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The Headlines:

Obama’s new energy plan

“State of the Planet 2010″ conference

Millenium Development Goals deadline

Anti-climate change industry takes a hit

East Anglia Professor Exonorated

The Details:

Obama’s new energy plan

Fresh from his victory with the passage of the new health care bill as well as the new higher education bill, President Obama unveiled his new energy plan on March 31. The plan throws back to the Republican campaign chant of “Drill Baby Drill”. Is the “everything under the umbrella” strategy an olive branch to open the dialog or a slap in the face to environmentalists? Perhaps both.

Here are the four main points of the plan as summed up by the L.A. Times:

1. Open two-thirds of the eastern Gulf of Mexico’s oil and gas resources for drilling.

2. Proceed with drilling off Virginia, provided the project clears environmental and military reviews.

3. Allow for drilling off the mid- and southern Atlantic coasts.

4. Allow for potential drilling in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas — areas hotly defended by environmentalists — but issue no new drilling leases in either sea before 2013.

Environmentalists and other liberals are up in arms. We’ll see how this affects Obama’s decisions, and how Congress decides to proceed with this new legislation.

Several nations participate in “State of the Planet 2010″ conference

On March 25, participants from New York,  Beijing, New Dehli, Nairobi and London all got together with individual events as well as through video-conference to discuss the title of the event, “The State of the Planet.” The New York end of the conference was hosted by The Earth Institute at Columbia University and in London by The Economist. And many classrooms around the world streamed live webcasts of the event.

Topics discussed included climate change, poverty, economic recovery, and international systems of crisis management.

[Insert Ban Ki-moon clip]

That was UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, speaking from The Earth Institute. He was just one of many speakers, including Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Prince Albert II of Monaco and various business owners and professors from around the world.

Ban Ki-moon is also making headlines on his own in our next story…

Millenium Development Goals deadline fast approaching

If you’re unfamiliar with the U.N.’s Millenium Development Goals or MDGs, there are eight of them, and they include halting the epidemic spread of HIV/AIDS  as well as cutting cases of extreme poverty in half. The U.N. has given themselves a deadline for these lofty ambitions: 2015.

Not surprisingly, the U.N. is nowhere near reaching these goals after 10 years since the initiative began. So Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is now calling for a summit of all the world’s leaders to address the issue.

Scheduled to take place in New York in September, the summit, according to the Secretary-General should “focus attention and accelerate the process to achieve, to realize, the goals of the MDGs by the target year, 2015.”

Now the ball is in the court of the leaders of the world. We’ll continue to update you on this story as it develops.

Anti-climate change industry takes a hit

[Koch is pronounced Coke]

Greenpeace has been making news every week, and this week is no exception.

They just exposed Koch Industries, one of the largest privately-owned companies in the world, for funding the anti-climate change industry. Greenpeace accuses the Kansas-based company of discreetly delivering nearly $50 million “to climate-denial front groups that are working to delay policies and regulations aimed at stopping global warming[...]”

Greenpeace’s report, entitled “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine”, is aimed at showing the public how much of the information they see as the “real” truth about climate change is really coming from private and incredibly biased sources.

Koch Industries sent a public statement to the New York Times and here’s the gist: “The Greenpeace report mischaracterizes these efforts and distorts the environmental record of our companies. We’ve strived to encourage an intellectually honest debate on the scientific basis for claims of harm from greenhouse gases.”

Read more of the response from Koch and the full Greenpeace report on our site.

East Anglia Professor Exonorated

Professor Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had his name dragged through the mud back in November 2009, when climate deniers hacked into the email accounts of several East Anglia professors.

The Huffington Post reported on March 31 that the British House of Commons issued a report stating, “the focus on CRU and Professor Phil Jones, Director of CRU, in particular, has largely been misplaced,” and that Dr. Jones’s actions were “in line with common practice in the climate science community,” and the CRU’s “analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.”

There’s no word at this time about Dr. Jones’s reaction to the news.