On any given day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has the power to throw the environmental movement into complete disarray. Tucked into a nondescript neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the court isn’t well known to the public, but it’s often called the second most important court in the United States. It has particular significance to the environmental movement because of its exclusive jurisdiction over regulations involving vital environmental laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

Two former senators threw their energy policy weight Tuesday to make the case that the private sector — rather than federal government — should decide whether to export natural gas. "Markets are dynamic. There are many factors [that] are working [that] change by the month. Some change daily," former Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) told lawmakers on a House Energy and Commerce Committee subpanel, citing fluctuating expenses like labor rates, interest rates and fuel costs.

The United States' proposal to let countries draft their own emissions reduction plans rather than working toward a common target can unlock languishing UN climate negotiations, the US climate change envoy said on Tuesday. The proposal that a global climate deal by 2015 should be based on national "contributions" gained traction at last week's round of UN talks in Germany, although China, the world's biggest carbon emitter, said it wanted far more binding commitments by wealthy countries. In the first public US statements on the plan, Todd Stern, the US State Department's special envoy on climate change, told reporters on Tuesday that the US approach was designed to bring as many countries as possible to the table through a form of peer pressure and break the impasse over a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol.

A judge on Tuesday ruled that Chevron Corp's chief executive must testify in the U.S. oil company's fraud case against Ecuadoreans seeking to collect on a $19 billion judgment against Chevron related to rainforest pollution. John Watson, who became CEO of Chevron in 2010 and had helped integrate Texaco after Chevron's 2001 purchase of the company gave it ownership of the long-running Ecuador case, could give his deposition before an end-of-May deadline for evidence-gathering ahead of the October fraud trial in New York, a spokesman for the Ecuadoreans said.

While the recent troop standoff in a remote Himalayan desert spotlights a long-running border dispute between China and India, the two emerging giants are engaged in a rivalry for global influence that spreads much farther afield. From Africa to the Arctic, the world's two most populous countries are bumping up against each other in their search for resources and new markets. Their rivalry is spilling over into global diplomacy and international institutions where Beijing and Delhi have elbow-jabbed over development loans and a seat for India on the U.N. Security Council.

A bill creating a two-year moratorium on the transportation of “tar sands” oil in Maine pit environmental groups against those who say the ban would have far-reaching negative effects on the economy during testimony before the Legislature’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee on Monday. The bill, LD 1363, calls for a legislative resolve setting the moratorium while directing the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to study the potential impacts of moving oil sands, known by environmentalists as “tar sands,” through Maine. At stake is the possibility a South Portland-based pipeline company would seek to move tar sands crude through Maine in the 262-mile Portland-Montreal Pipe Line.

For a climate organizer, the ongoing British Columbia election campaign has been a rare treat. For the first time in a very long time, climate change and fossil fuels are taking centre stage in an election campaign. The past two federal elections have been marked more by the absence of discussion of climate change than its presence. Even in the most recent U.S. federal election, climate only broke into the campaign thanks to the force of a climate supercharged hurricane crashing into New York City.

On Feb. 4, 2013, a U.S. congressman sent out a press release with some startling numbers. On that day, 1,600 days had elapsed from TransCanada Corp.’s initial application for a presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. That was, according to Fred Upton, the Michigan Representative who chairs the energy and commerce committee, longer than the U.S. involvement in the Second World War, between Pearl Harbour and the Japanese surrender. It was longer than the 491 days it took to build the Pentagon and longer than the 1,121-day Lewis and Clark expedition that drew some of the first maps of the American West in the early 1800s. For Canada, for the U.S., for opponents of the oil sands and supporters of economic expansion, for pro-pipeline premiers and anti-pipeline ranchers, nothing about Keystone XL has been short.

The Arctic seas are being made rapidly more acidic by carbon-dioxide emissions, according to a new report. Scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) monitored widespread changes in ocean chemistry in the region. They say even if CO2 emissions stopped now, it would take tens of thousands of years for Arctic Ocean chemistry to revert to pre-industrial levels. Many creatures, including commercially valuable fish, could be affected. They forecast major changes in the marine ecosystem, but say there is huge uncertainty over what those changes will be.

Governments and members of the European Parliament must decide on a plan to prop up the EU carbon market by July at the latest, a joint statement from nine energy and environment ministers, said. The statement, seen by Reuters, is expected to be published officially on Tuesday to coincide with discussions among members of the European Parliament on the European Commission plan. No-one from Britain's Department of Energy and Climate Change, which is expected to release the statement, was immediately available for comment. A proposal, known as backloading, to strengthen the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) by removing some of a glut of carbon allowances generated by recession was rejected by the European Parliament last month in an initial vote.

Technology created an energy revolution over the past decade — just not the one we expected. By now, cars were supposed to be running on fuel made from plant waste or algae — or powered by hydrogen batteries that burned nothing at all. Electricity would be generated with solar panels and wind turbines. When the sun didn’t shine or the wind didn’t blow, power would flow out of batteries the size of tractor-trailers. Fossil fuels were going to be expensive and scarce, relics of an earlier, dirtier age. But in the race to conquer energy technology, Old Energy is winning.