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We are hot and heavy into election season, and there is a lot of buzz about “jobs.” We hear about job-killing regulations (mostly from Republicans) and the wonders of green jobs (mostly from Democrats). All this, of course, is aimed at tying favored policy options to something the average voter can understand, the need for […]

The U.S. has been blessed with enormous quantities of natural resources yet has long been a net energy importer. The shift from global purchaser to global supplier of fossil fuels is accelerating.

Washington, D.C., July 14, 2012 — A group of mainstream conservatives and representatives from Washington environmental groups have been meeting over recent weeks to revive the idea of a U.S. carbon tax as a way to combat alleged man-made global warming. The aim is to have a package of proposed laws to bring up when […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week promulgated a final rule that does not revise the greenhouse gas (GHG) permitting thresholds that were established in Step 1 and Step 2 of the GHG Tailoring Rule. The final rule, which comes just days after a federal appeals court ruled the EPA was “unambiguously correct” in its interpretation of the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, is the third step of the agency’s phased-in approach to GHG permitting under the Clean Air Act.

Utilities in the Canadian province of Alberta were on Monday forced to institute rolling blackouts as soaring summer temperatures drove demand for electricity to an all-time high and six generators–four coal plants and two natural gas plants–entered unplanned outages.

Mississippi Power on Monday asked the Mississippi Supreme Court to review the June 22 unanimous denial by three commissioners of the Mississippi Public Service Commission (MPSC) of the company’s request to recover financing costs for its 582-MW Kemper County Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plant.

Finnish utility Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO)—operator of the Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear power plant under construction in Finland, a project that could be the world’s first EPR reactor but that has faced costly delays—must release €125 million ($155 million) of withheld payments to an AREVA-Siemens consortium, an international arbitration court ordered last week.

Ontario’s provincial government has persuaded the owner of an unpopular 280-MW natural gas-fired power plant that was already under construction in the City of Mississauga to relocate the project to an existing power plant site in southwestern Ontario. The agreement settles legal challenges to the government’s proposals to cancel the project.

Dr. Allison Macfarlane, an expert on nuclear waste issues and a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, was on Monday sworn in as the 15th person chosen to lead the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). She will serve a term ending June 30, 2013.

About 700 nuclear engineers on Monday joined 144 others in a strike that has lasted more than a month, after failing to reach a labor pact with Candu Energy, a subsidiary of Canada’s SNC-Lavalin Group.