Environmental Politics

"The Obama administration will require that vehicle fleets average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, according to people with knowledge of the talks. That would mark a sharp increase in efficiency."

"Government officials in the Northern Mariana Islands violated ethics rules when they handed an almost $400,000 contract to the [island commonwealth's] former Commerce secretary's new company, according to the Department of Interior's inspector general."

"To call the Interior and Environment spending bill the House will debate this week partisan would be an understatement."

"A federal magistrate refused Wednesday to order the White House to provide BP PLC with emails by a former top adviser to President Barack Obama about the administration's response to last summer's massive Gulf oil spill."

Congress created a cap-and-trade plan for air pollution from the nation's aging fleet of power plants 20 years ago. In its time, it was successful in cutting pollution, but today, tattered by politics and lawsuits, its future is uncertain.

"In the face of drastic funding cuts and a hostile political environment, U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has told her top deputies to rank which of their programs they deem to be essential and which could fall on the budgetary chopping block."

The president of Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish lambasted as untrue a ProPublica report that local officials -- nicknamed "spillionaires" -- had cashed in by manipulating cleanup contracts after the BP oil spill. New documents, however, support ProPublica's investigative findings, and raise questions about whether the official testified truthfully under oath before Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-CA) House Oversight Committee.

"The House of Lords has taken the unprecedented step of publishing a 'cease and desist' letter on its website demanding that Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate sceptic and the UK Independence party's head of research, should stop claiming to be a member of the upper house."

"U.S. EPA announced Friday that it decided against a proposed rule that would have required contractors to test dust to prove the absence of lead following renovations."