For a political non-starter, a carbon tax is generating an awful lot of activity on Capitol Hill. Texas Reps. Joe Barton and Jeb Hensarling will headline a press conference Wednesday slamming the idea.  More »

A grand jury probe targeting Chevron in last year’s Richmond refinery fire has created a rift between the federal agency investigating the incident and environmental regulators seeking possible criminal charges against the oil giant  More »

President Obama is barreling toward what one Bay Area activist predicts could be “all out warfare” with environmentalists who want him to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline.  More »

San Francisco — The California commission that polices bar pilots who navigate ships through San Francisco Bay has gone nearly a year without acting on an extraordinary complaint against a captain lodged after his loaded oil tanker nearly ran aground off Richmond – an incident that could have caused an environmental disaster.  More »

The pilot of the oil tanker that hit the Bay Bridge last week apparently decided at the last minute to change course and head between a different set of bridge towers, a tricky maneuver that may have played a role in the accident, experts said.  More »

CEO Arno Harris said Recurrent Energy’s new solar plants will sell power for as low as 7 cents a kilowatt-hour, nearly as cheap as natural gas-fired plants. He favors gas exports because they could lift the price of gas, making renewable energy more competitive.  More »

The pipe that fed a huge fire at Chevron’s Richmond oil refinery in August appears to have been punctured from the outside, possibly by company firefighters trying to get at a small leak before the blaze ignited, investigators said Thursday.  More »

Gov. Jerry Brown has formed an interagency working group on refinery safety after questions emerged following a fire at Chevron’s Richmond refinery about whether California is diligently inspecting oil plants, officials said Tuesday.  More »

Unchecked corrosion, the suspected culprit in the August blaze that destroyed part of Chevron’s Richmond refinery, was responsible for another fire at the plant last year that prompted workers to complain to regulators that the company was ignoring the problem, according to state inspection documents obtained by The San Francisco Chronicle.  More »

Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation of Chevron after discovering that the company detoured pollutants around monitoring equipment at its Richmond refinery for four years and burned them off into the atmosphere, in possible violation of a federal court order, The Chronicle has learned.  More »

California regulators have not been conducting the intensive workplace-safety inspections of Chevron’s Richmond plant and the state’s 14 other oil refineries that federal standards call for, a Chronicle investigation shows.  More »

The agencies investigating the fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond sought to assure residents Monday that they would hold the company accountable and use lessons from the Aug. 6 blaze to prevent future accidents.  More »