Calif.'s Prop 23 battle pits Big Oil against environmental concerns

Mix together a couple of big oil refiners, an arch-conservative oil tycoon, "green tech" venture capitalists, a former secretary of state and California's far-reaching climate legislation, and stir. The result is one of the most volatile and expensive political battles of the year. The issue is Proposition 23, a California referendum that would shelve the state's four-year-old climate legislation until unemployment there falls to 5.5 percent - more...

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Lawyers taking center stage in oil-spill investigation

HOUSTON - The Macondo well gushes no more, but the lawyers are just getting started. They go wall to wall in a Hilton hotel conference room, sitting at long tables that face the outnumbered investigators assigned to find the cause of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The thermometer may be hitting 100 outside, but the room is kept perfect for the men and women in power suits, many from Washington, Chicago, New Orleans and Dallas. The investigation,...

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E.U. rules let Iran import, export oil, creating possible split from U.S. policy

TEHRAN - The United States and Europe have worked cooperatively on Iran policy since President Obama took office, but a small crack might have begun to open over sanctions that are beginning to pinch ordinary Iranians. The European Union issued regulations this week that went well beyond a U.N. Security Council resolution passed in June, outlining tough restrictions on the sale of equipment and technology to the Iranian oil and gas industry, as...

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Freak accident or frontier enterprise? Deep-water drilling is still a big unknown.

BP's internal report on the causes of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, released earlier this month, summarized the calamity as the result of eight separate breaches of physical and operational barriers, any one of which could have, and should have, stopped the unfolding disaster. The blowout, in the BP scenario, was very much a freak event. A long shot. A graphic in the report showed the barriers arrayed like eight slices of Swiss cheese. All the...

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