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.

In one country, a government that campaigned on a move to green energy reacts to the nuclear crisis in Japan by reaffirming its commitment to nuclear power. In another country, a government that, only nine months ago, endorsed a plan to expand its reliance on nuclear power reacts to the Fukushima disaster by vowing to shut down all domestic nuclear reactors by 2022, and invest in conservation and alternative energy.

The latter of the two examples is, at present, actually the one more dependent on nuclear power for its domestic electricity production, so what can explain its more populist response to current events?

Three countries–one gets 29 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, one gets 26 percent from nuclear, and one gets 20 percent. Guess which one is winning the future. . . or, more to point, guess which one is not.

MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan hosts a live town hall from Oklahoma State University tonight at 8pm EDT. Panelists include: Boone Pickens, Oil Tycoon & Founder, BP Capital Management, Ashwin Madia, VoteVets.org, Bob Deans, Director of Federal Communications, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Former CIA Director James Woolsey.

Landowners between the wind generators that are being put in and the cities that need the power have been raising problems related to the scenery and their stake in that scenery.

Not only the Gulf disaster but several wars, tension with Iran, and terrorism directly or indirectly could link back to our addiction to oil, says former CNN foreign correspondent Tony Collings.

Companies that are in the business of wresting ex-plant and dinosaur-based energy-producing stuff out of the ground don’t give a crap about the earth and they don’t give a crap about the people who are doing the dirty, dangerous, health-destroying work that produces their profits.

Last week, Pew released a survey with the headline ‘Support for Alternative Energy and Offshore Drilling.’ The piece begins, “The public continues to favor a wide range of government policies to address the nation’s energy supply…”

That is accurate, but it doesn’t get at the most striking data. The most important finding in the survey is the fact that clean energy and mass transit investments are vastly more popular than nuclear investments and offshore drilling.

In an attempt to provide a warning about the “myths” of creating green jobs, a Washington Post Op-Ed by a writer with a GE affiliation gets the math hilariously wrong.