Last week New York joined a growing list of states opposed to oil and gas drilling off their coasts. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “Save Our Waters” bill prohibit oil and gas leasing, the construction of offshore oil and gas infrastructure on state-owned land, and the transportation of North Atlantic crude oil from offshore wells on the…
Regional grid operators filed comments on efforts to enhance the resilience of the bulk power system in a proceeding initiated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) after rejecting a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Rick Perry to subsidize coal and nuclear power plants. The comments by the nation’s federally overseen regional transmission…
On Monday, President Donald Trump said “we’re not backing down” on his intent to propose steel and aluminum tariffs that some legislators and analysts worry could have a negative effect on the U.S. energy industry and undercut the president’s goal of “energy dominance.” Trump shared his desire for the tariffs—25 percent on steel imports and…
President Donald Trump’s $4.4 trillion 2019 budget proposal, released Monday, echoed themes from the previous year’s budget priorities: steep cuts to domestic programs with large increases for defense. It outlines leaner budgets across federal agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Trump’s proposed budget, which was assembled before the…
In his first State of the Union speech, the words climate and energy barely received a mention from President Donald Trump. What he did say about energy boiled down to only a few sentences. “We have ended the war on American energy—and we have ended the war on beautiful, clean coal,” Trump said. “We are…
Last week I received news that one of my most respected high school teachers had died in Lahore Pakistan after a long and successful career of inspiring young minds to achieve excellence in Mathematics and Computer Science. Contrary to what you may expect, this teacher was not a Pakistani male but rather an American female…
The five members of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Monday unanimously rejected a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking from the Department of Energy (DOE) to change its rules to help coal and nuclear plants in the electricity markets FERC oversees (subscription). Instead it opened a new proceeding in which it calls on regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and independent system…
A study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that more than a quarter of Earth’s land will become significantly drier even if the world manages to limit warming to the Paris Agreement goal of less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Limiting the temperature rise to the agreement’s more ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius could significantly reduce the amount of land affected….
China, the world’s top polluter, unveiled plans for an emissions trading scheme on Tuesday. This carbon market, which would allow facilities to trade credits for the right to emit planet-warming greenhouse gases, would initially start with China’s power sector. It would include approximately 1,700 utilities that each emit more than 26,000 tons of carbon a year—adding up to more than 3 billion…