George Prescott Bush has kicked off a campaign to run for Texas land commissioner next year. Haven't heard much about this Bush? Just wait -- you will. He's the 36-year-old son of former Florida governor and 2016 presidential aspirant Jeb Bush and his Mexican-born wife Columba.

"A Spanish-speaking attorney and consultant based in Fort Worth, Bush is considered a rising star among conservative Hispanics, and his political pedigree is hard to match," writes the Associated Press. As the nephew of former President George W. Bush and the grandson of more-former President George H.W. Bush, he's got quite the dynasty behind him.

In a campaign video set to aggressively swelling music, Bush notes that Texas' land commissioner is responsible for "energy policy through the leases of our public oil and gas resources," and declares, "As Texans, we recognize the need for safe and reliable energy produced right here in our Lone Star State."

Drill, baby Bush, drill!

The New York Times editorial board and Times columnist Thomas Friedman have both come out swinging against the Keystone XL pipeline.

A strong editorial today calls on Obama to kill the project. The headline: "When to Say No."

[Obama] should say no, and for one overriding reason: A president who has repeatedly identified climate change as one of humanity’s most pressing dangers cannot in good conscience approve a project that — even by the State Department’s most cautious calculations — can only add to the problem. ...

Supporters of the pipeline have argued that this is oil from a friendly country and that Canada will sell it anyway. We hope Mr. Obama will see the flaw in this argument. Saying no to the pipeline will not stop Canada from developing the tar sands, but it will force the construction of new pipelines through Canada itself. And that will require Canadians to play a larger role in deciding whether a massive expansion of tar sands development is prudent. At the very least, saying no to the Keystone XL will slow down plans to triple tar sands production from just under two million barrels a day now to six million barrels a day by 2030. ...

In itself, the Keystone pipeline will not push the world into a climate apocalypse. But it will continue to fuel our appetite for oil and add to the carbon load in the atmosphere. There is no need to accept it.

In an op-ed published on Sunday, Friedman also calls for rejecting Keystone, but with a different spin. He thinks Obama will end up approving the pipeline, so he wants activists to make such a stink about it that Obama feels compelled to take other big steps to forestall climate change in exchange.

Activist and former White House adviser Van Jones came out swinging against the Keystone XL pipeline Friday night on CNN, warning that if it's approved it would be a big black mark on President Obama's legacy. His comments came a few hours after the State Department released a draft environmental impact statement finding that the proposed pipeline wouldn't have excessive environmental or climate effects. Jones:

What happens if you've got the Obama Pipeline -- now it's the Obama Pipeline -- and it leaks? His legacy could be the worst oil disaster in American farmland history. ...

If after he gave that speech for his inauguration, the first thing he does is approve a pipeline bringing tar sands through America ... the first thing that pipeline runs over is the credibility of the president on his climate policy. ...

The Obama Tar-Sands Pipeline should not the legacy of the president that gave that speech.

Watch the whole segment:

Less than two months ago, The New York Times dissolved its environment desk, eliminating its two environment editor positions and reassigning those editors and seven reporters.

Now the paper is swinging the hatchet again, shutting down the Green blog that had been home to original environmental reporting every weekday. The news was announced in a brief post on the blog today:

The Times is discontinuing the Green blog, which was created to track environmental and energy news and to foster lively discussion of developments in both areas. This change will allow us to direct production resources to other online projects. But we will forge ahead with our aggressive reporting on environmental and energy topics, including climate change, land use, threatened ecosystems, government policy, the fossil fuel industries, the growing renewables sector and consumer choices.

The paper says environmental policy news will move to the Caucus blog and energy technology news will move to the Bits blog.

But a Times insider tells Grist that the decision probably means an end to the significant amount of freelance reporting that appeared in the Green blog.

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) unveiled ambitious climate and energy legislation on Thursday. In our current sclerotic political environment, it has pretty much zero chance of passing in the Senate and negative chance of passing in the House. But many climate activists like it, and many climate deniers hate it, and the San Francisco Chronicle calls it "radical," so let's find out what all the fuss is about.

Here's a quick summary of the Climate Protection Act of 2013 from Sanders' office: "Under the legislation, a fee on carbon pollution emissions would fund historic investments in energy efficiency and sustainable energy technologies such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass. The proposal also would provide rebates to consumers to offset any efforts by oil, coal or gas companies to raise prices."

It's what green wonks call a "fee and dividend" bill. The Chronicle describes it as a "variant on a carbon tax":

It would impose a fee on carbon emissions at their source, such as coal mines, raising the price of fossil fuel energy.

But instead of giving the proceeds to the government, three-fifths of the money would be refunded to U.S. residents.

Such rebates could run into hundreds of dollars. The idea is modeled loosely on Alaska's "permanent fund" that distributes royalties from the state's oil and gas industry to every Alaskan resident. ...

