An ad campaign featuring images of Exxon Mobil's Arkansas oil spill disaster is targeting the federal regulators in charge of approving the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project. The consumer watchdog group SumOfUs.org has joined with Oil Change International and Environmental Action to place ads in the Washington, D.C. metro system with images of the tar sands pipeline spill that occurred last month in Mayflower, Ark. That disaster involved the rupture of Exxon's Pegasus pipeline and spilled somewhere between 150,000 and 210,000 gallons of tar sands oil in a residential neighborhood near Lake Conway, a popular fishing spot near Little Rock.

The playground in Manchester, a neighborhood on Houston's east side, is empty much of the time. Children who play for too long here often start to cough. They go back inside, leaving an empty swing set in the shadow of a nearby oil refinery. Yudith Nieto, 24, has lived in Manchester since her family came from Mexico when she was a small child. While it's OK to visit the playground, she says, it's not OK to bring her camera. On several occasions, security guards from the Valero refinery next door have appeared and ask her to leave, claiming that taking pictures in the park was "illegal." They've even brought in Houston police as reinforcements. Valero, one of the major oil companies operating in this industrial part of Houston, keeps its security busy: Nieto says that they have harassed documentary filmmakers and journalists. And when college students participating in an "alternative spring break" program came to the park to talk to her about the neighborhood’s problems, a guard drove up in an unmarked vehicle and took video of the meeting on his cellphone. "I'm not afraid of the attention I'm getting from these people," Nieto says, "because we want people to know that we're aware."

In 1990, "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher, the conservative hero, scientist and former leader of Britain, called for swift action to combat climate change. She said scientists knew enough for governments to proceed with an "insurance policy" against catastrophe. Thatcher borrowed the insurance concept from former President Ronald Reagan, who led negotiation of the 1987 Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer. Eight days after Thatcher died on April 8, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said, "There is no science in global warming." What science there is, he said, "is not settled. Beside that, we all know that it's a hoax now."

The Obama administration is pushing to protect public lands that could be used for producing renewable energy. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on Tuesday will publish a regulation in the Federal Register to limit mining claimsnear areas that have been identified as potential sites for wind or solar energy production or that are included in pending permits. The move will prohibit claims for mining operations on a renewable energy proposal's right-of-way lands while the BLM considers the application. The bureau has had an interim rule on the books since 2011, but the adoption of the final rule will give the government a long-term mechanism to safeguard those lands.

Maybe you've heard that North America is producing a lot more oil these days, courtesy of fracking, tar sands and other new sources. The Atlantic has a nicely reported cover story on the whole phenomenon by Charles C. Mann. Headline: "We will never run out of oil." It's a great article, but here's an key bit of additional context. Stuart Staniford has some great charts looking at the rapid growth in Chinese oil consumption over the past few decades. He's also done a simple extrapolation to see what China's oil demand would look like if it kept growing at 7 percent annually for another decade — hardly a wild assumption:

President Obama’s former climate czar is confident that the administration will limit carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s existing coal-fired power plants. "I think what you’ll see this term is more greenhouse gas requirements, particularly on new and existing coal-fired power plants," Browner told The Chicago Maroon, a student paper at the University of Chicago. The Environmental Protection Agency has already proposed carbon standards for new power plants, although final regulations have been delayed.

At a time when Canadian officials are aggressively defending TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline project, Alberta's Energy Department is quietly considering an Arctic alternative to carry their bitumen to market. The department is spending $50,000 to study the pros and cons of building a pipeline from Alberta's oil sands extraction sites north to the small native hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk along the shores of the Beaufort Sea in northwest Canada. The study, which is being conducted by the Calgary consulting firm Canatec Associates International, is the most recent option that the Alberta government has floated in its effort to ship oil sands crude to the world market.

The Alberta government has filed charges against Plains Midstream Canada ULC, a unit of U.S. energy pipeline operator Plains All American Pipeline L.P. (PAA), for an oil spill in 2011 in northern Alberta, according to a notice on the western Canadian province's web site. The oil spill, which happened in a fairly isolated stretch of boreal forest in northern Alberta, leaked about 28,000 barrels from Plains Midstream's Rainbow pipeline system, making it one of the province's largest in 36 years. The pipeline runs from northern Alberta to Edmonton, the provincial capital.

At Spring Creek Mine, a broad black seam of coal, reaching depths of 80 feet, runs like a subterranean river through arid, sagebrush-covered hills.   This is a world-class seam formed from the remnants of ferns, grasses and other plants that flourished here more than 50 million years ago, when this part of Montana was a humid marsh.   Cloud Peak Energy, operators of this mine, and other companies have proposals that could eventually double the state’s coal production — part of the push for a big expansion of U.S. coal exports.   "There has been more activity in Montana in the last three years than there has been in a generation," said Todd O'Hair, a senior manager at Cloud Peak.  

While championing the benefits of new energy extraction methods, Republican House members accused energy oversight agencies of research that misled the public on environmental and health risks. The accusations came at a joint Energy and Environment subcommittee hearing focus on hydraulic fracturing—often called "fracking"—an extraction technique pioneered in Texas in the 90s, which taps deep ground reserves of natural gas and oil. Rep. Ralph Hall of Rockwall slammed the Environmental Protection Agency at the Friday morning hearing. Hall said EPA reports on fracturing causing water contamination were later retracted by the agency. "Cleary this agency's more interested in rushing to judgment and placing information in the hands of the media than they are for looking for a sound scientific approach," Hall said.

A House GOP bill to implement a U.S.-Mexico offshore energy accord exempts oil companies operating under the pact from controversial federal rules that force energy producers to disclose their payments to foreign governments. The provision could become a sticking point in enacting the Transboundary Hydrocarbon Agreement, a 2012 accord to enable cooperation in development of oil-and-gas along a maritime boundary in the Gulf of Mexico. "I don't see how that provision can be taken out," said Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), the chairman of a House subcommittee that reviewed the bill Thursday.

Australia's huge coal industry is a speculative bubble ripe for financial implosion if the world's governments fulfil their agreement to act on climate change, according to a new report. The warning that much of the nation's coal reserves will become worthless as the world hits carbon emission limits comes after banking giant Citi also warned Australian investors that fossil fuel companies could do little to avoid the future loss of value. Australia is already the globe's biggest coal exporter and "mega-mine" plans in Queensland for more extraction are identified as the world's second biggest "carbon bomb" threatening runaway global warming. "Investments in Australian coal rest on a speculative bubble of climate denial, indifference or dreaming," said John Connor, one of the new report's authors and CEO of The Climate Institute, an independent research organisation based in Sydney. "Investors, governments and even some coal companies say they take climate change seriously, but this report shows they do not or are taking risky gambles."