Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) wants to know the extent to which Energy Department officials talked to supporters of clean energy subsidies before DoE published an unusual rebuttal to a study critical of green job programs.

He fired off a letter to a DoE official on Wednesday asking a series of pointed questions about discussions between government officials and groups like the American Wind Energy Association and the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank run by White House confidant John Podesta.

DoE was already on Sensenbrenner’s bad side for failing to provide what he believes was a timely or forthcoming response to a letter he sent back in September relating to the rebuttal, which was released by the department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. A recently released batch of emails showing possible collaboration between DoE and a group whose members stand to benefit from clean energy subsidies won't help.

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An electric utility trade group told senior House Democrats Wednesday that it does not doubt global warming science, despite backing a Senate resolution to overturn EPA's finding that greenhouse gases threaten humans.

The American Public Power Association (APPA) has come under fire from Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) over its support for Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R-Alaska) proposal to overturn EPA's "endangerment finding."

But in a letter to the lawmakers, the group said it's backing the resolution because EPA's finding is the legal underpinning for planned rules to limit emissions from power plants and other sources.

Four senators are pushing legislation that would ensure long-term tax credits for the fledgling offshore wind industry.

Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced a bill Wednesday to extend production and investment tax credits for coastal projects until 2020.

There are currently no U.S. offshore wind farms, but several are at various stages of the planning process.

Critics of teaching evolution to students are “gaining ground” in some states by tying the issue to climate change, reports the New York Times.

“The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general,” the Times account notes.

“Yet they are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming, particularly among political conservatives who oppose efforts to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases,” it adds.

American Solutions, the advocacy group led by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, on Wednesday slammed the Interior Department over the agency’s plan to wait until 2012 before a new offshore drilling plan takes effect.

The group, on its website, said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar “dropped a bomb on American energy independence, economic recovery, and public opinion,” when he previewed his plans this afternoon.

Pro-drilling groups want faster action from the Obama administration, which has signaled that it's open to at least some expansion of offshore development beyond areas where it’s already permitted.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) suggested Wednesday that the bar for her vote on climate legislation is high.

The wind industry’s major trade group on Wednesday attacked legislation floated by several Senate Democrats that would require stimulus-funded renewable power projects to rely on materials manufactured domestically.

Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said the proposal would kill 50,000 American jobs. “This proposal would torpedo one of the most successful job creation efforts of the Recovery Act, which has already preserved half of the 85,000 American jobs in the U.S. wind industry,” she said in a prepared statement.

The stimulus law created a new Treasury Department grant program to support construction of wind farms, solar energy projects and other renewable energy generation facilities.

Remember the dispute between the Energy Department and critics of the administration's "clean energy" and climate agenda over a Spanish study that claimed government subsidies to renewable energy industries in Spain cost more jobs than they created?

Jim Tankersley of the Chicago Tribune has a run down of some of the behind-the-scenes activity that ended with an unusual rebuttal from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the Spanish jobs study, which Republicans seized upon to combat claims from the Obama administration that government subsidies for clean energy would create millions of new jobs.

NREL responded that the study was flawed. Free-market think tanks and other opponents of the administration’s climate plans cried foul. One, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, used public records laws to obtain emails showing NREL shared its response with groups supporting renewable energy policy, like the American Wind Energy Association, before releasing the rebuttal publicly.

Those emails are the basis for Tankersley piece.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar dropped some hints Wednesday about his long-awaited policy on offshore oil-and-gas drilling in federal waters, which he hopes to announce later this month.

Salazar said Interior’s next five-year offshore leasing plan will run from 2012-2017, rather than upending the current 2007-2012 program.

That’s interesting because the Bush administration, on its way out the door, had proposed a draft 2010-2015 plan that would promote oil-and-gas development in large areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (among other expansions).