E2 Round-up: Green jobs focus shifts to stimulus; Sierra Club's new leader; and a look at 'fracking'

The Massachusetts special election post-mortem continues this morning. Republican Scott Brown’s (surprising, shocking, improbable) victory over Democrat Martha Coakley promises a new challenges for Democrats on a variety of policy fronts, including climate change legislation.

Bloomberg weighs in with a piece about how policies to create green jobs may migrate to a new stimulus package as hopes for a Senate cap-and-trade bill fade. Sen. John Kerry, himself of Massachusetts, says he continues to work with craft a bipartisan climate change bill, but Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) predicts the political will to cap carbon was sapped by the election results Tuesday.

Michael Brune, the incoming head of the Sierra Club, said strong climate and energy legislation will remain his group’s top priority, in this interview at Grist.org. And Brown might not be such a lost cause on climate issues after all, although he has said he opposes the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in June. ClimateWire examines the new senator’s environmental record.

A House panel hearing on the merger of ExxonMobil and XTO Energy didn’t turn into an assault on controversial drilling technique that some thought it would. But hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as a drilling technique is still generating some concern among local environmental groups, according to this report in the Wall Street Journal.