It's been a rough season for corn ethanol on Capitol Hill

Still, the next stage for the drama over ethanol's future will likely be the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which anticipates holding a hearing in April that takes a broad look at multiple facets of U.S. renewable fuels policy. The panel's chairwoman, Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), was one of 17 upper-chamber members who signed a bipartisan letter in November calling for the phaseout of ethanol tariffs and blending subsidies.

And ethanol is one of a few issues that find Boxer aligned with her committee's ranking Republican, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a longtime ethanol foe who is relishing his ability -- despite a reputation as a vocal climate change skeptic -- to build a partnership with environmentalists who want Congress to reduce support for the corn-based fuel.

"What we're trying to do is reach across the aisle" on ethanol, Inhofe spokesman Matt Dempsey said in an interview. "When you have Inhofe and Barbara Boxer and Friends of the Earth (FoE) on the same page, it's pretty understandable what's coming."

ALP loses its licence to campaign on global warming | The Australian

But the greatest loss for Labor is the majority of Australians, including a sudden swath of younger voters to have switched sides, who now oppose a carbon plan with cost rises.

Mourning Glory : Nature News

"I understand these things happen with the difficult tasks NASA attempts," Kopp wrote to Nature in a remarkably calm e-mail from the Vandenberg base, where he witnessed the failed launch. "I'm of course surprised that after two years of scrutiny, Orbital evidently does not understand what is causing their Taurus launch vehicles to fail — they've now lost three of the last four."

Scientists are also grieving for data that might have been. The loss of Glory's solar monitor increases the risk of a lapse in the continuous 32-year record of the Sun's total energy output, data that are fundamental to climate-change models. It also complicates efforts to compare solar-irradiance data from different instruments.
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"The magnitude of the aerosol forcing is a big determinant of where we are going to go in the future," says Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "We have the technology to pin this down more than it is being pinned down, and yet that technology is sitting at the bottom of the ocean."