E2 Round-up: Senate climate prospects, IPCC woes, Utah House weighs in on warming, and more.

The Washington Post editorial page hopes the Senate can find a way forward on floundering climate legislation, and has some nice things to say Wednesday about a proposal by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

The Wall Street Journal checks in again on the embattled Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Some top officials of a Nobel Prize-winning climate-science organization are acknowledging the panel made some mistakes amid a string of recent revelations questioning the accuracy of some of the information in its influential reports,” the Journal piece notes.

But the same story points out that scientists and others experts involved with the United Nations-backed panel say the revelations don’t undercut the IPCC’s core view that dangerous human-induced climate change is underway.

A top Obama administration official said much the same thing about the IPCC earlier this week on a call with reporters.

But that somehow didn’t prevent the Utah House from approving a resolution Tuesday that questions the science behind global warming, and opposes federal cap-and-trade legislation and EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, the Deseret News reports.

On Tuesday I wrote that William Magwood – one of President Obama’s nominees to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission – used a Senate confirmation hearing to rebut charges that he wouldn’t be an impartial regulator.

But the Project on Government Oversight, which is a watchdog group opposing the former Energy Department official’s nomination, thinks that Environment and Public Works Committee members didn’t dig deep enough.

The big French nuclear power company Areva SA turned some heads earlier this week by purchasing California-based solar power startup Ausra, Inc. This Bloomberg piece looks at why Areva is excited about solar power.

“Areva SA of France predicts the global use of solar-thermal power will grow by about 30-fold this decade, a forecast that spurred the world’s largest maker of nuclear reactors to buy a California-based equipment maker,” Bloomberg notes.

China is moving aggressively to boost its use of renewable energy, and Reuters reports that Chinese officials have preliminary plans to build a national renewable energy center that “would be responsible for policymaking, key projects, program management, market operations and international coordination.”