President-Elect Barack Obama and Congress have made it pretty clear that infrastructure needs like roads, bridges and electric transmission lines are going to be funded as a part of the stimulus package expected next month.

Idaho will naturally fit in to programs for roads, bridges and sewers. But it’s not as clear how Idaho might benefit from electric line transmission. Idaho’s private utilities are already working on new transmission lines east and west.

Idaho is in the running again for a nuclear reactor company.

Los Alamos-based Hyperion Power Generation Inc. want to mass produce nuclear reactors and it is considering New Mexico and Idaho Falls as sites for its factory, The Sante Fe New Mexican reported.

Meanwhile, nuclear power advocate Dan Yurman suggests

The debates over global warming are shifting with the election of Barack Obama throwing a curve in the rest of the world's position on the issue. European countries could simply blame George Bush for the lack of meaningful action on climate change.

While I was debating one of my regular contributors I came back across this thoughtful report that explains the science of the Arctic melting the best I've seen.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2005/11/29/science/1194816481964/the-big-melt-the-arctic-ice-cap.html

Boisian Kathy Steinbach’s vision for a new national monument that contains Idaho’s most moving waterfalls, pure, clear springs bubbling out the ground, home for grizzly bears and priceless hot springs connected to Yellowstone’s geysers will have to wait.

It doesn’t appear that President Bush is going to set aside 200,000 acres in the Caribou Targhee National Forest as Mesa Falls National Monument. Steinbach, an Idaho Statesman reader, made the recommendation in response to our appeal for nominations to send to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.

Dirk Kempthorne had hoped the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would have been able to complete a review of the status of greater sage grouse before the end of his term.

But it appears that Kempthorne is not going to be able to decide whether to list or not to list the sage grouse that is the canary in the coal mine of the health of millions of acres of sagebrush steppe habitat across 11 western states.

When Dan Reicher joined the Department of Energy in 1993 as a special assistant to then Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary he came as one of the young lions who had stormed the gates and were ready to shake up the nuclear establishment they had spent their career fighting.

Utah Author Terry Tempest Williams has walked through her life in the footsteps of ecologist Aldo Leopold.

On the wings of her lyrical prose, in books like the classic “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” Williams has carried us through the “world of wounds” Leopold said in his essay “Round River,” was the unfortunate penalty of an ecological education.

Two new names are emerging as possible nominees for Interior Secretary.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that Democratic Rep. Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona is being vetted by President-elect Brack Obama’s transition team. The son of a migrant worker and chair of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, has been a harsh critic of Bush Administration public land policies and a leading voice for mining reform.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski has an ambitious plan to improve its transportation infrastructure. He announced earlier this month a $1 billion investment in roads, rails, bridges, mass transit and port funding. It includes charging stations and other infrastructure necessary for electric cars.