Climate Central: Greenhouse Gases From Reservoirs Fuel Climate Change

Hydropower reservoirs are considered to be major sources of low-carbon electricity that can be used to cut greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change. But those same reservoirs emit global warming gases, and a team of researchers has now tallied just how much those gases impact the climate.

Globally, reservoirs are responsible for about 1.3 percent of the world’s manmade greenhouse gas emissions each year, or about the same as Canada’s total emissions, according to a study to be published in the journal Bioscience next week. The findings come from a team of researchers led by Washington State University-Vancouver and the Environmental Protection Agency.

InsideClimate News: Exxon's Big Bet on Oil Sands a Heavy Weight To Carry

State and federal investigators are zeroing in on ExxonMobil's accounting practices as part of two independent probes, asking whether the energy giant might have misled investors about the value of its assets.

Increasingly, those assets are made up of Canadian tar sands oil, among the world's most expensive and dirtiest forms of crude oil.

An InsideClimate News analysis of the company's financial disclosures shows that Exxon's oil sands reserves grew dramatically over the past decade. Doing so has deepened the company's dependence on an oil source that some economists say should be one of the first to be abandoned if governments decide to leave much of the world's fossil fuels in the ground to stave off global warming.

Houston Chronicle: 'Deepwater Horizon' Is a Disaster Flick That Takes On Corporate Greed

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, it triggered the worst oil spill in U.S. history, and perhaps the most exposed.

The Peter Berg-directed film, based on a New York Times story, walks through the crew's last hours on that doomed rig -- the decisions they made, the chaos that descended and how they fought through fire and gushing oil to save themselves and each other.

"I feel like the spill got plenty of attention," says Mark Vahradian, one of the film's producers. But "even to this day, I don't think people have ever even thought about the guys who were on that rig."

This movie attempts to recreate that night without getting into the ugly politics of blame and responsibility, he said: "In our minds, this was an opportunity to give a voice to those men who never had their day, who got forgotten in the midst of the oil spilling."

Business Green: Ed Davey Warns Grid Shakeup Could Prove a 'Huge Mistake'

Former Energy and Climate Change Secretary Sir Ed Davey has warned a pending decision to shake up the U.K.'s network charging arrangements could prove a "massively bad decision," leading to a drop in low-carbon energy generation, higher security risks and higher energy prices for consumers.

Speaking to BusinessGreen this week on the sidelines of an event hosted by the Carbon Trust, Davey said moves by Ofgem to cut payments to decentralized energy generators without looking at the wider system would be a "huge mistake."

Jalopnik: Don't Try to Take Highway Off-Ramps With Tesla's Autopilot Just Yet

Let’s make one thing clear: despite what you may have in your head, Tesla’s recently updated Autopilot can not safely navigate a highway off-ramp for you -- yet.

Tesla pushed out the Version 8.0 software update to its owners last week, including an update to Autopilot that would have the system automatically navigate highway “interchanges,” according to the release notes. An earlier company blog post concerning the update said it could handle highway “exits.”

Confused? So are some Tesla owners.