"Scientists up and down the West Coast are monitoring what appears to be a large-scale die-off of young Cassin’s auklets, small seabirds whose breeding grounds include a colony in the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco."
"The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday rejected parts of a key Texas clean-air plan, setting up a conflict with deep implications both for the state’s electricity mix and air quality across much of the country."
"As biotech masterminds and venture capitalists scramble to hatch a new generation of environmentally friendly fuels that can help power the average gasoline-burning car, they are confronting an unexpected obstacle: the White House."
"Federal officials will hold an auction in January for the rights to build wind turbines off Massachusetts’s shore, the largest sale of its kind."
"Global investment in tackling climate change fell for a second year in 2013 to $331 billion, largely due to a drop in the cost of solar power technology, according to an annual report on climate finance."
"For the solar and wind industries in the United States, it has been a long-held dream: to produce energy at a cost equal to conventional sources like coal and natural gas. That day appears to be dawning."
"Few people are alive today who would remember when wild turkeys teetered on the edge of extinction after almost being eaten into oblivion. But how that fate was avoided represents what is considered by some to be the greatest conservation success story in American history."
"North Dakota took on the oversight of a multibillion-dollar oil industry with a regulatory system built on trust, warnings and second chances."
"DuPont Co. ’s chemical plant in La Porte, Texas, for many years has gained a strong reputation among industrial-safety experts for migrating to safer chemicals. ... So when a gas leak at the plant earlier this month caused four employees—two of them brothers—to be fatally overcome by an industrial chemical called methyl mercaptan, some in the chemical safety world were taken aback."
"OSLO -- A global deal to combat climate change in 2015 looks more likely after promises for action by China, the United States and the European Union, but any agreement will probably be too weak to halt rising temperatures."
