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By now, you doubtless know a dastardly hacker broke into the e-mail system at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain late last month, grabbing and making public more than 1,000 e-mails that expose how these "scientific experts," cited so often to confirm "man-made global warming," have been fudging their data, conspiring to remove global warming skeptics from the teams that "peer-review" their doctored data for publication, and advising each other to delete incriminating e-mails being sought under the public disclosure laws. Wow. I'm about as shocked as Claude Rains' character when he found out there was gambling going on at Rick's Place in "Casablanca." Aren't you? Most Popular Stories # SHERMAN FREDERICK: Reid's chances look really dim # LETTERS: CityCenter: No joy, just a stark grayness # LETTERS: Do-gooders don't always do that much good # EDITORIAL: Lots of cash equals guilty # EDITORIAL: A hefty golden parachute # LETTERS: In praise of neighborhoods where kids can be kids # VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: The global warming fraud is melting # LETTERS: Union not only culprit in auto industry's demise # EDITORIAL: Cost control? # LETTERS: What are they thinking at City Hall? East Anglia is not some cowtown community college. The Climate Research Unit there is one of the world's four major collators and repositories of "global warming" piffle.

By now, you doubtless know a dastardly hacker broke into the e-mail system at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain late last month, grabbing and making public more than 1,000 e-mails that expose how these "scientific experts," cited so often to confirm "man-made global warming," have been fudging their data, conspiring to remove global warming skeptics from the teams that "peer-review" their doctored data for publication, and advising each other to delete incriminating e-mails being sought under the public disclosure laws. Wow. I'm about as shocked as Claude Rains' character when he found out there was gambling going on at Rick's Place in "Casablanca." Aren't you? Most Popular Stories # SHERMAN FREDERICK: Reid's chances look really dim # LETTERS: CityCenter: No joy, just a stark grayness # LETTERS: Do-gooders don't always do that much good # EDITORIAL: Lots of cash equals guilty # EDITORIAL: A hefty golden parachute # LETTERS: In praise of neighborhoods where kids can be kids # VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: The global warming fraud is melting # LETTERS: Union not only culprit in auto industry's demise # EDITORIAL: Cost control? # LETTERS: What are they thinking at City Hall? East Anglia is not some cowtown community college. The Climate Research Unit there is one of the world's four major collators and repositories of "global warming" piffle.

Tom Wilbanks, a corporate fellow at ORNL and a significant contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change work that shared a Nobel Prize with Al Gore, said the reports emerging out of the University of East Anglia's climate research unit are embarrassing and indefensible. But he said he doesn't believe there will be a huge effect long-term on studies of global climate change. Wilbanks said he was stunned to read reports of the e-mails, including some reported to be from scientists he knows well from Lawrence Livermore and the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other institutions.

Tom Wilbanks, a corporate fellow at ORNL and a significant contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change work that shared a Nobel Prize with Al Gore, said the reports emerging out of the University of East Anglia's climate research unit are embarrassing and indefensible. But he said he doesn't believe there will be a huge effect long-term on studies of global climate change. Wilbanks said he was stunned to read reports of the e-mails, including some reported to be from scientists he knows well from Lawrence Livermore and the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other institutions.

Back in September, the City of Houston agreed to buy all the solar power from a proposed NRG $40-million solar plant on a 25-year power purchase agreement, or PPA. The deal called for NRG to foot the bill for the plant, and the city to pay for the power at a rate of 8.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for the first year. What this meant, in real-world terms, was that NRG would supplant some of the solar output with power from other plants, giving the city an effective rate of 8.2 cents, though the agreement overall calls for Houston to pay 19.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. If built, the 10-megawatt solar plant would have been the biggest in the state, providing up to 1.5 percent of the city's electrical needs at a locked-in price on 90 percent of production - a fixed rate that would have served the city well if Reliant Energy raised its rates due to rising costs of oil, gas or coal. Reliant Energy's generation mix is 39.8 percent, followed by natural gas at 23 percent and coal at 22.5 percent - the former two prices likely to rise as the recession eases and tension over Middle East oil prices and production rises.

