Gov. Paul LePage wants to strip from state law goals for increasing the state’s wind energy capacity over the next two decades. LePage’s energy director, Patrick Woodcock, made recommendations Thursday to rewrite the state’s 2008 Wind Energy Act, shifting focus from growing wind energy capacity to lowering electricity costs and making sure Maine sees an economic return on its wind energy investments. The Maine Wind Energy Act, a priority of LePage's predecessor, Democratic Gov. John Baldacci, sought to expedite wind energy development in Maine. The law zoned much of Maine’s Unorganized Territory as suitable for wind development and set goals for the state to have 2,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity by 2015, 3,000 by 2020 and 8,000 by 2030.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she's confident that European Union member states can agree to more ambitious climate protection targets. Germany is in talks with EU member states including Poland about the need for a new CO2 emissions reduction target, Merkel told a sustainability conference today in Berlin. “We need, as soon as possible, another EU-wide target that goes beyond the CO2 reduction of 2020,” Merkel said. "I think that at the end of this year, possibly in connection with the climate conference in Poland, that we can succeed in jointly agreeing" on a new target.

A unit of Warren Buffett's MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co. plans to invest $1.9 billion to build additional wind farms in Iowa that would increase its wind generating capacity in the state by about half. MidAmerican Energy Co., Iowa’s largest utility, plans to build as much as 1,050 megawatts of new wind power plants in the state, adding to about 2,285 megawatts of projects that it already owns and operates, the Des Moines, Iowa-based company said today in a statement on its website.

If Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) gets its way, liquid natural gas could be flowing out of Texas to countries around the world within five years. The Irving-based oil and gas giant announced a partnership with Golden Pass Products and state-owned Qatar Petroleum International for a $10 billion expansion of the Sabine Pass LNG terminal along the Gulf Coast near Port Arthur.

The World Bank is making a major push to develop large-scale hydropower, something it had all but abandoned a decade ago but now sees as crucial to resolving the tension between economic development and the drive to tame carbon use. Major hydropower projects in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Nepal and elsewhere – all of a scale dubbed "transformational" to the regions involved – are part of the bank's fundraising drive among wealthy nations. Bank lending for hydropower has scaled up in recent years, and officials expect the trend to continue. Such projects were shunned in the 1990s, in part because they can be disruptive to communities and ecosystems. But the World Bank is opening the taps for dams and related infrastructure as its president, Jim Yong Kim, tries to resolve a quandary at the bank's core: how to eliminate poverty while adding as little as possible to carbon emissions.

Global warming will destroy more than half of the habitats of most plants and a third of animals by 2080, biologists conclude, unless steps are taken to limit greenhouse gases. Over the past century, average global surface temperatures have increased about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Academy of Sciences. This global warming is largely due to burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas, which retain heat and warm the atmosphere. Temperatures worldwide are expected to rise roughly 7 degrees by 2100 if the use of fossil fuels continues without attempts to mitigate their effects. Without mitigation, "large range contractions can be expected even amongst common and widespread species," concludes the study led by Rachel Warren of the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia. It was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The kid, as Randy Thompson calls the land agent from TransCanada Corp., wanted to talk. He was persistent. So Mr. Thompson arranged a meeting at the family’s Nebraska ranch house. "He wanted to know if they could do some surveying," Mr. Thompson recalls. "We told the kid – if you want to waste your time, go ahead and survey it. But I can tell you, we don't want the damn pipeline." TransCanada wanted to build its Keystone XL project through the middle of the Thompsons' corn field. The family was worried that it would disrupt the farm’s irrigation system. But there was a solution. If TransCanada would move the pipeline an eighth of a mile – 200 meters – the Thompsons could live with that.

A combination of growing oil sands production and congested pipelines is creating new opportunities for midstream companies that have cavern or tank capacity to spare. The waiting game for proposed pipeline projects such as Keystone XL or the Trans Mountain expansion, along with a new focus on rail transport, has resulted in growth of an industry segment many consider a sideline: Storage. "As the industry continues to grow, and as the industry continues to look for different ways of accessing markets, whether it’s by pipeline or by rail, all of that growth requires additional storage – particularly when the pipelines start to become full," said David Smith, chief executive of Keyera Corp., a midstream company that focuses on natural gas processing and natural gas liquids, but also has a significant storage business.

A domestic natural gas boom already has lowered U.S. energy prices while stoking fears of environmental disaster. Now U.S. producers are poised to ship vast quantities of gas overseas as energy companies seek permits for proposed export projects that could set off a renewed frenzy of fracking. Expanded drilling is unlocking enormous reserves of crude oil and natural gas, offering the potential of moving the country closer to its decades-long quest for energy independence. Yet as the industry looks to profit from foreign markets, there is the specter of higher prices at home and increased manufacturing costs for products from plastics to fertilizers.

Dubai is finalising legislation that will enable property owners to feed solar power into the grid and may even allow them to make money from it. The Government last year unveiled plans for a 1,000-megawatt solar park, but it believes that small-scale applications are important for meeting its renewable energy targets. "In the near future we will have a legislative environment that allows for grid-connected solar power. There will be different approaches for different scales," said Ivano Iannelli, the chief executive of the government-owned advisory company Dubai Carbon Centre of Excellence.  

Electric vehicles use the same roads, the same bridges and the same infrastructure as the rest of us. But because they don't burn gasoline, they're immune from paying taxes at the pump to fund that infrastructure. That's going to change. EV buyers have long received a federal tax credit of $7,500, but with the passage of Washington state's House Bill 2660 last year, what one hand giveth, the other taketh away. Eager to recoup some of the money lost to those opting for zero-emissions motoring, the state of Washington is slapping people with a $100 annual tax for driving an electric such as the Tesla Model S, Nissan Leaf and anything they've cobbled together in their garage.

President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency is in jeopardy after Republicans formed a united front Thursday to deny her a vote in committee. Democrats erupted in frustration at the GOP “obstructionism” and vowed to find a way to push Gina McCarthy’s nomination through the Environment and Public Works Committee, despite the last-minute Republican boycott of the vote. But even then, McCarthy could still face a filibuster on the Senate floor — and won’t have the 60 votes she needs, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told his Democratic allies Thursday morning.

The Obama administration has launched an online tool to bolster research into links between climate change and health and inform “more effective responses.” The interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program on Thursday unveiled its Metadata Access Tool for Climate and Health (MATCH) platform. “It is a publicly accessible digital platform for searching and integrating metadata ... extracted from more than 9,000 health, environment, and climate-science datasets held by six Federal agencies,” said Tom Armstrong, executive director of the interagency climate program, in a blog post.