Glad to see a company with a sense of civic responsibility. The search engine giant is taking a giant leap towards sustainable energy. From the Boston Globe:

The Internet search leader announced what is believed to be the largest solar project undertaken by a U.S. company during a solar energy conference in Silicon Valley on Monday. Google believes the sun eventually can deliver as much as 30 percent of the power at its 1-million-square-foot campus in Mountain View -- a suburb about 35 miles south of San Francisco.

As the saying goes, politics makes for strange bedfellows.

Congressional leaders reached an agreement on the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm that would give the head of the Coast Guard -- but not the governor of Massachusetts -- the power to order changes to the project or scuttle it entirely if he finds that it would interfere with navigation.

Though the bill would pose another potential obstacle to the Cape Wind Associates project, the agreement is being viewed as a victory for supporters of the wind-energy proposal because it does not award the governor veto power.

The seven state RGGI (centered around Massachusetts but not including it thanks to Governor Mitt Romney) will be soliciting public feedback for the next sixty days on their draft model rule. The final draft will be released in July and the regulations will take effect in 2009, giving the participating states until 2015 to stabilize their emissions and until 2020 to reduce them by 10%. Although this is a good beginning, it's pretty lax in comparison to the Kyoto Accord, which required their signatories to stabilize their 2010 emissions at 1990 levels.

From yesterday's Globe:

The state Department of Environmental Protection proposed yesterday the nation's toughest standard for perchlorate, a chemical used in explosives that was found in 10 public water sources in 2004. The drinking water limit of 2 parts per billion would be dramatically stricter than a proposed level of 24.5 parts per billion, announced by the US Environmental Protection Agency in January.

And in today's edition of the LA Times

The ingenuous people at Google unveiled Google Mars on Monday. It's comparable to the Lunar landscape released last year and runs in a web browser using the Google Maps Ajax interface. Here's the press release from the official Google blog.

We here on Earth have long held a fascination with the planet Mars. From Percival Lowell's sketches of its surface, to the countless books and movies that revolve around it, we've spent millenia studying and day-dreaming about our nearest neighbor in the solar system.

Karen O'Brian has published an interesting editorial in the journal of Global Environmental Change. I've only had the chance to give it a cursory glance but it looks like it addresses some points that I've been contemplating for a while. Here's the introduction:

According to Reuters, Interior secretary Gale Norton is stepping down.

Norton, 51, is the first woman to head the 156-year-old department and one of the original members of President George W. Bush's cabinet. She previously served as Colorado's attorney general.

Raw Story alleges that her resignation may be related to her ties to Jack Abramoff.