Yahoo Autos: Google Pairs With Ford to Build Self-Driving Cars

Google and Ford will create a joint venture to build self-driving vehicles with Google’s technology, a huge step by both companies toward a new business of automated ride sharing, Yahoo Autos has learned.

According to three sources familiar with the plans, the partnership is set to be announced by Ford at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. By pairing with Google, Ford gets a massive boost in self-driving software development; while the automaker has been experimenting with its own systems for years, it only revealed plans this month to begin testing on public streets in California.

Bloomberg: Brand New RWE Plant Is Latest Victim of Merkel's Energy Shift

Germany’s unprecedented energy shift is turning newly built power plants into white elephants that will never produce any electricity.

Once the backbone that underpinned growth in Europe’s biggest economy, coal and gas plants are being marginalized in a new world where solar and wind are all the rage. With electricity prices at their lowest level in more than a decade, the outlook is now so bad that RWE AG will never start its 1-billion-euro ($1.1 billion) Westfalen-D plant, while EON SE applied this year to close two new unprofitable gas-fired units.

InsideClimate News: Exxon's Oil Industry Peers Knew About Climate Dangers in the 1970s, Too

The American Petroleum Institute together with the nation's largest oil companies ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between 1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry, not just Exxon alone, was aware of its possible impact on the world's climate far earlier than previously known.

The group's members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company, including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio and Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil, the predecessors to Chevron, according to internal documents obtained by InsideClimate News and interviews with the task force's former director.

The Hill: Oil Exports Win Like ‘100 Keystone Pipelines’

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is touting the end of the oil export ban, comparing Congress’ vote to lift the restriction to building the Keystone XL pipeline 100 times.

Speaking Tuesday evening with conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, he listed oil exports as one of the top victories during his short time leading the House so far, and compared exports’ impact on oil markets to the controversial pipeline that President Obama blocked last month.

“We think we got good victories for the energy markets. Having the oil export ban lifted permanently, it’s like having 100 Keystone pipelines,” Ryan said.

Politico: Solar Blowback Hits Reid's Nevada

Harry Reid’s home state dealt a lethal blow Tuesday to rooftop solar power -- the latest skirmish in a nationwide green energy battle that has pitted the Senate Democratic leader against his favorite target, the Koch brothers.

The move by Nevada’s utility regulator, which voted to slash the economic incentives for homeowners to install solar panels, was most immediately a showdown between billionaires Warren Buffett, owner of the state’s largest power company, and Elon Musk, [chairman and co-founder of] SolarCity, which is the nation’s largest installer of panels that create electricity from the sun. But it also served as a proxy fight in a national struggle about states’ green energy programs, in which free-market groups backed by industrialists Charles and David Koch have fought to roll back incentives that they argue distort the marketplace and force some customers to subsidize other people’s power choices.