The Powder River Basin in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming can be as beautiful as its name suggests, but …
regulation
Why the Shale Gas Industry Needs Regulations for Fracking
You’ll rarely find a business in America—and especially one in the fossil-fuel industry—asking for more regulation. The default mode of industry groups like U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute (API) …
Under Pressure from High Gas Prices, Obama Looks to Streamline Domestic Oil Production
Whenever President Obama isn’t talking about cracking down on subsidies for Big Oil, he’s usually hyping all the work his own Administration has done to support domestic oil production. He has a point—U.S. oil production has …
Shale Gas: It’s Not the Fracking That Might Be the Problem. It’s Everything Else
If you were trying to invent with a term that sounds as scary as possible, you couldn’t do better than “fracking.” That’s industry terminology for hydraulic fracturing, the process used to get at unconventional natural gas and …
Clean Air At Last: The EPA Cracks Down on Coal Pollution
During his career as a running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Jerome Bettis made a habit of running over opponents—that’s why they called him “the Bus.” Now the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hoping that Bettis can …
On Coal, Jobs and Regulations
Jia Lynn Yang of the Washington Post has a nice piece this morning on the real impact of government regulations on employment, pivoting off the tightening environmental rules that have led some coal plants to close early. She finds that on the whole, regulations don’t have much impact on jobs:
Some jobs are lost. Others are created.
…
Study Shows that Bluefin Tuna Is Being Severely Overfished
There’s a reason why scientists like to refer to the bluefin tuna as the “tigers of the sea.” The fish can grow to as much as 1,500 lbs. (700 kg), and can swim over 40 mph. Scientists who’ve tagged bluefin tuna in the wild to track their movements are amazed at how far the fish can range, swimming from their breeding grounds in the …
Natural Gas Can Save the Climate? Not Exactly
I’m beginning to think solving this global warming thing is going to be really, really hard. We all know that the burning of carbon-intensive coal is just about the single biggest source of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why groups like the Sierra Club are fighting so hard to get America off coal—whether or not we burn …
Why Dropping the Gas Tax Would Be a Disaster
In the wake of last month’s game of chicken/debt deal compromise, the country was almost paralyzed again by another fiscal dispute—this time over funding for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Congress couldn’t agree to re-authorize the FAA’s operations, thanks to a disagreement between some Republicans and Democrats over a …
Egg Producers and the Humane Society—Mortal Enemies—Come Together on Battery Cages
The corporate food system in America has come under intense pressure in recent years over its environmental and humanitarian standards—most recently when a pork producer in Iowa was filmed by undercover allegedly abusing its animals, as my colleague Alexandra Silver wrote about recently. Usually industrial producers and green …