The News

washingtonpost.com — A former Environmental Protection Agency official contradicted EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson's congressional testimony on one of the administration's key global warming decisions, saying the White House ordered Johnson to block California's bid to regulate vehicles' tailpipe emissions. Former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett — who resigned last month and has since divulged key details about how President Bush and his deputies have influenced the agency's decisions on climate policy — testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that Johnson had concluded that California's request was legally justified — until White House officials ordered him to reverse the decision.

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nytimes.com — MOSCOW — President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia declared Tuesday that their countries would more closely coordinate their actions on global oil and gas markets and that they would work together on foreign policy, a sphere in which both countries have sought to counter American influence. Mr. Chávez, who was also expected to sign contracts to purchase more than $1 billion worth of Russian arms, called for the two nations to become "strategic partners" to defend against what he called an American threat to his country.

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npr.org — Congressional Democrats who want to lower gas prices by curbing speculation in oil futures saw their legislation survive a key vote in the Senate. GOP lawmakers are seeking a vote on lifting a longstanding moratorium on oil and gas exploration in the U.S. outer-continental shelf. Speculation in the oil futures markets has exploded over the past few years, ever since a Republican-led Congress changed the rules so anyone could buy oil futures — not just those who actually intended to use that oil. As a result, the number of futures contracts has increased nearly 12-fold since 2001. Democrats cite estimates that speculation is responsible for between 20 and 50 percent of the recent spike in oil prices.

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hosted.ap.org — The Bush administration wants to set the stage before leaving office for developing oil shale, rocky deposits in the western U.S. that could eventually yield 800 billion barrels of oil, according to government estimates. Oil shale may be the largest untapped source of domestic oil, dwarfing the quantity of oil available offshore and on federal lands currently off-limits. However, it is very expensive to extract, because it requires energy to bake the rock and pump the molten oil to the surface. A government program to subsidize its development in the 1980s was shut down when cost figures came in at several times the then-market price for oil. There are also big environmental concerns about the possible effect on water, wildlife and public lands.

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ft.com — The U.S. rush into wind power has enabled the country to pass Germany to become the world's biggest generator of such energy, according to estimates for the first half of 2008 from the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). The U.S. had not been expected to reach this milestone until the end of 2009. It achieved this early, while still running behind Germany in total installed capacity, because its average wind speed in significantly stronger. Nonetheless, with growing attention on wind energy in the US, the AWEA says the country could well take the world lead in installed capacity as well by the end of this year.

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nytimes.com — Former Vice President Al Gore said, during a speech at an energy conference in Washington, D.C., that Americans must abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts. "The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk," Mr. Gore said. "The future of human civilization is at stake." Mr. Gore called for the kind of concerted national effort that enabled Americans to walk on the moon, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy famously embraced that goal.

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