When Barack Obama chose Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, he not only got someone with strong foreign relations credentials, but also someone who can walk the talk on the environment. Since Biden is the designated McCain attack dog, we're not expecting much in the way of specific environmental policy during tonight's speech.

Last weekend, Grist dissected Biden's environmental and energy voting record and campaign messages, including several video segments from his presidential bid. In case you're wondering, his lifetime -- that's lifetime --League of Conservation Voters score is 83 percent. Not perfect, but pretty darn good.

Among Biden's answers in the 2007 Grist interview, we were most impressed with his response to the question about clean coal: "Clean-coal technology is not the route to go in the United States, because we have other, cleaner alternatives. But I would invest a considerable amount of money in research and development of
clean-coal and carbon-sequestration technologies for export." Given that Obama often works clean coal into his campaign rhetoric -- including this unfortunate ad -- we wonder if Biden will fall in line.