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U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, speaking to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner in a new interview. Obama went on to defend his nuanced positions on the Keystone XL pipeline and Canadian tar sands, arguing that while he was unhappy with Republican attempts to circumvent the pipeline approval process, Canada was likely to develop the tar sands no matter what [...]
It was two years ago today that the Deepwater Horizon—a top-of-the-line offshore drilling rig owned by BP and run by Transocean—experienced a sudden burst of gas from a three-mile long well its crew was drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, 40 miles south of the Louisiana coast. The combustible methane rushed up the well and [...]
Whenever President Obama isn’t talking about cracking down on subsidies for Big Oil, he’s usually hyping all the work his own Administration has done to support domestic oil production. He has a point—U.S. oil production has gone up under Obama. Unlike his predecessor, Obama doesn’t look much like an oil man, but he’s hardly gone [...]
Why was President Obama speaking at the small town of Cushing, Oklahoma this morning? Whether or not you know the answer to that questions probably predicts where you stand on energy policy. Cushing is the Pipelines Crossroads of the World—they even have a monument. The town is the central hub for American oil pipelines, feeding [...]
I’m a pretty even-tempered writer by nature. I like to withhold judgement for as long as possible. Even though I’m an environment writer, that attitude sometimes gets me in trouble with environmentalists who want me to come down harder on climate skeptics or the fossil-fuel industry. But I know just how difficult it is to separate [...]
Barack Obama likes to say that as President of the United States, he doesn’t “bluff” when it comes to foreign policy. But when it comes to energy, it looks like Obama might be willing to try the occasional fake out. Yesterday Reuters reported that Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron discussed the possibility of [...]
President Obama has been talking tough about what he sees as unfair Chinese trade policy since at least this year’s State of the Union speech, when the President boasted that his Administration had brought up trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate of his predecessor. (In former President George W. Bush’s defense, there was [...]
I have a brilliant idea that will solve the nation’s energy problem. We need to invest in a massive research program—I mean Apollo Project-sized—to invent a silver bullet. Because all I keep hearing is that we’re all waiting for a silver bullet to solve our energy woes, if only we could find one. Take President [...]
It’s Presidents’ Day as I write this, so if you were lucky enough to have the day off, give some thanks to Washington, Lincoln and all the other chief executives — even stinkers like James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Of course in modern American politics, every day is really Presidents’ Day — so central is [...]
There are no shortage of reasons why the Keystone XL pipeline has become such a hot button issue for environmentalists. Many worry about the risks the project could pose to the Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska, where the pipeline was originally designed to pass. Indeed, when President Obama rejected Keystone XL in January, his stated concern [...]
