"TEXAS CITY, Texas -- The cleanup of an unknown amount of thick, sticky oil that spilled into the Galveston Bay blocked the movement Sunday of about 60 ships, including three cruise ships, between the Gulf of Mexico and one of the world's busiest petrochemical transportation waterways."

"Forget Glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev and the arms race. What really broke the Soviet Union was the collapse of oil prices in the late 1980s. The late economist Yegor Gaidar, one of Boris Yeltsin’s prime ministers, wrote in 2007 that the empire’s fall could be traced back to Sept. 13, 1985, when Saudi Arabia, fed up with holding back supply to prop up prices, opened the spigots in a quest to recover lost market share. That day, he argued convincingly, was the beginning of the end."

"America’s largest industrial accident tore apart the town of Kingston, Tennessee. Five years later, has the industry learned anything?"

"Energy companies have been under increasing pressure from shareholder activists in recent years to warn investors of the risks that stricter limits on carbon emissions would place on their business. On Thursday, a shareholder group said that it had won its biggest prize yet, when Exxon Mobil became the first oil and gas producer to agree to publish that information by the end of the month."

"Wisconsin towns want regulatory control. Will the state take it away from them?"

"Dark clouds of soot and gases spewed by tractors, bulldozers and backhoes are becoming a thing of the past under new federal standards that have forced cleaner diesel engines this year."

"You might expect the biggest lease owner in Canada's oil sands, or tar sands, to be one of the international oil giants, like Exxon Mobil or Royal Dutch Shell. But that isn't the case. The biggest lease holder in the northern Alberta oil sands is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, the privately-owned cornerstone of the fortune of conservative Koch brothers Charles and David."

"The Interior Department announced Wednesday that it sold $872 million worth of leases in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico to major oil companies."

"Insects living in wetland grasses along Louisiana's coast oiled in the aftermath of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster are still dying, the result of exposure to remaining oil in the marsh almost four years later, Louisiana State University entomologist Linda Hooper-Bui said Wednesday."