"The Interior Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) says it has begun a 'preliminary investigation' into reports that Secretary Ryan Zinke made phone calls pushing Alaska's senators to support a GOP healthcare bill or risk losing federal support for economic development efforts in their state."

"The real fight over America's energy future isn't in coal, despite the Trump administration's public focus on a mining revival. Rather, dozens of pipeline projects, making up one of the largest expansions of natural gas infrastructure in U.S. history, are where the fossil fuel action is."

"Workers laboring outdoors in southern states are wrestling with the personal and political consequences of a worsening environment."

"Southern Co.'s preliminary figures for its nuclear expansion in Georgia now put the new source of electricity on the grid no earlier than 2022 and push the total price tag for twin reactors to more than $20 billion."

"The Senate voted Thursday evening to confirm two of President Trump's nominees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), paving the way for the commission to have its first quorum in six months."

"It is August, the month when a new generation of black-legged ticks that transmit Lyme and other diseases are hatching. On forest floors, suburban estates and urban parks, they are looking for their first blood meal. And very often, in the large swaths of North America and Europe where tick-borne disease is on the rise, they are feeding on the ubiquitous white-footed mice and other small mammals notorious for harboring pathogens that sicken humans."

"Dealing a blow to the Trump administration and business groups, a federal appeals court will allow California and a half-dozen other states to intervene in litigation to defend U.S. EPA's 2015 ground-level ozone standard."

"The proposed Keystone XL pipeline survived nine years of protests, lawsuits and political wrangling that saw the Obama administration reject it and President Donald Trump revive it, but now the project faces the possibility of death by economics."

"Climate change is essentially tied with the Islamic State as the most-feared security threat across much of the world — except in the United States, where cyberattacks are considered a greater danger than global warming, according to a Pew Research Center report released on Tuesday."

"The Interior Department announced on Wednesday that the Upper Missouri River Breaks, a famous chunk of river in central Montana that holds a national monument designation, would remain fully protected by federal land-use restrictions."