BOULDER CITY, NV – President Obama touted solar energy as an “industry on the rise” and condemned Republican skeptics of this power source in his first stop on a nationwide energy tour.

“This is an industry on the rise. It’s a source of energy that’s becoming cheaper. And more and more businesses are starting to take notice,” Obama said, noting that 16 solar projects have been approved on public land since he took office.

But, standing in front of a vast field of solar panels set against a Nevada mountain skyline, Obama criticized those politicians who he said “make jokes” about alternative energy.

Using a new favorite catch phrase for lawmakers he considers outdated, Obama said, “If these people were around when Columbus set sail, they’d be charter members of the Flat Earth Society.”

The president toured the Copper Mountain photovoltaic facility in Boulder City, Nevada – the largest of its type in the country – before making his remarks, which were intended to highlight one pillar of his “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.

The Copper Mountain solar panel site was constructed in 2010 and produces enough solar energy to power more than 17,000 homes, according to plant’s owner company Sempra Generation. Most of the homes it powers are in Southern California, not Nevada.

While the bulk of the project was financed with private money, it did receive about $40 million in federal tax credits – the sort of funding Obama said the federal government should continue to provide in order to jump-start emerging industries.

He acknowledged, however, that such government investments sometimes do not pay off – an indirect reference, perhaps, to the Solyndra solar power company that went bankrupt in 2011 despite receiving $535 million in federal stimulus loan guarantees.

“Each successive generation recognizes that some technologies are going to work, some won’t; some companies will fail, some companies will succeed,” Obama said.

But he likened such failures to the trail-and-error of now-established industries like automobiles and airplanes, which he noted once were both fledgling technologies themselves.

“Not every auto company succeeded in the early days of the auto industry. Not every airplane manufacturer succeeded in the early days of aviation.”

Obama also compared the Copper Mountain solar facility to an earlier federal energy project – the Hoover Dam, for which Boulder City, just 20 minutes away, was originally constructed as a suburb for dam builders during the 1930s.

“Eight decades ago, in the midst of the Great Depression, the people of Boulder City were busy working on another energy project that you may have heard of. Like today, it was a little bit ahead of its time,” Obama said, referring to the dam. “Even today it stands as a testimony to American ingenuity, American imagination and the power of the American spirit.”

Perhaps coincidentally, Obama’s praise of the Hoover Dam came just days after the government-funded project was mentioned by Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney as an example of the kind of large-scale construction projects America is capable of.

“We once built the interstate highway system and the Hoover Dam. Today, we can't even build a pipeline,” Romney said Monday in Illinois, referring to the stalled northern portion of the Keystone oil pipeline.

(Obama’s energy tour is not considered by the White House to be an official campaign jaunt.)

It was only 10 days ago Olympics Minister Hugh Robertson declared that recent worries over the London 2012 budget were subsiding.

Pointing to the £500m of contingency untouched in the last three months, Robertson said he was as confident as he could be that the Games would not exceed the £9.3bn public sector funding package.


Today's report by the Public Accounts Committee seems to agree with him, with PAC chair Margaret Hodge insisting the Games are "on track to be delivered on time and within budget".

But then the report also contradicts that assessment by arguing that the true cost of the Games could be nearer £11bn once the £766m price tag for buying the Olympic Park land and £826m of legacy projects are taken into account.

Of course, it is not the first time we have heard this argument. And many people find it hard to understand why some elements of public expenditure fall within the £9.3bn funding package while others do not.

For example, there will inevitably be security costs beyond the £475m set aside in the Olympic budget. If that money comes out of the Metropolitan Police or Home Office budgets, should that be considered an Olympic cost?

And what of the funds spent by other government departments, such as the Foreign Office, whose job it will be to look after visiting dignitaries and heads of state. Is that an Olympic cost?

It used to be sufficient for the government to say the £9.3bn was an infrastructure budget, set up to pay for the venues of the Olympic Park.

But with that money now being used for so many different areas of the project - security, ceremonies and other operational requirements associated with the actual staging of the Games - that argument no longer holds.

So in that sense it is right that the PAC should question whether the real bill is much higher and to call for a full and thorough audit of all the public money that has been spent on putting on the Olympics when the Games are over.

