of electricity from the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa to the Chicago area.

ITC called the plan, depicted above, the Green Power Express, saying it could

result in a reduction of up to 34 million metric tons of carbon emissions, which is equivalent to the annual emissions of about seven to nine 600 MW coal plants.

ITC made its announcement the same day a major study, the Joint Coordinated System Plan (JCSP), was released by the Midwest grid operator and other U.S. regional grid managers was released. It concluded that to increase wind power to 20% of electricity production by 2024 (requiring some 230 GW of wind) would require some 15,000 miles of new transmission costing $80 billion. The total cost of the wind would be some $1 trillion.

The WSJ reports this as “New Grid for Renewable Energy Could Be Costly.” But in fact the study found that “increasing wind’s share to 20 percent of U.S. power production would yield annual net savings of $12 billion annually by 2024 based on wind’s low production cost compared to the fossil plants the turbines would replace,” as Energy Daily (subs. req’d) explained.

Moreover, JCSP projects that the 20% scenario would save 3 billion tons of carbon over the next 16 years, which would generate in 2024 an annual value of some $40 billion a year at carbon prices comparable to that which the European Union has seen over the past year — and several times that if the price of carbon to reaches levels needed to stabilize at 450 ppm.

One reason I say windpower has come of age is because the announcement and the study don’t come from your traditional pro-wind trade groups or think tanks. Far from it.

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