"It's been a busy week for anyone following the national debates over hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking,' the controversial method used to cut into shale rock to extract natural gas. In New Jersey, a strong bipartisan majority in both chambers of the legislature approved a bill banning fracking in the state as its neighbor to the north, New York, appeared ready to end its moratorium on the practice."
"In 2004, a flamboyant Oklahoma City multimillionaire took out his hefty checkbook for what you could call the political equivalent of a wildcat well - and he struck a gusher, right here in Pennsylvania. The $450,000 in campaign checks that energy mogul Aubrey McClendon wrote that fall helped elect a man he said he'd never even met - a relatively obscure GOP candidate for Pennsylvania attorney general, Tom Corbett."
"The owner of the West Virginia coal mine where an explosion killed 29 men last year kept two sets of books on safety conditions -- an accurate one for itself and a sanitized one for the government, federal regulators said Wednesday."
"It took farmer Ghulam Hussain almost a year to start re-building his house, destroyed last year in floods that left vast swathes of Pakistan underwater, and disrupted the lives of more than 18 million people. Now, his small, two-room mud and brick house -- just a few hundred meters from the Indus River -- is almost complete, but he is worried as to how long it will survive."
"U.S. EPA [Tuesday] issued a final rule on how gasoline stations must label fuel with up to 15 percent ethanol content (E15), marking a step toward legal sale of the fuel and drawing criticism from several groups that said the labels will not do enough to prevent consumers from misusing it."
"Willie Soon, a U.S. climate change skeptic who has also discounted the health risks of mercury emissions from coal, has received more than $1 million in funding in recent years from large energy companies and an oil industry group, according to Greenpeace."
"Federal lawmakers called Tuesday on several agencies, including the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, the Energy Information Administration and the Government Accountability Office, to investigate whether the natural gas industry has provided an accurate picture to investors of the long-term profitability of their wells and the amount of gas these wells can produce."
"The Obama administration is telling American automakers that it would like cars and light trucks to average 56.2 miles per gallon by 2025 — a boost to fuel economy that would save consumers money at the pump and help with global warming but drive up the cost of automobiles."
"Near a nuclear power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a series of exhibitions in a large public relations building here extols the virtues of the energy source with some help from 'Alice in Wonderland.'"
"Despite criticism over perceived ties to oil and gas companies, judges of the New Orleans-based federal appeals court that frequently handles cases affecting the energy industry have made little effort to divest themselves of investments that could create conflicts of interest, according to new financial disclosure statements."
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