E2 Round-up: Mountaintop mining in EPA’s crosshairs, the Copenhagen summit’s rising stock, Ford and Microsoft team up on energy, and more on offshore drilling

There’s plenty of coverage of EPA’s decision Thursday to toughen water quality rules for Appalachian coal mining operations, which Jim blogged about here.

The Wall Street Journal calls the action a “significant step in the EPA's push under the Obama administration to limit the practice of mountaintop coal mining and its environmental effects.”

Environmentalists are thrilled with the plan, while the industry said it will cost jobs.

The New York Times weighs in here, while the Charleston Gazette notes the response from Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who said EPA’s announcement “will hopefully now have everyone reading off the same page” and provided a “clearer, concise policy on moving forward with mountaintop mining permits and water quality issues.”

The writer of the Gazette piece, Ken Ward, puts the EPA plan in a broader context over at his Coal Tattoo blog, looking at the announcement in light of other federal policies and the state of the industry.

Elsewhere, BusinessWeek looks at a partnership between Ford Motor Co. and Microsoft to help drivers of Ford’s upcoming electric vehicles manage energy use.

Bloomberg reports that billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens doesn’t see huge potential oil finds off the East Coast, one of the regions the Obama administration is opening for exploration.

“I do not think you’ll come up with very much oil. But, let’s do it. I am for anything American,” he said.

CNN’s John King caught up with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar this week to discuss the drilling plan, which Salazar calls “critical” to the nation’s energy security.

Salazar also defends the decision to keep or place several areas off-limits – notably the Pacific Coast and Alaska’s Bristol Bay – and calls opening large areas off the Atlantic Coast a “look-and-see” approach. From Salazar's interview with King (via Real Clear Politics):

KING: The flip side of the argument has come from some Republicans who say this is too timid, that you should not have taken Bristol Bay out of play up in Alaska, for example. You should not have taken out of play the Pacific Coast. Why those decisions?

SALAZAR: Well, those decisions are based on the fact that there are some natural ecological wildlife values up there that are just absolutely the greatest. Bristol Bay provides about 40 percent of the fish for the United States. It is a place where presidents from the past, Republicans and Democrats, wanted to protect that place. The same thing is true with the Pacific, and the National Wildlife Refuges of the Marine areas there are absolutely at the very top of the line.

So, we're going to protect those environments because they are very special places. On the other hand, if you summed this up, John, I would say this, you know, in the Gulf of Mexico we say let's go for it, and we're going to do it surgically to protect the Florida coast. In the Atlantic, it's a look-and-see. In the Pacific and in some places in Alaska like Bristol Bay, they're too special to drill, so we're going to conserve, and so this is a balanced plan. It represents a new direction for us and this administration based on what had happened in the past; we're not just thoughtlessly going and rushing to lease everywhere in America.

Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Times reports that maybe the Copenhagen climate summit last year wasn’t a total disaster after all.

From Jim Tankersley’s piece:

The Copenhagen climate summit, roundly dubbed a failure when it ended last year, may actually have sparked significant steps toward curbing global warming, according to some environmentalists and financial analysts.

Analyses from groups, including Deutsche Bank, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the liberal Center for American Progress, are challenging the snap indictment of the December conference, which drew wide criticism for failing to produce a new treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions.