"SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Jerry Brown took a strong stand against coal on Friday, approving an East Bay lawmaker's bill to ban state funding for coal-related projects."

"Native Americans from reservations hundreds of miles away from North Dakota have joined the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s growing protest against a $3.8 billion four-state oil pipeline that they say could disturb sacred sites and impact drinking water for 8,000 tribal members and millions further downstream."

"The Iowa Utilities Board has approved a wind turbine operation it says will be the nation's largest wind energy project."

"As Kevin Widener was growing up on his family’s tobacco farm in the rolling hills of southwest Virginia in the 1990s, lawmakers and lawyers in Washington were waging a war on smoking."

"Environmental groups launched a broad assault today on federal oil and gas leasing, accusing the Obama administration of ignoring the climate impacts from leasing on hundreds of thousands of acres since early 2015."

The emissions cheating scandal badly damaged the businesses of many U.S. Volkswagen dealerships. Now VW has agreed to pay  them some $1.2 billion.

"Have oil and gas companies injected toxic materials into Texas groundwater sources? State regulators don't know, even though they agreed in 1982 to track injections into zones that could hold underground sources of drinking water, according to records obtained by The Texas Tribune."

"A ruling in the request by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to stop a four-state oil pipeline under construction near their reservation will come by Sept. 9, a federal judge said Wednesday."

"Oil companies facing an industrywide glut showed low interest Wednesday in bidding on offshore drilling rights in the western Gulf of Mexico."

"Numerous rulings by a former Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) favored energy companies his lobbyist wife worked for at the time, a DeSmog investigation can reveal."