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio -- GOP "it" boy, climate denier, dry-mouth sufferer -- gave the official Republican response to the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. His speech included some whining about climate action:

When we point out that no matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather -- [Obama] accuses us of wanting dirty water and dirty air.

And some Solyndra scaremongering. (Rubio tries to act like he's with it, but he's more than a year and a half behind the times on that faux scandal.)

One of the best ways to encourage growth is through our energy industry. Of course solar and wind energy should be a part of our energy portfolio. But God also blessed America with abundant coal, oil and natural gas. Instead of wasting more taxpayer money on so-called “clean energy” companies like Solyndra, let’s open up more federal lands for safe and responsible exploration. And let’s reform our energy regulations so that they’re reasonable and based on common sense.

Still, his most memorable eco-fail came when he awkwardly lunged for that bottled water. Talk about dirty water and dirty air. I can't believe he didn't bring his own SIGG.

Now that's Rubio's gone all establishment, the Tea Party turned to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to deliver its SOTU rebuttal. This line toward the top of the speech might have seemed promising:

The path we are on is not sustainable, but few in Congress or in this Administration seem to recognize that their actions are endangering the prosperity of this great nation.

Obama threw the climatespotters a bone in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. Multiple bones, even.

For all you climatespotters: the number is 3.

— David Roberts (@drgrist) February 13, 2013

That is, the president said the words “climate change” three times during the address, and made a mention of “dangerous carbon pollution” to boot. That’s compared to just one mention of “climate” in his 2012 SOTU, and zilch in 2011, for those of you keeping score at home.

This year’s climate callouts weren’t a surprise — Obama paved the way with his inaugural address last month, and in recent days his advisers had been hinting strongly that climate change would get a substantial nod in the speech.

Even though he also lauded increased oil and gas drilling, the section on energy and climate was substantial enough to encourage some greens:

The President's call to put a price on carbon pollution and solve the climate crisis was bold and meaningful. We must act now. #sotu

— Al Gore (@algore) February 13, 2013

"[F]or the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change," Obama said. He noted that "the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods — all are now more frequent and intense."

We've written a lot over the past month about the sharing economy -- how people are using apps and technology that make it easy to share cars, bikes, homes, couches, offices, tools, pets. More sharing = less resource use = all-around goodness.

And now the latest addition to the list of shareable items: kids. Yes, people are using websites and Facebook pages to find like-minded people with whom to share children. From The New York Times:

[A] new breed of online daters [is] looking not for love but rather a partner with whom to build a decidedly non-nuclear family. And several social networks, including PollenTree.com, Coparents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com, and MyAlternativeFamily.com, as well as Modamily, have sprung up over the past few years to help them.

“While some people have chosen to be a single parent, many more people look at scheduling and the financial pressures and the lack of an emotional partner and decide that single parenting is too daunting and wouldn’t be good for them or the child,” said Darren Spedale, 38, the founder of Family by Design, a free parenting partnership site officially introduced in early January. “If you can share the support and the ups and downs with someone, it makes it a much more interesting parenting option.”

The sites present what can seem like a compelling alternative to surrogacy, adoption or simple sperm donation.

Eve Ensler made it OK to say the word vagina out loud. Could she now inspire more of us to say climate change too?

Ensler, the artist and activist behind The Vagina Monologues, is currently making a big push to promote One Billion Rising, a global event planned for this coming Valentine's Day, aka V-Day. She's calling for people everywhere to "dance, rise up, and demand an end to violence against women." The campaign was inspired by a U.N. estimate that one in every three women will experience violence during her lifetime, meaning well over a billion of us.

And Ensler's activism extends beyond this critical issue. She has recently been drawing connections between the violence that men perpetrate against women and the violence that fossil-fuel companies perpetrate against the climate and all of us who depend on it. She talked to Grist recently about how these topics tie together and her hopes for her new campaign.

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Q. I was interested to read a piece you published in The Guardian last month comparing climate change and violence against women. You wrote, "Like climate change, only the patriarchs with power seem to be blind to the magnitude of the horrors," and you wrote about "the raping of the Earth through ecological destruction by the corporate powerful." Can you talk more about those common threads?

Back in 2011, the Obama administration postponed a decision on whether to build the Keystone XL pipeline until after the election. Now, this week, they've postponed it again until at least April.

But the White House can't kick the can down the road forever. Someday the decider must decide. What do you think Obama's decision will be?

• Climate blogger Joe Romm thinks the odds now favor rejection of the pipeline.

• TransCanada says in its internal communications (accidentally made external), "We continue to believe that Keystone XL will be approved."

• CNN: "most analysts still expect Obama to approve the pipeline. But the chances that he won't are increasing."

And you? What do you think?