Amanda Little makes the case that the road to our new energy future runs not through Washington, DC but through the prairies of west Texas, where wind energy can be cheaply harvested, and the South Bronx, where activists like Majora Carter are leading a new environmental movement based on protecting public health. The great energy debate will be settled not with a single headline-making event, Little argues, but gradually as dropping clean energy prices first converge with rising dirty energy prices, then leave them in the dust.

BP’s middle-of-the-night made-up claim about how much their wellhead is spilling, and the Coast Guard’s and NOAA’s repetition of that number without insisting on independent verification by outside experts and instruments, makes these federal agencies look incompetent. BP, through its duplicity and incompetence, has infected the exact agencies Americans, and especially American scientists want to work with and help: the Coast Guard & NOAA.

These agencies must free themselves from the corporate self-dealing and self-protection umbrella that BP has thrown over them.

An independent scientific effort, funded by NOAA, has discovered “shocking” amounts of oil underwater, huge plumes that range up to three miles by ten miles wide, and about 300 feet deep, within many columns of the water in the Gulf of Mexico.

Blue Dog Caucus founder and former Oklahoma Congressman Bill Brewster’s firm Capitol Hill Consulting Group was hired to lobby lawmakers by Transocean, owner of the failed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.