The NY TImes story on this latest absurdity from the Department of Interior plays the headline pretty straight: Citing Need for Assessments, US Freezes Solar Energy Projects. And here are the lead paragraphs:

Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

A bit of editing at the copy desk might have yielded a more telling lede:

The federal government has placed a moratorium on solar energy projects on public land in order to study the environmental impact of collecting sunshine in the desert.

It's another spiteful move by the administration designed to slow down the development of alternative energy projects. Some of the best solar resources in the country fall on public land, and fledgling solar companies were left frustrated and angry.

Yet just last week, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne saw fit to stand next to President Bush in the Rose Garden when he called on Congress to allow development of oil shale on public lands in the Green River Basin which straddles Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The moment is commemorated on the Department of Interior web site in both a photo and a video.

The damage estimates are starting to roll in from the Midwest floods, and they’re staggering.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has put crop-related losses at around $7 billion -- and rising. Iowa alone accounts for more than half of that amount.

Add property damages of $1.5 billion to the total hit, and you arrive at a preliminary flood damage estimate of $8.5 billion.

That's a very low-ball number. And yet, it already puts the Midwest floods of ’08 at number two on the list of the most expensive non-hurricane flooding catastrophes in the US, ever. WunderBlog has that story.

Read it. And when you do, keep this in mind: Despite media neglect, global warming -- in part -- has caused the treacherous rains that have spawned those costly floods, as Climate Progress and many others have studiously catalogued.

The energy discussion took a great leap forward today with the release of a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Senator McCain and President Bush have recently called for oil drilling in offshore US waters as a solution to high gas prices. So the report examines whether drilling would make a difference at the pump and compares it to the impact of increasing the fuel economy of automobiles.

No surprise -- drilling for oil would have no effect on gas prices. That's according to the Energy Information Administration:

The Energy Information Agency (EIA) projects that Senator McCain's proposal would have no impact in the near-term since it will be close to a decade before the first oil can be extracted from the currently protected offshore areas.

The EIA projects that production will reach 200,000 barrels a day (0.2 percent of projected world production) at peak production in close to twenty years. It describes this amount as too small to have any significant effect on oil prices.

But what if US autos had become more fuel efficient over the last 20 years, slowly but steadily? A lot of savings at the pump and a whole lot of oil no longer needed -- about 3 million barrels a day less. The lost opportunity is astounding in magnitude, and points to a better way toward energy security.

Dynegy Inc. has the most proposed coal-fired power plants of any company in the nation. And it’s just been dealt a heavy blow.

A Superior Court judge in Georgia has ruled to kill the construction of Dynegy's proposed 1,200-megawatt, $2 billion coal plant on the banks of the Chattahoochee River.

Longleaf was its name. And it was slated to be Georgia’s first new coal-fired power plant in 20 years.

But for now, it's dead, on account of Dynegy’s failure to do anything to limit the facility's CO2 emissions.

Historic.