The 9th International Conference on Climate Change kicked off Monday in Las Vegas, featuring some of the most best-known skeptics of human-caused global warming. Among the speakers at the 3-day conference is Lord Christopher Monckton. He was once a policy advisor to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Now he is the chief policy adviser at the Science and Public Policy Institute in Virginia. He spoke with me on the telephone from the conference. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will retain powerful but limited authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from sources like power plants and oil refineries, under to a ruling issued Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices left largely intact the Obama administration’s only existing program to limit power plant and factory carbon emissions, but blocked the agency’s attempt to expand its regulatory power under the Clean Air Act without explicit approval from Congress.

The Obama administration announced a 645-page environmental plan today that would set the first national limits on carbon dioxide. Under rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and scheduled to be finalized next year, power plants will have to cut carbon dioxide emissions 30 percent by 2030. All 50 states will be responsible for tackling their own emissions under customized plans that will have to be approved by the EPA.

In California’s Silicon Valley, drivers of electric cars are finding it increasingly difficult to access car-charging stations at work. The growing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) is in many cases outpacing the number of charging ports that companies are willing to install for their employees. The soaring demand for charging ports is leading to incidents of “charge rage” at some companies, and giving rise to a new sphere of  workplace etiquette issues.

A chemical spill in West Virginia on Thursday left more than 300,000 people without clean tap water for at least five days. Often going without showers, residents in and near Charleston, W.Va., had to use bottled water for essential hygiene and cooking needs during the ban on tap water.

The government-driven demand for corn ethanol is ruffling feathers with another government program intended to preserve prairie and wildlife habitat. The result? A bird-hunting industry that’s going down.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report Friday criticizing a $1.3 billion federal program to clean up the Great Lakes. The GAO claims that without adequate assessments to measure performance, it’s hard to know whether the money was well spent.