Our activists have just descended from the 400-ft smokestack of Progress’s Asheville Generating Station and been arrested. Progress Energy and Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK) are pursuing a merger that will make them the nation’s largest utility, with the power to either lead us forward with high-tech clean energy investments or throw us back to the industrial age.

And today, I’m officially announcing our campaign to make Duke Energy the clean energy company that North Carolina and the United States deserve.

Over the weekend I watched Earth Days, the PBS documentary by Robert Stone on the history of the environmental movement. The show closes with a discussion with Duke Energy CEO and how environmentalist and they all get along now. Then the folks at Greenpeace sent me the real story.

When I turned on the TV last night, I wanted to stand up and cheer. While watching President Obama’s State of the Union address, I felt much like I did when I watched his 2008 acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium in Denver. OK, that’s not true–not hardly. Reality has not been kind to Obama’s rhetoric, after all. But when Obama got to the energy section of the speech, I found much to applaud, not unlike in 2008. . . with some obvious caveats for his praise of dirty, dangerous, failed or flat-out fictional forms of energy production.

“Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.” This sunny tagline from the early days of atomic energy has more recently become a quickest way to sum up how dark and dismal its prospects are today–as in, nuclear power has proven itself to be unclean, unsafe, and prohibitively expensive. “Clean, safe and too cheap to meter” now sounds less like boastful marketing, and more like a schoolyard taunt.

The numbers of ways nuclear power plants have betrayed their Madison Avenue mantra has pretty much been the backbeat of this column for nearly ten months now, and 2012 keeps up the cadence.

Four fracking wells in northeastern Ohio have been shut down by the state, after an increase in seismic activity, which many believe has been caused by the fracking itself.

The $6 billion-a-year ethanol subsidy really will expire in a matter of days. But that may not spell the end of ethanol-based tax credits. Specifically, the $1.01-a-gallon production tax credit for cellulosic ethanol – made from switchgrass or wood chips or corn husks – is a priority for the renewable fuels industry. That production tax credit does not expire until next year, and the industry wants a five-year extension.

The Keystone XL pipeline will now either receive or be denied its construction permit by February 21, according to the schedule worked out in the two-month stopgap deal to extend the payroll tax, unemployment insurance and the doctor’s fix. But the ultimate fate of tars ands oil may not be decided for years.

As part of the omnibus spending bill, the federal government will delay enforcement of new regulations for increased energy efficiency in light bulbs. Republicans claim that this delay, achieved through blocking Energy Department funding for enforcement through Fiscal Year 2012, will “save” the incandescent light bulb, but in reality incandescent bulbs were never banned. And light bulb manufacturers put a lot of money and effort into meeting the standard, so they oppose the delay altogether.

With so many atrocious things happening in Congress — and necessary things not happening — it may seem odd to focus on a relatively minor provision in the omnibus spending bill that defunds a small program at the Department of Energy.

But the dim bulbs in the House and their Tea Party followers deserve attention for insisting on a measure that will raise your monthly utility bills, enrich coal and gas companies and increase global pollution. You have to be exceptionally stupid to accomplish all that.

TransCanada, the company in charge of the Keystone XL pipeline, has announced that they would re-route the pipeline away from the Nebraska Sand Hills, where it would pass over an aquifer that provides a good deal of water for much of the Great Plains.