This is great, California is going to be dropping some serious money on solar programs 3 BILLION!! dollars. Once you get past the idea that we spend about 6 billion A MONTH in Iraq, you will notice that this is a lot of money for a solar program.

Lighting up the solar industry, a California agency on Thursday approved $2.9 billion in solar incentives to encourage consumers to switch to sun power, creating the largest solar-incentive program in the United States.

The money will be used for rebates for solar Photovoltaic, solar water heating, and solar heating and cooling systems over 10 years, with 10 percent of the money slated for low-income customers and affordable-housing projects.

With 2005 being the hottest year on record worldwide, its about time someone (anyone) start doing something to get us off our oil addiction.

The year 2005 has been the hottest year on record for the planet, hotter than 1998, 2002, 2004, and 2003. More importantly, perhaps, this has been the autumn when the planet has shown more clearly than before just what that extra heat means. Consider just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the last three months:

—Arctic sea ice is melting fast. There was 20 percent less of it than normal this summer, and as Dr. Mark Serreze, one of the researchers from Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, told reporters, “the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover.” That is particularly bad news because it creates a potent feedback effect: instead of blinding white ice that bounces sunlight back into space, there is now open blue water that soaks up the sun’s heat, amplifying the melting process.

—In the tundra of Siberia, other researchers report that permafrost has begun to melt rapidly, and, as it does, formerly frozen methane—which, like the more prevalent carbon dioxide, acts as a heat-trapping “greenhouse gas”—is escaping into the atmosphere. In some places last winter, the methane bubbled up so steadily that puddles of standing water couldn’t freeze even in the depths of the Russian winter.