"If the Chevy Volt's $40,000 price tag sounds a bit too steep, you could always go the do-it-yourself route of Oregon teenager Ashton Stark. He just finished a yearlong conversion of his grandfather's 1972 Volkswagen Super Beetle into an electric car."

"The House of Representatives on Friday approved the toughest reforms ever to offshore energy drilling practices, as Democrats narrowly pushed through an election-year response to BP's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico."

"Environmentalists are suing U.S. EPA over a rule that aims to regulate greenhouse gases from only the largest industrial sources, arguing that the agency exempts too many big polluters."

"The EPA says that the brew of oil and dispersants still swirling in the Gulf of Mexico can be highly to moderately toxic to marine organisms at certain concentrations determined in a lab setting. The agency did not say whether those acute toxic levels are present in the open waters of the Gulf."

"Scientists say this year that the 'dead zone' area that forms every summer in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest ever measured."

"The BP spill is by far the world's largest accidental release of oil  into marine waters, according to the most precise estimates yet of the well's flow rate, announced by federal scientists on Monday."