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New Zealand’s tuatara may be one for the climate change history books. It's a lizard-like creature that's become global warming's latest canary in the dirty coal mine.

The two species of tuatara are the only surviving members of the Sphenodontians which flourished around 200 million years ago, but because of climate change, they are reaching the end of a very long earthly run for a very peculiar reason.

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.

As the Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lifts its absurd moratorium on new solar projects on public lands -- a result of industry and public outcry -- it’s worth remembering that five years ago the BLM was campaigning for solar.

Yep. The BLM released a report in February 2003, arguing for heavy development of solar power and other renewables on public lands in the West. Straight from the agency's 2003 release:

Increasing our domestic development of renewable energy sources, will help to reduce our dependency on foreign sources of energy...As the report demonstrates, public lands have abundant opportunities for renewable energy development.

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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.

There is a category of psychological illusion called "projection" which serves the purpose of reducing personal anxiety. It's a defense mechanism in which one attributes one’s own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts and emotions to others.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal provided a textbook case of the phenomenon in an editorial called Global Warming as Mass Neurosis. It is yet another installment of exemplary denialist rhetoric in need of some Freudian analysis.

The author, Bret Stephens, accuses those concerned about global warming of practicing a sick-souled theology. He doesn't realize he's blaming others for his own illness: his dogmatic embrace and belief in the perfect functioning of free markets.

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.

A small but growing number of churches in Massachusetts began tolling their bells 350 times last week, bearing spiritual witness to the changes we have wrought on the world's climate.

It's one of the latest efforts to emerge from 350.org, an international grassroots campaign that aims to mobilize a global climate movement united by a common call to action -- to reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.