From the BBC:

The government is due to announce its climate change bill, aiming to cut Britain's carbon dioxide emissions by 60% by the year 2050.

Ministers say the law gives the UK the world's first legal framework for transition to a low-carbon economy.

Environment Secretary David Miliband has rejected opposition calls for annual targets on reducing emissions.

"Changing your policy on the basis of one year's weather isn't a sensible way of doing things," he told the BBC.

"We think it's right that every five years we set carbon budgets in legislation, that we give business confidence about a 15-year period ahead so that we can really invest for the future," said Mr Miliband.

"Instead we need a framework of legislation which gives real confidence to business and to individuals about the way in which our country's going to change to meet the climate change challenge."

For tonight's purposes, here's a link to the annual report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Punk poetess and perpetual outsider Patti Smith, who sold few records but influenced many, ruminates on being admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame club.

BTW, Ain't It Strange is the title of a cut from Radio Ethiopia, her second album. I bought it on vinyl back in the day! :)

Some scientists, and not just the usual climate-change-denying cranks, are raising questions about whether Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth is unduly alarmist in some of its interpretations.

From a NYT commentary by oil industry watchdog Antonia Juhasz:

TODAY more than three-quarters of the world’s oil is owned and controlled by governments. It wasn’t always this way.

Until about 35 years ago, the world’s oil was largely in the hands of seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP. They are among the world’s largest and most powerful financial empires. But ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the governments, the companies have been trying to get it back.

Iraq’s oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world — have always been high on the corporate wish list. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.”

A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would, if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq’s oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.

The NYT's Andy Webster chats with singer Shane McGowan in Boston during the Pogues' annual St. Patrick's Day tour of the United States. Mr. McGowan starts by shitting on Wordsworth.