Back in September, the City of Houston agreed to buy all the solar power from a proposed NRG $40-million solar plant on a 25-year power purchase agreement, or PPA. The deal called for NRG to foot the bill for the plant, and the city to pay for the power at a rate of 8.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for the first year. What this meant, in real-world terms, was that NRG would supplant some of the solar output with power from other plants, giving the city an effective rate of 8.2 cents, though the agreement overall calls for Houston to pay 19.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. If built, the 10-megawatt solar plant would have been the biggest in the state, providing up to 1.5 percent of the city's electrical needs at a locked-in price on 90 percent of production - a fixed rate that would have served the city well if Reliant Energy raised its rates due to rising costs of oil, gas or coal. Reliant Energy's generation mix is 39.8 percent, followed by natural gas at 23 percent and coal at 22.5 percent - the former two prices likely to rise as the recession eases and tension over Middle East oil prices and production rises.

President-elect, Barack Obama, has had a very favorable view of renewable energy, and has presented some specific plans about how to increase the renewable portfolio in the United States. Below is a lis of items in his proposed Comprehensive Energy Plan, with attention to both short term and long term objectives. Comprehensive Energy Plan * Provide short-term relief to American families facing pain at the pump. * Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. * Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future. * Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined. * Put 1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars -- cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon -- on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America. * Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.

Earth2Tech reports that England may be left out of Scottish plans to join a European supergrid crossing the north sea - Scotland Snubbing England in Supergrid Plans?. The Scottish government believes the North Sea could become host to an underwater renewable energy grid, supplying power from wind, wave and tidal power across Europe, but England could be left out in the cold. A new study from Scotland looks at the possibility of a supergrid between Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, but doesn't mention Scotland's big neighbor to the south. Yes, Scotland is still part of the UK, and most of England's east coast is also on the North Sea, but the word "England" doesn't even show up once in the 21-page study and "UK" is only used in a couple of footnotes. It might just be an oversight, but the possible snub comes during the same week in which the UK government made a filing with the Commission on Scottish Devolution questioning the Scottish government's powers covering energy.

Push through a bulletproof revolving door in a nondescript building in a dreary patch of the former East Berlin and you enter the control center for Vattenfall Europe Transmission, the company that controls northeastern Germany's electrical grid. A monitor displaying a diagram of that grid takes up most of one wall. A series of smaller screens show the real-time output of regional wind turbines and the output that had been predicted the previous day. Germany is the world's largest user of wind energy, with enough turbines to produce 22,250 megawatts of electricity. That's roughly the equivalent of the output from 22 coal plants--enough to meet about 6 percent of Germany's needs. And because Vattenfall's service area produces 41 percent of German wind energy, the control room is a critical proving ground for the grid's ability to handle renewable power.

The Washington Post has an article on forces encouraging and opposing renewable energy in the US - Alternative Energy Still Facing Headwinds. I like that Obama is still using his "end the tyranny of oil in our time" line. The late afternoon light is shining golden on the high chaparral as Donna Tisdale stands near a faded 1800s ranch house, scans the unblemished surrounding hills and sees trouble on the horizon. "The ridge right there will have turbines on it," she says, squinting west into the setting sun. Turning north and east, where a pristine ridgeline meets the sky, she points out the route of a $1.9 billion electricity transmission line whose 150-foot towers will march 123 miles from the Imperial Valley to energy-thirsty San Diego.

Compared to, say, the pitched battles over Yucca mountain, the storage of toxic fly ash produced by coal-fired plants has gotten virtually no coverage, even though it's arguably a far, far bigger health and safety risk. So I suppose one upside-if you can even call it that-of the recent (and massive) ash-spill disasters in Tennessee and Alabama is that we're starting to see more investigations like this one, by Shaila Dewan of The New York Times: The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States-most of them unregulated and unmonitored-that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.

