Forbes.com has an interesting editorial on why “all hope for action to limit climate change died” in 2010, when Senate Leader Harry Reid moved energy legislation this week with no firm caps on GHG emissions.

No doubt there are strong opinions on either side of the issue of what motivated the discussion of climate change and what caused Reid to move on energy legislation without GHG caps. This editorial writer suggests that a political issue “died” for political reasons.

Here’s another video from our friends at ACCCE.

In this video, we see more of the real people who rely on affordable energy for their every day lives, their jobs, and their well-being.

A soon-to-be-published IEA study calls for $10 trillion in new spending on renewable energy and carbon reduction technologies “to limit the rise in the Earth’s temperature.” According to the study, total expected spending will need to top $500 billion per year, over the upcoming 20 years.

This Wall Street Journal note suggests that current spending is approximately $100 billion per year and that this new IEA estimate is a 37% increase from last year’s estimate. Not surprisingly, the study suggests that developed countries, such as the U.S. and Germany, will need to shoulder the largest portion of these expenses.

The Alabama Policy Institute has a good video detailing the expected costs of the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade bill.

It’s increasingly interesting to see the divisions forming in the green community over the issue of using coal. While many environmental activists try to ignore the fact that we need the affordable, abundant/secure, and increasingly clean energy provided by coal, other memebers of the green fraternity are willing to admit that we need the always on, baseload energy that can only be supplied by a few energy options — coal being the most obvious of those choices.

An April 8^th Wall Street Journal article details some of the splits that are now fracturing the green community on this issue.

For decades, the coal industry has hummed quietly along, producing half of the electricity used in the U.S. We’ve kept ourselves out of the media, comfortable with our role as one of the country’s key energy resources. We “knew” that, despite the occasional bit of bad press, no one would ever seriously consider getting rid of coal-based energy.

Something has changed.