On the two specific points raised by the PAC, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport is clear that they should be treated separately to the £9.3bn.

It says the £766m for the land acquisition will be repaid once the site is sold after the Games. Less convincingly perhaps, it argues that the £826m for legacy projects comes from "existing business as usual" budgets.

Most people will look at all this and find it meaningless to quibble over which department is spending what on the Olympics. Ultimately, it all comes from the same source and "Olympo-cynics", as Boris Johnson calls them, will say it is money that should not have been spent at all, especially when there is such a squeeze on the public finances.

The PAC report also flags up concerns about the pressure on the budget of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog), which was always supposed to be a separate and entirely privately-funded enterprise.

But almost £1bn of public money is now being spent through this committee (Locog), while the PAC says the government, as the ultimate guarantor, could end up on the hook for even more money.

With this in mind, it is still worrying that, despite all this taxpayers' money being pumped into the Locog, it remains subject to less scrutiny than government departments and publicly funded bodies like, say, the Olympic Delivery Authority.

Locog has already been heavily criticised by the London Assembly for being overly secretive on the controversial issue of ticketing. Perhaps the time has come for London 2012 officials to become much more open with us.

Almost half of the world's seabirds have populations that are thought to be in decline, according to a new review.

One of those is the Balearic shearwater, which can be found in UK waters in the summer.

The review also found that 17 out of 22 species of the albatross family are threatened with extinction.

Conservationists say commercial fishing is one of the key threats to seabirds with large numbers killed as a bycatch in nets and on lines.

Another is the impact that invasive species such as rats and feral cats have on breeding colonies, either damaging habitats or eating chicks and eggs.

Some of the most important breeding colonies are on remote islands in UK overseas territories. Last year an Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) project, part-funded by the UK Government, carried out a programme to eradicate rats on Henderson Island in the South Pacific.

Helicopters guided by GPS dropped rat poison pellets on the island, which is the only known breeding site of the endangered Henderson petrel.

Grahame Madge of the RSPB said: "Without projects like this, these seabirds would have a finite life. On Henderson Island the rats were bringing birds towards extinction."

A pilot study is being carried out to look at the feasibility of removing mice from another important breeding site, Gough Island in the South Atlantic.

Japan has ended its whaling season with less than a third of its annual target, said the country's Fisheries Agency.

There have been several clashes between the activists and whalers in the past months.

In January, three activists said they suffered cuts and bruises after clashing with a Japanese ship, the Yushin Maru No 2, about 300 miles north of Mawson Peninsula off the coast of Antarctica.

The Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), which sponsors Japan's whaling activities, said the activists were trying to ''sabotage'' the Yushin Maru, throwing ropes with hooks attached and also hurling glass bottles of paint.

The vessel was one of the security ships escorting the whaling fleet.

The week before the incident, Japan handed three anti-whaling activists who had boarded a whaling support ship back to Australian authorities.

"The catch was smaller than planned due to factors including weather conditions and sabotage acts by activists," AFP news agency quoted an agency official said. "There were definitely sabotage campaigns behind the figure."

The agency said the fleet had departed "as scheduled".

A deadly and infectious fungal disease first struck Mexican salamanders in the 1970s, found a new study. From there, it spread through Guatemala and Costa Rica over the next two decades.

As the first study among salamanders to document the history of an epidemic of the sickness, the research helps verify the fungus (known as Bd, for Batrachyochytrium dendrobatidis) as a major cause of widespread amphibian collapse in current decades. Some 40 percent of frogs, toads and other amphibian species are presently in decline.

The findings could also lead to enhanced ways of slowing or preventing the spread of Bd and similar outbreaks in the years to come.

"This really shows how devastating this disease can be," said lead author Tina Cheng, a graduating master’s student in ecology at San Francisco State University. "Up until now, it was not known that this pathogen had any bang on salamanders, and many are highly threatened right now."

Animals that become tainted with the fungus develop chytridiomycosis. They shed their skin and become lethargic. Sickened salamanders lose their tails. Frogs lose weight and become so insensitive that they fail to turn themselves over when put on their backs. Death comes in a matter of weeks.

Since the discovery of Bd, researchers have associated the fungus to the collapse of frog and toad populations in California, Australia, Panama and Peru. Some species have already gone extinct because of it.