The Associated Press: Congress abandoning Obama clean energy goals

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress is all but abandoning President Barack Obama's goal of producing fully one-quarter of the nation's electricity from renewable sources — wind, solar and the like — by 2025, though a push for at least some increase is making headway.
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Mark Sinclair, whose Clean Energy States Alliance works with state renewable energy programs, maintains that the congressional mandates "are very weak and really will not require any additional renewables beyond what states already are doing."

Sinclair cites an analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that says the national mandates being considered by lawmakers would in some cases result in less renewable energy being used by 2030 than what is anticipated under existing state requirements and from incentives from Obama's economic recovery program.

"It will be meaningless. It's just a gesture," says Sinclair of the bills before the House and Senate.

Government Accountability Office Cites Hurdles for Aquiring Plug-in Vehicles for Government Agencies - Environmental Capital - WSJ

...It’s worth noting, then, that the U.S. government sees so many problems adding them to its 645,000-vehicle fleet.

A report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office highlighted a raft of technical, economic and bureaucratic hurdles facing government agencies that might want to add some of these newfangled technologies to their carpool.

Among the hurdles were some pedestrian concerns, like cost. Lithium-ion batteries with enough juice to power a car are pretty expensive. As a result, the electric-powered vehicles are expected to retail for much more than their internal-combustion-engine cousins.

What global warming distracts us from

Our concern with global warming distorts our big economic decisions, persuading us that, for example, corn is better used as a fuel than a food. This in turn persuades others that throwing Indians off their land and killing them is justified if it allows more efficient exploitation of the Amazon for its natural resources. Or it persuades rich countries to buy land in poor countries to insure their food supply--at the cost of depriving the poor countries of land they can use for their own agricultural needs.

For those of us (and there are many of us, despite claims to the contrary) who believe that global warming will prove to be a moderate issue at the worst (and possibly not much of an issue at all), it seems very much as though we are killing and impoverishing the poor for our own selfish ends.

Not much of a change, then.