"A handful of the biggest oil and gas companies and their CEOs poured millions into a super PAC created to boost the election of Senate Republicans as the industry made a successful lobbying effort to repeal the 40-year-old ban on oil exports."

"ST. LOUIS — A Midwest environmental group is questioning the ability of the country's largest coal producer to guarantee it has enough money for future cleanup of its Illinois mines, and it's threatening to sue the state if regulators don't change their approach."

"£6bn wiped off stock market value of oil company as investors react to losses and increasing Deepwater Horizon liablities".

"As recently as 2011, shares in Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest private sector coal company, traded at the equivalent of $1,000. Today, they hover around $4 each. Over that time, investors who held the stock lost millions."

"AMES, Iowa — Tim Recker has been growing corn in this state his whole life, and using his crops to make ethanol almost as long, at first by the jar for his trucks, now by the barrel for the nation. That is in large part because Congress in 2005 mandated that oil refiners blend ethanol into gasoline."

"Regulators in California, home to more residential solar customers than any other state, agreed on Thursday to retain a system that compensates users of rooftop solar panels for their excess electricity."

"Call it the Saudi calculus. Oil prices were already plummeting 14 months ago when, at Saudi Arabia’s insistence, OPEC put the global petroleum industry on notice: The member countries would not try to prop up prices by cutting production."

"In Michigan, leaders talk about a "blue economy," everything from reviving waterfronts to lakefront tourism to new technology that cleans, treats or saves water. In Wisconsin, they're also linking water and economic revitalization. Nowhere are they testing the idea of a water tech economy more urgently than Milwaukee."

"A federal appeals court upheld the government’s new coal dust exposure rule for coal miners Monday, rejecting industry challenges to it."

"Plummeting coal prices have pushed almost half the debt issued by U.S. coal companies into default, and for miners and their investors there’s no end in sight."