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Last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that his department and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are fast-tracking unconventional gas drilling permits in Utah’s Uintah Basin.

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Today in Salt Lake City, climate activist Tim DeChristopher (aka Bidder 70) finally gets his day in court after waiting almost 2 years since his original indictment for disrupting an illegal auction of oil and gas leases that would have opened pristine public lands in Utah to drilling. The district attorney has delayed the trial as many as 6 times as the government hoped DeChristopher would succumb to a plea bargain, but DeChristopher’s legal team has stood firm in demanding a public trial by a jury of his peers so that the public might hear the truth about the original BLM auction, which was a last-minute parting gift to the oil and gas industry from outgoing President George W. Bush.

Back in December 2008, DeChristopher showed up at a controversial oil and gas auction in Utah that was offering leases to companies to drill on environmentally-sensitive public lands, including Nine Mile Canyon and Dinosaur National Monument. An economics student at the time, DeChristopher was troubled by the Bush Administration’s efforts to skirt around required environmental assessments, essentially making the auction illegal in the first place.

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As the world prepares to meet in Bali next month at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, U.S. governors have decided to take action at home. Weary of Congressional foot-dragging, the governors have made regional agreements on global warming and joined hands in a concerted bid to generate public and political support for legislation now before the Senate. But can anything meaningful take place while President Bush is still in office?

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The converters and filters used to combat air pollution from cars won’t help to reign in global warming because they do nothing to reduce fuel consumption. To cut the carbon emissions that drive climate change, people need to drive smaller cars.