** California officials arrest a man suspected of blowing up two Pacific Gas & Electric transformers and leaving thousands of Bay Area utility customers without power late last year.
** Many state and national leaders took to social media after a second Norfolk Southern train derailed in Springfield Saturday afternoon. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said he is in touch with local officials and called on the passage of the Railway Safety Act following the train derailment in Springfield.
** Contaminated soil from the site around the East Palestine train wreck in Ohio is being sent to a nearby incinerator with a history of clean air violations, raising fears that the chemicals being removed from the ground will be redistributed across the region. The new plan is “horrifying”, said Kyla Bennett, a former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official now with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility non-profit.
** Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Sunday had sharp words for the chorus of Republican-led critics to his response to the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in February. In an interview with CNN, Buttigieg offered his most vociferous defense to date, seeking to rebut claims that the Biden administration doesn’t care about the blue-collar town by casting his detractors as the ones truly out of touch.
** An internal memo from the U.S. Interior Department suggesting that the agency set the highest possible royalty fee on potential oil and gas development before last year’s Cook Inlet lease sale is drawing blowback from the Democratic chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said in a statement he was “appalled” by the memo
** New complications hit California’s Rosedale Highway refinery conversion project as partner Exxon Mobil Corp. said this week it will walk away from its 2019 agreement to buy all the renewable diesel produced at the facility if it’s not operational by the end of June.
** The Department of the Interior is taking action to restore wild and healthy populations of American bison, along with the prairie grassland ecosystem. On Friday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) issued a Secretary’s Order that allocates over $25 million from the Inflation Reduction Act to fund the restoration.
** A proposal to build a nearly 500-mile-long stretch of transmission line in Nevada has been further delayed due to the discovery of possible fossil deposits in its path. The path of the Greenlink West power line, as it’s been proposed by NV Energy, runs through 1.5 miles of Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, established as a National Park Service site in 2014.
World
** German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said talks were constructive with the European Union in resolving a dispute over plans to ban new combustion-engine cars in the bloc from 2035, after Berlin derailed the effort this past week. Scholz met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the sidelines of a government retreat in Meseberg north of Berlin on Sunday.
** State-controlled Saudi Aramco increased most official selling prices for Asia in April. The company’s main Arab Light grade was lifted to $2.50 a barrel above the regional benchmark, 50 cents more than the level for March.
** Months after cheering development of wind farms in United Kingdom seas, the deal with wind turbine maker Orsted turned sour. Orsted warned last week that its £8bn Hornsea Three development was no longer viable under the terms agreed with the Government and threatened to mothball the project without tax breaks to offset rising costs.
** Drone attacks oil pipeline substation near Russia’s Belgorod. A UAV equipped with an improvised explosive device crashed into an empty tank with a capacity of 3,000 tonnes, resulting in a 1-square-meter hole.
