“What’s more, over 70 percent of the components and products used in construction will be manufactured in the USA”

In his weekly radio, the  President announced he was putting $2 billion into two solar energy projects, including Concentrated solar thermal with storage (aka solar baseload).

CSP remains “The technology that will save humanity.”  And we are seeing more and more plants in various phases of construction (see “Total of 8500 MW of CSP planned for 2014 in U.S. alone“).

The easiest way to deal with the intermittency of the sun is cheap storage “” and thermal storage is much cheaper and has a much higher round-trip efficiency than electric storage.  The ability to provide power reliably throughout the day and evening in key locations around the world (including China and India) is why CSP delivers 3 of the 12 – 14 wedges needed for “the full global warming solution.”

Obama made this announcement in his weekly address:

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More BP jokes welcome!

“Scientists say they have developed a car that can run on water. The only catch is, the water has to come from the Gulf of Mexico.” — Jay Leno

“Bad news, it’s going to be a huge environmental disaster, the oil rig down there in the Gulf of Mexico. The good news is they think now that the oil spill will be diluted by the melting ice caps.” “”David Letterman

There’s certainly plenty of grim news from the Gulf.  Here are some of the best jokes I’ve seen (culled from a longer list):

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When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Okay, the Declaration of Interdependence sounds a lot like the Declaration of Independence.

By saying that it is a self-evident truth that all humans are created equal and that our inalienable rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, our Founding Fathers were telling us that we are all in this together, that we are interdependent, that we have a moral duty to protect these inalienable rights for all humans. President Lincoln, perhaps above all others, was instrumental in making clear that the second sentence of the Declaration was “a moral standard for which the United States should strive,” as Wikipedia puts it.

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“Climate instability and our oil addiction present immediate, direct threats to America’s national security.”

A carbon-pricing plan will decrease our dependence on foreign oil, create American jobs, lower energy bills, and protect our environment. This will be the measure of a real bill, and I’m prepared to fight to get this done, following the strategy Winston Churchill laid out at the outbreak of World War II: “Never give in, never give in — never, never, never, never.”

That’s the rousing final paragraph of a column by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Foreign Policy, titled, “Whatever it takes.”

Here’s more:

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Interesting video: “Scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock from EADS Astrium visits the Royal Institution’s new Young Scientist Centre to carry out a simple experiment that shows how CO2 traps heat. ”

Of course, the BBC can’t help itself in bending over backwards to the point of breaking in its absurd scientific impartiality:

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