A tale of 2 power plants: Tennessee's experience shows how environmental concerns can be misdirected On Dec. 22, a deluge of coal-ash slurry broke through a retaining wall near the Kingston Fossil Plant, a power plant in eastern Tennessee. Black sludge inundated a valley and destroyed houses as it surged down to the Emory River, where hundreds of fish soon lay dead on fouled banks. Helicopter video footage showed a landscape resembling the moon's surface, with more than a billion gallons of sludge covering 300 acres. The disaster also temporarily halted an incoming train loaded with coal. This presumably came from other industrially ravaged landscapes to the east, where entire Appalachian mountaintops are routinely bulldozed into valleys to access seams of Paleozoic carbon.

Inhabitat has a report from Bulgaria on the continuing impasse between Russia and the Ukraine over Russian gas exports - Gazprom Crisis Engulfs Europe. Home heating price increases have certainly been a major concern for recession-strapped households in northern climates, but the possibility of having one's heat completely shut-off in this new era of natural resource 'muscle flexing' and bitter political show-downs is perhaps a whole new energy policy boiling point in Europe and beyond. Russia's decision this week to turn off the flow of gas from its Gazprom pipelines to the Ukraine, which in turn forced many European countries to rely on their (in some cases virtually nonexistent) gas reserves, demonstrates the dire need to identify alternatives to Siberia and the Middle East for our massive oil and gas dependencies. Given that my family and I are currently in Bulgaria for six weeks, we are experiencing the Gazprom gas cut-off crisis first-hand. This issue will not be going away any time soon, despite the band-aid patches that will crop up over the next few weeks and months.

The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States - most of them unregulated and unmonitored - that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.

TVA is near the end of its first phase of response to a massive coal ash spill in East Tennessee last month, stabilizing and preventing further spread of the sludge at an estimated cost of $1 million a day. The giant public utility is considering options for what could be the costliest, lengthiest and most complicated operations: removing the ash from land and water and restoring the area to pre-spill conditions. Advertisement The state must approve the Tennessee Valley Authority's "corrective action" plans and has given it a mid-March deadline to submit details.

Building an alt-energy power plant is risky and expensive, but thanks to a new ruling by an Environmental Protection Agency panel, building a coal plant may become riskier and more expensive. The Environmental Appeals Board blocked the EPA from issuing a permit to a proposed coal plant addition near Vernal, Utah, about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City.

It's a common misconception: The United States imports most of its foreign oil from the Middle East. Not quite. Not even close. As the table below indicates, dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf represents barely 10 percent of total domestic oil consumption, and most of that oil comes from Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Wednesday called for a "clean break" from the Bush administration's energy policies, which she says rely too much on importing foreign oil. In a policy speech, the Alaska governor said the recent drop in gas and oil prices shouldn't deter consumers and lawmakers from seeking alternative energy sources. She cast energy independence as a national security issue, saying dependence on oil from the Middle East made the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist threats.

In a possible breakthrough on energy, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a compromise Friday that would preserve the oil-drilling ban off the West Coast while easing restrictions on exploration off the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. The proposal also would provide billions to greatly expand the availability of vehicles powered by alternative fuels.

"For the first time in 10 years Americans are more likely to say the United States should give more priority to developing oil, natural gas and coal than to protecting the environment, according to a poll on Tuesday. U.S. | Green Business The poll was conducted a few weeks before President Barack Obama announced he would open offshore oil drilling in some parts the U.S. East Coast, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Half of 1,014 U.S. adults, who were surveyed March 4-7 by Gallup, said the country should give more priority to developing and producing the fossil fuels. Only 43 percent said protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of limiting the amount of energy supplies."

Current worldwide rig count and U.S. Rig count, Middle East, Canada. Number of active drilling rigs. Inflation adjusted price of crude oil

Ontario, Canada's economic hub, announced Monday the suspension of its plan to build two new nuclear reactors, citing concerns about vendor Atomic Energy Canada Limited's viability, and pricing. The provincial government said AECL's bid to build the two new nuclear power plants at its Darlington station, 43 miles (70 kilometers) east of Toronto, by 2018 was the only one to meet its terms and objectives. The project was to be the first step in the modernization of Ontario's aging nuclear fleet. France's Areva and Westinghouse Electric Company, a subsidiary of Japan's Toshiba, had also bid on the project in February.