("Don't' worry kids," says Grandpa. "John Boehner says the global warming gas carbon dioxide is nothing to worry about because we exhale it. But just think how much safer you'll all be when I stop breathing altogether!" Oh gramps, you're funny but you're no John Boehner.)

This being the week of Earth Day, we find ourselves blogging on an almost continuous basis in order to stuff as much green gunk into readers' heads as we can before their attention wanders back to American Idol.

So how happy were we, we ask you, when the Environmental Protection Agency declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be, imagine our amazement, dangerous?

The significance of this, other than to prove that the EPA is not spending its days drooling into a bucket and watching Sponge Bob Square Pants, is it sets the stage for carbon dioxide to be regulated. You may remember that was something George W. Bush promised to do when he first ran for president. You may also remember that promise evaporated faster than exhaust from a Camaro about 13 seconds into his first term.

Now, like magic, we are about the same amount of time into Barack Obama's first term and voila!, the EPA sees the light. If we didn't know better, we would almost suspect that somehow politics affects the government's view of science.

If you're wondering how we got to this point, here is a little refresher, courtesy of The New York Times: "In 2007, the Supreme Court, in Massachusetts v. E.P.A., ordered the agency to determine whether heat-trapping gases harmed the environment and public health. The case was brought by states and environmental groups to force the E.P.A. to use the Clean Air Act to regulate heat-trapping gases in vehicle emissions. Agency scientists were virtually unanimous in determining that those gases caused such harm, but top Bush administration officials suppressed their work and took no action."

In issuing the EPA's determination Friday, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said: “This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations," according to this article in The New York Times.

Almost as quickly, John Boehner, the top Republican in the House of Representatives, went on national television to declare that "the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide. And so I think it’s clear…"

This insightful piece of logic was presented on ABC This Week to amazed host, George Stephanopoulos and can be viewed at this link to The New York Times Web site for Green Inc.

What's truly clear, is evidenced in the transcript; that Mr. Boehner was trying hard not to answer the question while seeming to, it also undermines its own logic.

According to Mr. Boehner, if it comes out of our bodies, it must be safe. And yet, what we do with what we flush down the toilet is highly regulated. How our bodily fluids get handled is regulated. Here in Pennsylvania, you even need a license to cut people's hair. Heck, just try burying grandpa in the back yard after he buys the farm and see what happens. Our whole bodies are regulated after we die.

(I must also mention here, with some reluctance, that Mr. Boehner and his party have a great deal of interest in regulating what comes out of a woman's body after conception, so I'm not sure he really wants to go down that road.)

Also, we're not sure where Mr. Boehner came up with the idea that anyone is calling carbon dioxide a "carcinogen." No one, to our knowledge, other than Mr. Boehner is saying CO2 causes cancer, only that it is altering the atmosphere in a way that may change the planet forever, which juuusssttttt might have an effect on human health.

So we agree with Mr. Boehner that the idea that CO2 is a carcinogen is "almost comical," largely because no one but him is saying that. Which, we're pretty sure, makes the joke on him.

In fact, we would consider his entire position "almost comical," if the survival of our planet's eco-system were a laughing matter.

P.S. We do want to thank him for providing us with the opportunity to inject a little bathroom humor into this debate, allowing us to loosen our collective collar and shed a little bit of our stuffy erudite image. After all, you should always leave 'em laughing, a point Mr. Boehner seems to understand.

Hope came from the Pacific last Friday when the state of Hawaii, according to an Associated Press report, became the first in the nation to require solar water heaters in new homes.

My bi-partisan heart (yes, I do have one) swelled even more when I read further that the governor who signed the bill, Linda Lingle, is a Republican.

Moments later, that hope evaporated and i had a bi-partisan heart attack as I continued to read The New York Times.

This article reported that the U.S. Dept. of the Interior; known for failing to collect money owed the taxpayers by oil and gas companies drilling on public lands; known for ignoring public opinion and trying to increase the number of snow mobiles allowed in Yellowstone National Park; known for ignoring previous "roadless" rules and bowing to timber companies to allow roads into pristine forests; this department had suddenly got religion.

And for what?

Why to protect the environment of course.

And to do that, the administration put a two-year freeze on all solar energy project applications on public lands.

The reason given is a concern for the impact pipelines and infrastructure would have on native fauna, like the desert tortoise.

If I were the suspicious type (and I am), I might conclude that about the only time this administration, which, no doubt by sheer coincidence, happens to be run by two former oil executives and whose Secretary of State has an oil tanker named after her, cares most about protecting the environment when it also protects the interests of the oil and gas industry.

