It’s the middle of the frigid, long midnight at Tapkaurak Point, a spit of gravel curling out into the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska. Up in the middle of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest remaining wilderness area in the U.S., the sun set weeks ago and won’t peek above the horizon until the middle of January.

Congressional Republicans allowed a tax on oil companies that generated hundreds of millions of dollars annually for federal oil-spill response efforts to expire this week — a move that amounts to another corporate break in the wake of lawmakers’ sweeping tax overhaul late last month.

During the Obama administration, the federal government took action to prevent another Deepwater Horizon-sized oil spill, widely viewed as the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. After taking office, the Trump administration immediately began making plans to relax certain offshore drilling rules implemented after the 2010 disaster.

New Delhi: US oil refineries that are unable to sell a dirty fuel waste product at home are exporting vast quantities of it to India instead. Petroleum coke, the bottom-of-the-barrel leftover from refining Canadian tar sands crude and other heavy oils, is cheaper and burns hotter than coal. But it also contains more planet-warming carbon and far more heart- and lung-damaging sulfur - a key reason few American companies use it.

France's parliament has approved a law banning all exploration and production of oil and natural gas by 2040 within the country and its overseas territories. Under that law that passed a final vote on Tuesday, existing drilling permits will not be renewed and no new exploration licenses will be granted. The French government claims the ban is a world first. However, it is largely symbolic since oil and gas produced in France accounts for just 1 percent of domestic consumption. The rest is imported.

The Saudi- and Russia-led supply limits that have lifted crude to a 2 1/2-year high must be prolonged for an extended period or prices will collapse, said Ed Morse, global head of commodities research at Citigroup Inc. Investors already are assuming OPEC and its allied producers will agree at the end of this month to extend the limits well beyond their March expiration, Morse said at a gathering of energy economists in Houston on Monday.

A coalition of environmental, community and First Nation organizations is calling on the B.C. NDP to broaden a campaign promise to review fracking by instead ordering a full public inquiry or commission. During the spring provincial election campaign, the NDP announced it would appoint a scientific panel to review the hydraulic fracturing process to ensure that gas is produced safely and the environment is protected, but the coalition suggests that review wouldn't go far enough.

A federal court ruled late Wednesday that the Trump administration broke the law when it tried this summer to delay an Obama administration rule related to greenhouse gas released through oil and natural gas drilling. Judge Elizabeth Laporte of the District Court for the Northern District of California said the Interior Department cannot use a provision in the Administrative Procedure Act to delay the rule on methane emissions on federal land, as it tried to do in June.

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing some of the world’s largest oil companies over climate change, joining an emerging legal effort to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damages wrought by rising seas. The suits, filed separately in Superior Court in San Francisco and Alameda County and announced Wednesday, claim that a slate of oil, gas and coal producers not only caused the heat-trapping gases that drove sea level rise but knowingly did so, a challenge akin to litigation against big tobacco companies in the 1990s.

Clean-up crews are scrambling to contain an oil spill from a Greek tanker as it menaces some of Athens’ most popular beaches. The vessel, Agia Zoni II, was carrying 2,500 tonnes of fuel when it sank off the island of Salamis on Sunday. Nearby beaches were soiled by the oil, but officials believed it could be contained given mild wind conditions.

Fresh evidence submitted in a major 9/11 lawsuit moving forward against the Saudi Arabian government reveals its embassy in Washington may have funded a “dry run” for the hijackings carried out by two Saudi employees, further reinforcing the claim employees and agents of the kingdom directed and aided the 9/11 hijackers and plotters.

As Texas and Louisiana cope with the destruction wrought by Hurricane Harvey and as Hurricane Irma continues to ravage Caribbean islands on its way to the United States, many are asking a pertinent question: Who should pay for the damage? According to a "landmark" study published in the journal Climatic Change on Thursday, the answer is clear: Big Oil. "We know that the costs of both hurricanes will be enormous and that climate change will have made them far...

President Trump has nominated a former coal executive whose company clashed with federal officials over mining safety rules under President Obama to the top mining safety post in his administration. Trump on Friday named David Zatezalo, the former chairman of Rhino Resources, to be an assistant secretary of Labor overseeing the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). The position is currently vacant, according to the Department of Labor's website.

And in Wisconsin, six people were arrested after one person locked himself to a piece of heavy machinery to stop the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. The proposed line would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to a terminal in Superior, Wisconsin. It faces sustained resistance from indigenous nations and environmental activists in both the U.S. and Canada.

The U.S. Energy Department on Thursday released 1 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and a White House adviser said more could flow after Tropical Storm Harvey inundated Gulf Coast refineries and drove up motor fuel prices.

Since the beginning, President Donald Trump promised that removing regulations on oil companies would drive employment. “We’re bringing back jobs big league,” he said in February. But, after six months of regulatory rollback, Trump has done almost nothing that will create jobs on oil fields or offshore rigs. That’s because low oil prices, not environmental protections, are stunting job growth, and Trump’s push to nix federal regulations and expand drilling will only make oil cheaper.

Health costs related to fossil fuel use outweigh taxpayer-funded subsidies by 600%, according to a new study that insists governments should stop pumping money into dirty energy sources. G20 governments spent $444 billion on oil, gas and coal subsidies in 2014 alone and have long pledged to cut this support, as countries look to decarbonise their economies in line with the Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals and national goals.

Norway is set to become the first country in the entire world to ban the use of gas to heat buildings. The Scandinavian country, which is the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas outside the Middle East, will wholly stop the use of both oil and paraffin to warm buildings from 2020 onwards.

Environmentalists have condemned Donald Trump as a “threat to every ocean and coastline in the country”, after the president pushed forward plans to expand oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans as part of what he called a new era of “American energy dominance”. The Trump administration has taken the first steps to rewrite a five-year plan, put in place under Barack Obama, that banned drilling along the Atlantic seaboard and in large swaths of the Arctic.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has banned all future settlements of pollution violation cases that include money for cleanup efforts managed by third-party organizations.