This week, Obama’s Interior Department said it would not propose oil exploration off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines or the eastern Gulf of Mexico for at least seven years. “The changes that we are making today really are based on the lessons that we have been learning” since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

The Interior’s 2012-2017 offshore-drilling lease strategy will proceed “safely and responsibly” with offshore drilling “in the right ways and the right places,” he added.

Two key Atlantic Coast Democratic senators — Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Bill Nelson of Florida were thrilled Wednesday with the administration’s reversal. “I regret that it took the spill in the Gulf to have them come to that conclusion that there is no such thing as absolutely safe drilling,” Menendez told reporters.

While the official decision on Cape Wind isn’t expected until noon tomorrow, it’s looking like the nine year struggle over Cape Wind will be settled in favour of the the massive wind farm project’s approval.

The Washington Post has is citing a source close to the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, as saying that the secretary will approve Cape Wind.

Cape Wind, planned to have 130 wind turbines across 25 square miles of federal ocean space off the coast of Nantucket, will cost approximately $1 billion and be the first American offshore wind power project ever.

This project was recently officially opposed by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation on the grounds that it was wrecking the view from historical locales like Martha’s Vineyard.

Cape Wind was also strongly supported by six east coast governors who wrote a letter to Salazar last week asking to see the project come to fruition.

Ken Salazar announced this week that the Department of the Interior is temporarily barring the filing of new uranium mining claims on about a million acres near the Grand Canyon. The land is being “segregated” for two years so that the department can study whether it should be permanently withdrawn from mining activity.

Environmentalists have long contended that mining opens the Grand Canyon up to terrible environmental damage and that no new operations should be proposed when the old mining sites haven’t been cleaned up. There are close to 1,100 uranium mining claims are within five miles of the Grand Canyon National Park.

The protections offered by Salazar won’t include uranium mining claims already filed near the Grand Canyon. The former Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Rob Arnberger said he was glad of any protection that the Department of the Interior offers, but that permanent withdrawal is the goal. “Are we prepared to allow the landscape to be torn up adjacent to the park, to threaten the hydrological and the natural resources of that park?” Arnberger said. “My answer to that is no. Don’t open it up to exploration.”

At a public hearing in Atlantic City last Monday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar stated that he believed that most, and possibly all, coal power plants in the United States could be replaced by wind turbines along the East Coast.

“The idea that wind energy has the potential to replace most of our coal-burning power today is a very real possibility,” he said. “It is not technology that is pie-in-the sky; it is here and now.”

Salazar estimated that East Coast ocean winds could produce one million megawatts of power, which would account for almost five times the amount of power produced by all coal plants currently operating in the United States.

Not surprisingly, a spokesman for the American Coal Council, Jason Hayes, was more than a little sceptical about this possibility and pointed to roadblocks of wind power including wildlife impact and efficiency issues with transferring power back to shore.

The Atlantic City hearing was the first of four that will be held throughout the US which will examine how energy resources should be utilized with respect to the Obama administration’s energy policy. The Atlantic City Convention Center, where it took place, has the largest roof-mounted solar energy panels in the United States.