"A coal-fired power plant in Billings, Montana, will be mothballed starting in April 2015 because it will cost too much to comply with new emissions reductions required by the government, plant owner and operator PPL Montana said on Wednesday."

"America's hydraulic fracturing gold rush portends the greatest environmental disaster of a generation. ... The natural gas industry has spent $747 million lobbying state and federal officials over the past decade, allowing it to continue drilling in 34 states. Few Americans are any richer. But a whole lot more have horror stories to tell."

"BP shut a Norwegian oil and gas field after a potentially dangerous leak, the company said on Tuesday, six days after the incident forced the emergency shutdown of the facility."

"At least 26 people were killed and as many injured when a Pemex gas facility burst into flames in northern Mexico on Tuesday, one of the worst accidents to hit the state oil monopoly in recent years."

"HOUSTON -- With the prospect of rich new oil fields in tantalizing reach, Shell Oil announced on Monday that it was forced to put off completing wells in the Alaskan Arctic for another year after a spill containment dome was damaged during a testing accident."

"Rising seawater temperatures forced an unprecedented shutdown last month of a nuclear reactor on the Connecticut coast."

"TOKYO -- The Japanese government has decided to phase out nuclear power by sometime in the 2030s and shift the country in the direction of renewables, energy conservation and natural gas."

Oil and gas drilling can usually protect groundwater when enough effort is taken to install well casings and cement them properly. But even those safeguards may fail in karst formations, as the Bureau of Land Management's experience in New Mexico shows.