Energy Archive

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, discuss the real story around land expropriation in South Africa, after President Donald Trump’s promotion of a white-nationalist conspiracy theory about white South African farmers. They also look at overshadowed headline news from the week, including the international implications of Trump’s rollback of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which had set national carbon pollution limits on coal-fired power plants. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get […]

The Trump administration on Tuesday unveiled its proposal to relax environmental regulations on coal-burning power plants across the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Affordable Clean Energy rule would roll back the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which had placed stricter national pollution standards on power plants in an effort to reduce carbon emissions and push American utility companies away from coal and toward natural gas and renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar. It is the Trump administration’s biggest move yet to boost the American coal industry. But according to the EPA’s own analysis, the new rule could lead […]

Venezuela’s flailing oil industry has helped prop up global energy prices even as Saudi Arabia and Russia open the spigots and global oil demand remains robust. Though oil prices have recovered from their lows during the price collapse in 2015, Venezuelan output has since seen an incredible decline of 1 million barrels per day. The drop in oil production is further squeezing the Venezuelan economy, which faces critical shortages of goods and ballooning inflation that is expected to reach an astounding 1 million percent this year. But could Venezuela’s oil production decline even more steeply? Three evolving developments will largely […]