A “level playing field” sounds inherently fair, so why should domestic solar manufacturing have to suffer for the sins of legacy energy production?

Meet your government, ladies and gentlemen. Josh Fox, the Academy Award-nominated director of the fracking documentary Gasland, was arrested today on Capitol Hill for attempting to film a public hearing. The GOP Committee did not want Fox filming their latest witch hunt.

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.

Small hints have been dribbled out to journalists ahead of tonight’s State of the Union Address, which in an election year invariably signals an attempt by an incumbent running for re-election to set the terms of the debate, to state what they will campaign on throughout the year. Looks like the focus will be on tax reform, housing, energy, but how will this President go to confront an obstructionist Congress and his own instincts?

After weeks of apprehension, the Environmental Protection Agency reversed itself and will step in to supply drinking water to residents of Dimock, PA, a de facto acknowledgment that fracking led to contamination of the water supply in this town along the Delaware River Basin.

“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.

We, humans – our whole ecosystem – cannot exist without water. There is no substitute. None. So, the questions of who “owns” the water on our Planet should be or major concern to each of us. Should water be owned privately or held jointly for the common good? Why do we not consider those who pollute water (like the operators of fracking operations) to be guilty of a major crime?

Dimock, PA, home to dozens of fracking wells and featured in the movie Gasland, experienced massive contamination with their water supply. Cabot Oil & Gas, the main fracking company, provided free water to the residents, under an order from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. But with a new governor, PA DEP let Cabot stop the water shipments. At first, the federal EPA said it would provide water, but then the EPA canceled the delivery. What now?

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.

I’m saving my “What to Look for in 2012″ listicle for tomorrow, but one of the issues that may not make the list, but which is terribly important, is the battle in the states over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. 2011 was the year when this issue finally bubbled up to the surface (pardon the pun) and into the consciousness of the public. The critically acclaimed Gasland came out in 2010, but anti-facking forces benefited this year from some scientific revelations. Independent studies for the first time identified fracking as a cause of methane contamination and water pollution, and late in the year, the EPA agreed in a case in Wyoming.