The U.S. Justice Department filed a civil oil-spill lawsuit today against a British Petroleum PLC unit and several other companies. This is the federal government’s first major legal action in the Gulf of Mexico disaster. The other defendants are subsidiaries of Transocean Ltd., which owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon oil rig; Anadarko Petroleum Corp. [...]

Gov. David Paterson has ordered a seven-month moratorium on some natural gas drilling in New York State. Paterson vetoed a bill on Saturday that would have halted all new natural-gas drilling permits until May 15. Instead, he issued an executive order prohibiting high-volume hydraulic fracturing of horizontally drilled wells, such as those in the Marcellus [...]

This week, Obama’s Interior Department said it would not propose oil exploration off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines or the eastern Gulf of Mexico for at least seven years. “The changes that we are making today really are based on the lessons that we have been learning” since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 [...]

Coffee giant, Starbucks, has set a goal of making 100% of its cups (over one billion a year) reusable or recyclable by 2015. The recycling industry has long stated that the types of cups Starbucks uses are non-recyclable. The company thinks that more paper recyclers could take the coated cups than actually do. They recently [...]

British Petroleum is now going to court to fight a bid to legally force it to waive a $75 million statutory cap. Lawyers for local businesses and individuals filed a motion this month asking U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier, who is overseeing the oil-spill litigation in New Orleans, to rule that a cap is inapplicable [...]

The European Commission opened competition for the world’s biggest investment program in green technologies this week, in a bid to gain a competitive advantage over the US and China on renewables and carbon capture and storage. Approximately 6 billion dollars (4.5 billion Euros) will be made available to at least 34 innovative renewable energy and [...]

Vice President Joe Biden is set to announce a series of initiatives today aimed at helping middle-income Americans make their homes more energy efficient and boost job growth among home retrofitters. The goals of the measures are to help Americans keep down energy costs while at the same time laying the groundwork for a larger [...]

A new ThinkProgress investigation has found that the incoming GOP congress is chock full of legislators who not only oppose climate change legislation, but deny that manmade global warming even exists. Terrifying. Here are a couple of the scariest factoids about the GOP Class of 2010: 50% deny the existence of manmade climate change 86% [...]

NEWSWEEK’s 2010 Green Rankings is a data-driven assessment of the largest companies in the U.S. and in the world. To produce the 2010 Green Rankings, NEWSWEEK collaborated with MSCI ESG Research—a leading source of environmental, social, and governance ratings—which served as lead research organization; Trucost, which specializes in quantitative measurements of environmental performance; CorporateRegister.com, the [...]

Today the White House lifted the off shore oil drilling moratorium that they had set after the BP oil explosion and spill several months ago. A federal report said the moratorium probably cost a temporary loss of 8,000 to 12,000 jobs in the Gulf region. Even though the temporary ban on exploratory oil and gas [...]