The Shirley Sherrod saga has continued, as most of you know. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack (above) has apologized for firing the state rural development director. She is not inclined to take a job Vilsack offered.  The Post gives proper credit to CNN for getting the full story on Sherrod's situation. The Des Moines Register gives a good rundown on Vilsack's history on civil rights matters. And Talking Points Memo writes a story about how this situation is related to the Pigford settlement between USDA and black farmers who faced discrimination at the agency. (Sherrod was a Pigford plaintiff.)

Finally, Sherrod told the television talk shows this morning that she'd like to talk to President Obama, but not about her situation. "I'd like to talk to him about the experiences of people like me, people at the grassroots level, people who live out here in rural America people, who live in the South. I know he does not have that kind of experience," Sherrod said.

•The Federal Communications Commission has concluded that between 14 and 24 million Americans still lack access to broadband "and that the immediate prospects for deployment are bleak." Download the report here. The report concludes that universal deployment is not being reached "in a timely way" and that many of those affected "are poor or live in rural areas that will remain unserved without reform of the universal service program and other changes to U.S. broadband policy that spur investment in broadband networks by lowering the cost of deployment."

•Politico notes that even friends of the coal industry are saying that changes federal regulations and in markets for other energy sources could soon make coal, now the cheapest source of energy, one of the most expensive options for producing power.

“Regulations are coming in the future. If coal does nothing, coal will lose,” Sen. Byron Dorgan said in an interview with POLITICO. “The reason I have reached out to the coal industry is that they’ve been on the defensive position, not negotiating with anyone, and they’re going to lose under that. With or without carbon regulations, there will be a substantial conversion to natural gas, and coal will lose.”

We saw a couple of stories in our quick run through the news this morning. First, the energy reporter for the Washington Post, Steven Mufson, reminds us that Louisiana hasn't had an oil-free environment for some time, largely because the state has long accepted the degradations that come with large scale energy development. 

"Americans may be torn up by the BP oil spill and its destruction of the Gulf of Mexico's natural habitat -- and torn up we should be -- but that habitat has not been pristine for decades," Mufson wrote. "In many ways, Louisiana made its deal with the devil long ago." 

Mufson reminds us of the "resource curse," the economic paradox that countries and regions overloaded with mineral wealth are often poor. They have lower living standards, higher morality and less dynamic economies that areas with no mineral advantage. That describes Louisiana to a T. And he describes Louisiana's long and very close and forgiving attitude toward big oil and gas.

The Des Moines Register's Dan Piller writes about Michael Owen's (above) warnings that weeds are quickly growing resistant to herbicides such as Roundup. "I tell them to quit doing what they're doing now, because it won't work for long," said Owen, an Iowa State University agronomy professor. "Iowa is probably about two years away from a serious problem with glyphosate resistance, and it's better to react now than to wait until it's too late." 

Owen warns that farmers need to "mix up the herbicides" they use, to stem the development of chemical resistant weeds. Roundup-resistant weeds have already infected Southern cotton and grain crops, but have not yet made their presence known in Iowa's corn and soybean fields. 

The nation will need more than 500 new biorefineries to meet the goal of tripling biofuel consumption by 2022, according to a study released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The cost: $168 billion. 

The country's goal is to use 36 billion gallons of biofuel a year by 2022, a level set by Congress in 2007. In 2009, the US produced 10.75 billion gallons of ethanol, primarily from corn. That level should get to 12 billion gallons this year, according to the USDA. By 2022, 21 billion gallons of biofuels is to come from sources other than corn.

Philip Brasher, in the Des Moines Register, has a good summary of the study and of the problems such expansion of the industry is likely to encounter. "Biofuel developers have proposed a range of facilities that would make ethanol from material as diverse as wood, garbage and corncobs, but few of the projects have gotten off the ground. Industry officials say it has become virtually impossible to find investors willing to put money into the projects," Brasher wrote.

"Right now few if any banks are willing to work with biofuels," said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association. Cellulosic ethanol plants would cost more than four times the cost of corn ethanol plants, according to USDA estimates.

The nation's energy future is being created in rural communities. On the far eastern shore of Maine, a company is learning to generate electricity from the tides.