They have good reason to be afraid for their entrenched wealthy friends.

According to the Times, many of the 119 million acres of taxpayer-owned land in sunny places like Arizona, Nevada and southern California are ideal for solar power.

Since 2005, more than 130 solar power proposals have been filed with the government, most of which call for erecting such facilities on public land to help cut costs.

Unlike the companies that pump and produce oil and natural gas, and which seem to suck all the air out of the government subsidy room, many of these solar power companies are start-ups -- you know, the kind of small, entrepreneurial businesses President Bush also cites as the kind needed to buck-up our flagging economy.

Where the existing proposals to be built, they could cover more than 1 million acres and have the potential to power more than 20 million homes, according to the Times.

Certainly, no tree-hugger worth his salt is going to suggest that one million acres of public property be developed without a thorough review, but freezing all new applications just sends panic through a young industry which might ultimately save our bacon.

Just ask our local Congressman, Jim Gerlach, R-6th Dist.

On Friday, Gerlach delivered the House Republican Conference Weekly Radio Address, according to a timely press release, the subject of which was "the need for Congress to start working together on a National Energy Initiative."

According to the release, Gerlach said: “Decades of relying on foreign oil from the Middle East and unstable regimes across the globe, while refusing to produce more of our own resources, have resulted in the average price of gas soaring past the $4 per-gallon mark.”

Putting a two-year freeze on all new solar power plant applications on public lands doesn't sound like an effort to "produce more of our own resources."

Most of the solar plants in the U.S. use "concentrating" technology by which the sun's rays are concentrated with mirrors to heat a synthetic mixture of oil and water to make steam to power turbines.

But photovoltaic plants, which directly convert sunlight into electricity are up and coming. According to the Times, Photovoltaic solar projects grew by 48 percent in 2007 compared with 2006.

So if you want to get away from $4 gas, as Mr. Gerlach suggests, why not "think outside the pump."

Instead of trying to open up off-shore drilling while refusing the make oil and gas companies drill on the public land where they already have leases (another partisan split in Congress; see if you can guess which party is on which side), why not promote something that could replace it completely?

The nation's first hydrogen pump station just opened in Los Angeles and electric cars are looming on the market place.
Having already had a functional electric car that it pulled from the market in a brilliant display of entrepreneurial foresight, (See "Who Killed the Electric Car?") Detroit is now rushing to catch up to the Japanese in creating what it had already created, a viable electric car.

My personal fantasy is to pull my all-electric car into my driveway and plug it into my personal solar-power generator and laugh all the way past the Exxon station.

While we're fiddling around on our knees to the oil companies, other countries like German and Britain are reading the writing on the atmosphere and getting ahead of us. (See my posts on 6/26 and 6/19)

If you think none of this is the government's business, consider that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Thursday that he will lead his country to increase its renewable energy use 10-fold by 2020.

For an investment of $200 billion (the equivalent of what we pay for a long afternoon in Iraq) he envisions the U.K. cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by nearly 20 percent and oil dependency by 7 percent, and creating some 260,000 green-collar jobs.

Notably lacking in sunny days, Britain will instead make the most of its particular resources, its windy coastline, and use wind power to meet those goals according to this story by Bloomberg News Service.

So just as I tried to come to terms with the idea that the Bush administration had once again crushed hope into dust, I read this article in Scientific American.

It appears that some of the big businesses the administration thinks it has to protect have a longer view than the next quarter's returns.

Three companies that got rich envisioning the future, IBM, Intel and Hewlett Packard, have all made major investments in solar energy, the magazine reported.

First out of the box was IBM, which has "plans to make solar panels covered with a thin film of chemical compounds. The idea is that the film, when applied to different surfaces such as glass or brick, can produce solar energy more efficiently than conventional silicon wafer–based solar cells—which are made of materials similar to those used to fabricate computer chips. (That's right—a company built on chips based on silicon is trying to get the world to move away from using it in solar cells)" the magazine reported.

(And here you thought I was the only purveyor of journalistic sarcasm).

"Also last week, Intel spun off a new solar tech company called SpectraWatt, which was born with $50 million in investment capital from Intel, Cogentrix Energy LLC, PCG Clean Energy and Technology Fund and Solon AG," according to Scientific American.
And the trifecta: "Meanwhile, HP earlier this month began licensing technology to Xtreme Energetics, Inc., in Livermore, Calif., designed to help that start-up company deliver rooftop solar energy systems that produce twice as much energy as conventional solar panels at half the cost."

Hmmm, twice as much energy at half the cost.

That's almost reason to hope....