Days before a Shell drillship went aground in the storm-tossed Gulf of Alaska, it was clear that towing failures could spell disaster for the vessel, the crew and the marine environment, a company official told a U.S. Coast Guard panel on Monday. The Kulluk, having completed preliminary drilling on an exploration well in the Beaufort Sea, broke away from its tow lines, and support vessels attempting to regain control of the drillship developed their own engine and mechanical problems, Norman Custard, Royal Dutch Shell's Alaska emergency response leader, told the panel. Custard said he began planning for a crew evacuation on December 27, four days before the Kulluk grounded off Kodiak Island.

Federal regulators have indefinitely delayed a decision on the proposed restart of the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant in California, raising new questions Monday about whether the twin reactors will produce electricity again. The seaside plant between San Diego and Los Angeles has been dark since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water. Operator Southern California Edison wants permission to restart the Unit 2 reactor and run it at reduced power in hopes of stopping vibration and friction that was blamed for damaging tubing.

State environmental regulators determined that oil and gas development damaged the water supplies for at least 161 Pennsylvania homes, farms, churches and businesses between 2008 and the fall of 2012, according to a cache of nearly 1,000 letters and enforcement orders written by Department of Environmental Protection officials and obtained by The Sunday Times. The determination letters are sent to water supply owners who ask state inspectors to investigate whether oil and gas drilling activities have polluted or diminished the flow of water to their wells.

Extreme global warming is less likely in coming decades after a slowdown in the pace of temperature rises so far this century, an international team of scientists said on Sunday. Warming is still on track, however, to breach a goal set by governments around the world of limiting the increase in temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, unless tough action is taken to limit rising greenhouse gas emissions. "The most extreme rates of warming simulated by the current generation of climate models over 50- to 100-year timescales are looking less likely," the University of Oxford wrote about the findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The push for mass coal exports from Washington state, already facing a huge environmental battle, also could get hit with slowing Chinese demand for coal shipments. The American coal industry, stung by a drop in U.S. demand, hopes to revive its fortunes by sending Rocky Mountain coal to Asia from proposed terminals near Bellingham and Longview, Wash. But a recent report by Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs says this will be a transformational year for China, with its seaborne coal imports dropping for the first time since the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 and continuing to decline in the coming years. China’s own coal production has spiked, Goldman Sachs said, along with investment in Chinese railroads to move its coal. Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2013/05/17/2905933/chinas-hunger-for-american-coal.html#storylink=cpy Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2013/05/17/2905933/chinas-hunger-for-american-coal.html#storylink=cpy

The Coast Guard will kick off hearings Monday on how a Royal Dutch Shell PLC drill barge used for Arctic Ocean exploratory drilling ended up aground off a remote Alaska island. The Kulluk was under tow and bound from the Aleutian Islands’ Dutch Harbor to a Seattle shipyard when it ran into rough Gulf of Alaska water. It broke from its towing vessel, and after four days of futile attempted hookups, ran aground New Year’s Eve in shallow water off Sitkalidak Island, near Kodiak Island. Damage to the ship led to Shell’s decision not to drill in Arctic waters in 2013.

Environmental activists are vowing to do everything they can to help Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Edward Markey in his special election battle with Republican challenger Gabriel Gomez. During the Democratic primary, environmental groups spent nearly $1.8 million in outside money to help Markey defeat Stephen Lynch. Markey and Lynch had agreed to the so-called People’s Pledge, which discouraged outside groups from launching television, radio or Internet campaign ads. That forced the groups to spend most of their money on organizing and get-out-the-vote efforts.

The number of people employed by the government to work on the UK's response to the effects of climate change has been cut from 38 officials to just six, triggering accusations that David Cameron's promise to be the greenest government has been abandoned. The UK is facing a multi-billion pound bill over the next few years for the costs of adapting to the effects of climate change – including flooding, much fiercer storms, droughts, heatwaves and more extreme weather. The government's advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, have warned that the measures needed to prepare the UK's infrastructure will include defences for power stations, transport and communication networks, changes to how buildings are constructed, and new ways of trying to prevent flooding, such as an upgrade to the Thames Barrier. But the number of officials charged with dealing with the issue within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has been dramatically reduced. A freedom of information response to a question by Friends of the Earth confirmed the reduction from 38 to six posts.

A senior official from the Civil Aviation Administration of China said on Friday that the country disapproved and "will not accept any unilateral and compulsory market measures", after the European Union threatened Chinese carriers with fines for non-compliance with its Emissions Trading System, or ETS. Speaking at the 2013 China Civil Aviation Development Forum in Beijing, Yan Mingchi, deputy director-general of the policy, law and regulation department under the CAAC, said that "airlines in developing countries should be provided with financial and technological support in their efforts at coping with the effects of climate change".

The Government of Canada is supporting a three-year project that will result in the construction of a $19-million, demonstration-scale facility in Alberta that will use algae to recycle industrial carbon dioxide emissions from an oil sands facility into commercial products such as biofuels. The Algal Carbon Conversion (ACC) Pilot Project is a partnership among the National Research Council of Canada (NRC); Canadian Natural Resources Limited, one of the largest independent crude oil and natural gas producers in Canada; and Pond Biofuels. The demonstration-scale algal biorefinery will be established at Canadian Natural’s Primrose South oil sands site, near Bonnyville, Alberta. The demonstration facility will be integrated into the Canadian Natural’s operations with direct access to industrial flue gas emissions, wastewater and waste heat.

Britain has given its clearest signal yet that it wants to allow European countries to import carbon-intensive tar sands oil from Canada. Leaked papers seen by the Guardian show that in EU negotiations on laws intended to encourage the use of low-carbon transport fuels, the UK has rejected language that would class tar sands oil as more polluting than conventional crude or other fuels. The European commission has proposed labelling the oil as "highly polluting" under its fuel quality directive, a move that would deter countries importing it. Studies suggest that oil from tar sands produces more than one-fifth more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional crude.

Buried in the questions Senate Republicans want answered by the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency is a stumper: data linking microscopic particles in the air to premature death. The problem is the EPA doesn’t have the data, which was compiled by Harvard University researchers more than two decades ago, and confidentiality agreements with hundreds of thousands of participants prevent researchers from making it public. The nominee, Gina McCarthy, had nothing to do with the research. Critics say the demand -- among 1,100 questions put to McCarthy -- exemplifies the way confirmation battles are now waged on Capitol Hill, with queries that appear to range beyond the nominee’s fitness for the post.

In January, northern Minnesota electric utility Minnesota Power announced a new direction forward for its generation portfolio. The company’s “Energy Forward” plan calls for adding wind and hydropower, retiring one coal-burning unit, and converting two others to natural gas. Along with continued conservation efforts, the investments are projected to lower the utility’s carbon emissions 30 percent by 2015 compared to 2005 levels. It’s the years beyond that, however, that worry climate activists.