Plans for new coal in Kansas are unraveling.

The latest? The Kansas House has failed to come up with a two-thirds majority to override Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ vetoes of two new coal plants in Western Kansas.

In response, legislators have chosen to smear lipstick all over the legislative pig by layering it with economic development dollars for other parts of the state -- and calling it new. What nerve!

Here's how Kansas lawmaker Judy Morrison sees it:

"It's one of the worst bills I've ever seen. What they're trying to do is force everyone to vote for it. It's blackmail."

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This month’s DOE report on the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) in place in 25 states makes at least one thing clear: without them, America’s emerging clean-energy markets would be half as robust as they are today.

The figures: From 1998 to 2007, over 50 percent of the non-hydro renewable energy capacity was installed in states with RPS policies.

Wind power’s role has been huge, accounting for 93 percent of the total RPS additions.

That helped to push America into the number one slot on the list of the world’s biggest markets for new wind turbines.

And led to this conclusion from the report's author:

Activist investors in the US have pressed the Securities and Exchange commission to require companies to disclose their carbon emissions as a routine part of financial reporting. Now they can point to Japan and an emissions dataset just released by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) as a model worthy of emulating.

Kevin Gurney of Purdue and a team of researchers are making a splash with work that makes America's carbon footprint visible. Since the story broke on NYT's Dot Earth under the headline Breath of the Nation - Animated CO2 Map, the research has been attracting widespread attention.

It helps that Gurney and his team, with funding from NASA and DOE, were smart enough to render their findings in a video they posted on YouTube, which You can click here to see.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial writers again revealed their disregard of basic carbon economics in a piece last Friday that ignored new financial realities in order to stump in favor of more coal power for Kansas.