Energy & Fuel

"Regulators in the United States knew they had to act fast. A train hauling 2 million gallons of crude oil from North Dakota had exploded in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, killing 47 people. Now they had to assure Americans a similar disaster wouldn’t happen south of the border, where the U.S. oil boom is sending highly volatile crude oil every day over aging, often defective rails in vulnerable railcars."

"During their careers as oil and gas inspectors for the Texas Railroad Commission, Fred Wright and Morris Kocurek earned merit raises, promotions and praise from their supervisors. ... But they may have done their jobs too well for the industry’s taste—and for their own agency’s."

"BERKELEY -- Oil trains that could roll through some Bay Area cities on their way to a Central Coast refinery will not carry volatile Bakken crude, but another type that comes with equally dire threats to the environment and public safety, environmentalists warn."

"A coalition of activists on Tuesday protested outside the office of the federal Bureau of Land Management in Reno to decry an auction of huge tracts of public land for private oil and gas exploration that they claim damages the environment and guzzles water in a time of drought."

"Some of the millions of abandoned oil and natural gas wells in the United States are still spewing methane, marking a potentially large source of unrecorded greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study released on Monday."

SAN PEDRO VILLAGE, Peru -- "It is a disaster hidden from the environmental leaders gathered inside the walls of a military compound in Lima on a mission to fight climate change."

"President Obama spoke in dismissive terms of the Keystone XL pipeline Monday during an interview on "The Colbert Report Monday, saying its modest benefits need to be weighed against its contribution to climate change, 'which could be disastrous.'"

"GARDI SUGDUP, Panama -- As the Obama administration makes headway at home in the fight against global warming, it has helped stoke record exports of fossil fuels that are contributing to rising levels of pollution elsewhere.

U.S. exports of diesel and gasoline have doubled since President Barack Obama took office, and the carbon embedded in them has meet political goals by taking it off America's pollution balance sheet. But that does not necessarily help the planet.

"The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected BP's challenge to its multibillion-dollar settlement agreement over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, which the oil giant complained has allowed payouts to some businesses that are unable to trace their losses to the disaster."