Rhode Island's PBS station, WSBE, will be tackling Rhode Island's green energy foray with a pair of panel discussions, spliced with recorded segments, set to premier October 17.

The "Powering the Future" panels will look first at the state's broad energy needs and practices and second at the massive wind farm project planned off the Rhode Island coast.

The Obama Administration dealt environmentalists a major blow last week when it announced it was blocking an important new air pollution rule that had come under fire from Republicans and business interests.

The administration said the nation couldn't afford the rule, which would lead to significant new costs for business, in tough economic times.

Interesting editorial from our sister paper, the Boston Phoenix, this week on the disaster in Japan:

"Most people today," writes political philosopher John Gray, "think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science."

The unfolding disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station sorely strains that faith, as did the 1979 crisis at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant and the 1986 catastrophe at Chernobyl in the Ukraine.

The Providence Phoenix gathered a nice little clutch of awards at this weekend's New England Newspaper & Press Association's annual fete - this one covering work from mid-2009 to mid-2010.

The paper took first place in the religious reporting category for a piece on Brown University biology professor Ken Miller's quest to reconcile religion and evolutionary theory - to the consternation of the atheist crowd.

The GOP landslide in November means, among other things, certain death for the cap-and-trade approach to reducing carbon emissions.

But there is an intriguing debate, even among those who accept the scientific evidence for anthropomorphic climate change, about whether cap-and-trade would be all that effective, given the resistance of emerging economies like China and India to the idea.

Deepwater Wind gets some good press on its ambitious push to build the largest offshore wind farm in the country. But the official name of the project - the Deepwater Wind Energy Center - could use some tweaking.

Who wants an "energy center" in the middle of the ocean, especially when the "Cape Wind" project promises to dance in the breeze just to the north?

Outgoing Attorney General Patrick Lynch fired a parting shot today at Deepwater Wind, the company that aims to build a largescale wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island.

The AG filed a brief with the state Supreme Court objecting to General Assembly passage of a bill that required the state's Public Utilities Commission to take up Deepwater's proposal for a pilot project off Block Island for a second time - weighing criteria that favored the developer - after initially rejecting it.

I've got a cover story in this week's Phoenix about the push to make electric cars the dominant form of transportation in Rhode Island and across the country.

Rhody's size could make the state an ideal incubator for the limited-range cars which, advocates say, might represent the country's best chance to wean itself off of foreign oil and declare energy independence.

It seemed, for a time, that Deepwater Wind's proposal for turbines off the coast of Rhode Island - a small demonstration project near Block Island followed by a much larger array further out to sea - was living a charmed existence. It had the strong backing of a GOP governor and a Democratic legislature - and nothing like the well-financed, persistent opposition that has proved a major drag on the Cape Wind project off Massachusetts.

Advocates of offshore wind in Rhode Island, and up and down the East Coast, will be watching closely for a forthcoming decision from the Obama Administration on a long-discussed wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts.

The decision could have big implications for the entire industry. From the New York Times:

For the last decade, the backers of a huge wind power project off the coast of Cape Cod have navigated through stormy community meetings, hidden regulatory snags and verbal cannon blasts from the Kennedy family and a pair of Indian tribes.

As reported here last week, Governor Carcieri was part of a group of 20 governors who penned a letter voicing opposition to the EPA's planned regulation of greenhouse gases. Attorney General Patrick Lynch is now blasting the governor for the move:

Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch has sent Governor Carcieri a copy of a letter he has written to Rhode Island’s Congressional delegation to counter Carcieri’s participation in a multi-state letter in which Carcieri, along with 19 other governors, stated that the EPA should not regulate greenhouse gas emissions but should be restricted to merely offering input.

Governor Donald Carcieri trumpeted the importance of wind energy yesterday as the vice chairman of a bi-partisan group of 29 governors pushing for greater federal support for wind.

The event added to a nice green sheen the governor has cultivated. But close watchers know it's the energy independence wind promises that most excites.

This just in from the Boston Globe:

After months of speculating, Curt Spalding, the longtime executive director of Save the Bay in Rhode Island, has just been named New England’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief.

Spalding was considered a strong candidate, but pundits were placing bets on Charlie Lord, who helped found Boston College’s Urban Ecology Institute or David Cash, Massachusetts assistant secretary for policy at the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

The US Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee today signed off on Rode Islander Cynthia Giles' nomination to the Environmental Protection Agency's top enforcement post. From Sheldon Whitehouse's office:

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, applauded the committee’s voice vote today endorsing the nomination of Cynthia Giles, of Barrington, RI, to be the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

The Ocean State's latest bid for a little love from Washington is underway. The US Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee is conducting a hearing this morning on the nomination of Cynthia Giles for the top enforcement post at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Giles, beloved by our own Phillipe and Jorge, is the director of the Conservation Law Foundation's Rhode Island Advocacy Center.