The next round of Gulf of Mexico oil-and-gas leases the Interior Department auctions will require oil companies to develop quickly to take on the new tracts.

The upcoming March 17 lease sale encompasses areas spanning 37 million acres off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

For leases in water depths between 400 and 800 meters, Interior is scuttling the old eight-year lease terms in favor of five-year leases that can be extended if drilling has commenced.

The British university in the eye of the storm over climate change research on Thursday announced an “independent external reappraisal” of papers published by the school’s Climatic Research Unit.

“Published papers from CRU have gone through the rigorous and intensive peer review process which is the keystone for maintaining the integrity of scientific research,” said Professor Trevor Davies, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Enterprise and Engagement at the University of East Anglia, in a statement. 

“That process and the findings of our researchers have been the subject of significant debate in recent months. Colleagues in CRU have strenuously defended their conduct and the published work and we believe it is in the interests of all concerned that there should be an additional assessment considering the science itself,” he said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) decision to push a pared-down jobs package that omits several energy provisions is drawing criticism from biodiesel producers seeking extension of lapsed tax credits. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a proponent of the industry, isn't thrilled either.

An extension through 2010 of biodiesel tax credits was part of a jobs plan unveiled by Senate Finance Committee leaders Thursday morning. But the $1-per-gallon biodiesel blending credit and several other energy provisions are no longer in what Reid said will be the first of several jobs measures.

“Clearly, the National Biodiesel Board is disappointed that Senate leadership decided to pull the biodiesel tax incentives from the current jobs bill,” said Michael Frohlich, a spokesman for the trade group. He added that leadership should recognize that “saving 23,000 jobs that are in immediate jeopardy is inextricably linked to a true job-saving and creation agenda.”

Advocates for climate legislation don’t want their cause to get buried along with everything else by the record levels of snowfall in Washington.

Climate skeptics have used Snowpocalyse/Snowmageddon to poke fun at the notion that the planet is warming. But skeptics are only using the snow to obfuscate overwhelming evidence that the world is, in fact, heating up, according to Joe Romm, a former Energy Department official and author of the Climate Progress blog.

“An individual weather event is not climate,” Romm said during a conference call with reporters that was organized by the Center for American Progress to fire back at global warming doubters.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) on Thursday appeared to downplay the chances of expanding popular energy manufacturing credits in the upcoming Senate jobs bill, but sees multiple chances to address the issue.

“I think the Majority Leader may want to have something that is more limited for our first jobs bill,” Bingaman told reporters in the Capitol after Democrats met to discuss jobs legislation.

The 2009 stimulus law created a new credit for domestic manufacturing of "clean energy" equipment such as wind turbines and solar panels, but applications have already far outstripped the law’s $2.3 billion cap.

The draft bipartisan jobs package that Senate Finance Committee leaders unveiled Thursday would raise an estimated $24 billon over a decade by preventing paper companies from claiming a lucrative renewable fuels credit.

Lawmakers don’t want the credits applied to “black liquor,” a byproduct of wood pulping that is used as an energy source at paper mills.

From the Finance Committee summary:

A major federal grant program to keep renewable energy projects underway during the economic downturn might end too quickly to help some planned solar power plants unless Congress extends it.

In a note Thursday, FBR Capital Markets predicts that several large projects will face a crunch to begin construction this year to take advantage of a program in the 2009 stimulus law.

The stimulus allows renewable project developers to access federal grants, covering 30 percent of their costs, in lieu of traditional tax credit financing, which dried up during the downturn.

As we also have noted, the punishing winter storms that have battered Washington are fueling climate change deniers like Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), whose family apparently built an igloo and called it Al Gore's new home.

The Los Angeles Times' blog Greenspace has a nice, short take on how you can have global warming and still get storms like Snowmageddon.

"The cold weather spells in the East have been linked with an 'El Nino' year and a shift in the arctic oscillation that sent a jet of cold air down the Eastern United States and elsewhere," the blog notes. Lost in the hype: Alaska has been enjoying unusually warm weather.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that FirstEnergy Corp. agreed to a $4.7 billion takeover of Allegheny Energy Inc. 

Read more...

More on the controversy surrounding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Union of Concerned Scientists comes to the U.N. panel's defense in response to questions regarding its credibility. Those questions stem in part from an apparently faulty claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 due to global warming. See the response here.

The IPCC has said it regretted its estimate about those glaciers, which was included in the second of four reports the panel issued on climate change. UCS says basically that one poorly sourced statement shouldn't discredit the whole report. IPCC's 2007 climate study remains the most comprehensive synthesis of climate change science to date, according to UCS.

The Associated Press, though, has a story today about growing concern within the scientific community about that same report that included the Himalayan glacier claims. The report tries to estimate the possible effects on humans and the environment due to climate change, and according to some scientists, relies on more subjective data.