"Oil prices tumbled below $50 a barrel on Monday, spooking global financial markets and signaling that the remarkable 50 percent price drop since June was continuing this year and even quickening."

"LONGMONT, Colo. — This northern Colorado city vaulted onto the front lines of the battle over oil and gas drilling two years ago, when residents voted to ban hydraulic fracturing from their grassy open spaces and a snow-fed reservoir where anglers catch smallmouth bass."

"Groups that support teaching students about the evidence showing that humans are contributing to a global rise in temperatures are speaking out against West Virginia’s changes to the state’s new K-12 science education standards."

"Republicans are putting the Keystone XL pipeline at the top of the agenda as they seek to move a stack of legislation to President Obama’s desk in 2015."

"Some of the stories that gripped our attention in 2014 will probably be forgotten in a few years — if not a few weeks. But there's one story that President Obama argues we'll be living with for decades to come."

Clean drinking water is something most U.S. residents take for granted -- until something goes wrong. And when something does go wrong, as it did in Charleston, W.V., this year, there are political consequences.

"An effort to kill California's first-in-the-nation state ban on single-use plastic grocery bags advanced this week after bag makers spent several million dollars on a campaign to gather signatures for a proposed ballot initiative to overturn it."

"Texas is not Kentucky. Or West Virginia. That's clear to everyone."

"President says pipeline’s extension from Canada to Nebraska would do little to reduce American energy prices, and generate only a limited number of US jobs"

"A longtime energy aide to Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) who spearheaded the state's climate change initiatives will become the new director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency that oversees oil and gas and renewable energy development on roughly 1.7 billion acres of federal waters."