Opening these airwaves could lead to the possibility of building a nationwide wireless network and spur innovation in Internet technologies. If the FCC votes in favor of the proposal—as it is expected to do unanimously—huge portions of wireless spectrum will be available all over the country, including 40 percent of the spectrum in the Dallas-Ft. Worth and 74 percent in Juneau, Alaska.

This could be the easiest way to bring high-speed broadband access to all Americans. The available spectrum can penetrate walls, relay large amounts of data, and travel longer distances than signals on other frequencies, which would allow it to reach almost everyone in the United States. And a wireless system operating on these spectrum bands would definitely be less costly, time intensive, and disruptive than laying wire across the entire country.

But major TV broadcasters, including ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, strongly oppose such a project, along with some sports groups such as Major League Baseball and NASCAR, who argue that an increase in signals could disrupt their own broadcasts and communication.

Even former FCC Chief Economist Thomas Hazlett and Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith—despite opposing the proposal—pointed out in the Wall Street Journal last month that, “today’s digital transmissions can be tightly packed. It is now easily possible to deliver 50 digital signals using just eight TV channels of bandwidth.” The FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology confirmed this conclusion on October 15th, saying that its laboratory and field tests show that opening up the airwaves will not disrupt signals. The FCC’s report further recommended that requiring portable devices to have sensing technologies and a geo-location database would ensure protection for broadcasters.

Opening the airwaves is supported by groups ranging from Google—who launched a “Free the Airwaves” campaign in response—to the New America Foundation, the Wireless Innovation Alliance, and Free Press. This support is for good reason. Access to the powerful, new broadcast spectrum will expand possibilities for wireless innovators of all stripes and potentially give more Americans better access to the Internet and new technologies that we can’t even imagine yet.

UPDATE: As projected, the FCC voted 5-0 to open the white spaces.

Carbon dioxide emissions from energy sources increased a total of 1.6 percent last year, or 96 million metric tons. To give this number some perspective, it’s as if we added 14 million more cars to the road. Alexandra Kougentakis points out that this “single largest year-over-year increase since Bush took office.”

The biggest increases were in emissions from residential and commercial electricity, which rose a combined 3 percent. Residentially, this is no doubt largely due to increased heating and cooling from last year. Commercially, the number one emissions producer in 2007 was coal-fired electric plants, which added 35.3 million more metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2006 than 2007. But natural gas plants, which have been seen as way to reduce emissions, actually saw a greater increase in their total carbon dioxide emissions—35.6 million more metric tons.

Bush may have claimed, after the 2006 decrease, that, “We are effectively confronting the important challenge of global climate change through regulations, public-private partnerships, incentives, and strong economic investment.” But that it clearly not the case.

We need bigger, more effective ideas if we’re going to reign in emissions from power plants. The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act is unlikely to pass through Congress this year, but it does lay the groundwork for the kind of plan that we need to set ourselves on a course to steadily reduce emissions.

The bill would establish a carbon cap-and-trade program, which would encourage companies to upgrade and innovate their systems in order to reduce emissions by setting a cap and putting a price tag on the amount of carbon dioxide that they can produce. It may seem like a stretch to think that we’ll be able to get utility companies to buy or trade credits for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit, but there’s already a successful model of just such a program.

Back in 1990, the Clean Air Act set up a cap-and-trade system for the sulfur emissions that cause acid rain. Not only did the program meet its goals; it surpassed them. Companies reduced their emissions faster and at one-tenth of the predicted cost.

We should let these new numbers from The Energy Information Administration serve as a wake up call. Just keeping our fingers crossed isn’t enough to make carbon dioxide emissions go down. We need a plan.

New advancements in stem cell research that have created pluripotent stem cells from non-embryonic sources have brought the necessity of embryonic stem cell research into question. Why get into the politics of embryonic research when you can create the same research from adult cells?

But Jonathan Moreno, in a video interview with the Center for American Progress, explains that, “we’re not going to know for a number of years if adult stem cells can do everything that we believe embryonic stem cells could do under the right conditions. Some recent research, for example, shows that the older the person from whom the skin cell is taken, the harder it is to reprogram that adult cell into a pluripotent stem cell.” What’s more, “even if adult stem cells do work, human embryonic stem cells are needed as comparisons to see if those adult stem cells really do approximate in a useful way the qualities of human embryonic stem cells.” Watch the video:

President Bush’s repeated failure to allow embryonic stem cell research legislation to move forward, despite strong majorities in both houses of Congress who support the legislation, is blocking progress in the life and medical sciences in the United States. Americans agree by a very wide 64 percent to 31 percent majority that Bush should not veto this legislation. Hopefully this time Bush will listen to the American public and scientific community. If not, the United States will only continue to fall behind in the race for lifesaving cures and lose American scientists.

The fact is that if the Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act is enacted, both of these studies will prove to be totally wrong.

Why? The short answer is that they predict future clean up results and costs based on a snap shot of current technologies. And history has taught us that industry almost always finds better, and cheaper ways to meet requirements. We can call this the innovation factor.

The best correlating example of how this has played out in the past is the Clean Air Act of 1990. The bill laid out a program for reducing the sulfur emissions that cause acid rain that is very similar to the carbon cap-and-trade program proposed by the Lieberman Warner bill.

Studies released in advance of the Clean Air Act vote in Congress predicted significant economic costs, including compliance costs of $2.7 to 4.0 billion a year, sulfur credits in excess of $700, increased electricity rates, and job losses. Yet when the final tallies came in, it turned out that the actual costs were only one tenth of what studies predicted; electricity prices actually went down; and the fewer-than-expected coal mine job losses were actually due to productivity improvement and other economic factors.

The Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act is far from perfect. It could require more greenhouse gas reductions in the early years and by 2050. It gives away, rather than auctions off, too many allowances early on, which could decrease the revenue to aid low and middle income families, invest in clean energy, and help developing nations adapt to the effects of global warming. And it fails to establish a new source performance standard for all new coal fired power plants to speed the development and deployment of carbon capture and storage technology.

Yet even with these shortcomings, history tells us that the bill will provide a strong and respectable first step in the urgent effort to reduce global warming pollution.