The nuclear energy industry has had plenty to celebrate recently. President Barack Obama said the country needed to build new reactors to meet the challenges of climate change in his State of the Union address, and then his administration requested Congress triple the amount of loan guarantees to help finance the plants.

But as Associated Press reports today, the industry still faces some political challenges.

The Vermont Senate voted Wednesday to block the state's only nuclear plant from operating after 2012. The AP reports that, "Vermont is the only state in the country with a law giving its Legislature a say over a nuclear plant's relicensing."

An arm of the group called Repower America launched ads in Indiana, Missouri, Maine and Arkansas this month.

President Barack Obama reiterated his support for putting a price on carbon during an address to the Business Roundtable today.

"A competitive America is also an America that finally has a smart energy policy.  We know there is no silver bullet here – that to reduce our dependence on oil and the damage caused by climate change, we need more production, more efficiency, and more incentives for clean energy. 

Already, the Recovery Act has allowed us to jumpstart the clean energy industry in America – an investment that will lead to 720,000 clean energy jobs by 2012.  To take just one example, the United States used to make less than 2% of the world’s advanced batteries for hybrid cars.  By 2015, we’ll have enough capacity to make up to 40% of these batteries.  

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California and several other states have leapt into the Senate fray over climate change, attacking a GOP-led measure.

The United Nations is under attack from climate skeptics, but that hasn’t stopped it from continuing to issue warnings about modeling that predicts dangerous global warming.

A UN report released Tuesday looks at why various national emissions pledges won’t hold global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius or less. That’s the level needed to prevent the most devastating effects of climate change, climate scientists say.

“Yearly greenhouse gas emissions should not be more than 40 and 48.3 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2020 and should peak between 2015 and 2021, according to new modeling released on Tuesday by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP),” notes this Reuters account of the report.

A swing at EPA’s climate change rules will end up hitting – and bloodying – Detroit automakers.

That’s the case the White House is making as it fights Capitol Hill plans that would nullify EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, refineries and other industrial sites.

The effort to block these planned EPA regulations would also upend a popular upcoming rule that creates a single, national mileage and emissions standard for automobiles.

Just what does a czar do anyway? 

Judicial Watch, a public interest group, is suing the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency to get documents that may suggest what role Carol Browner has played in developing climate change and other energy policies in the administration.

Browner was a former administrator of EPA under the Clinton administration. Her role in the current White House is a bit more nebulous: special assistant on energy and climate. The media routinely shortens that to climate czar.

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Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) crowed Tuesday that recent events prove he was right seven years ago when he called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public.”

Inhofe, the ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and Public Enemy Number 1 in the eyes of climate bill advocates, pointed to recently uncovered errors in a widely cited U.N. climate change study, hacked “Climategate” emails that suggest climate scientists suppressed dissenting views, and comments by a leading climate scientist that the planet has not warmed significantly in the past 15 years to support his contention that the whole thing is, in fact, a giant hoax.

But Lisa Jackson, administrator of EPA, said issues Inhofe and other Republicans raised at an EPW hearing on Tuesday do not undermine the overwhelming scientific evidence that the planet is warming and humans are a leading cause.

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Pop and hip-hop stars are trying to accomplish what Democrats and green groups haven’t on their own: to win enactment of a sweeping climate and energy bill.

Two separate events this week highlight joint efforts between environmentalists, urban advocates and pop stars around energy policy.

On Tuesday afternoon, will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas is slated to announce a new partnership between the popular band and three groups including the League of Conservation Voters (LCV).