** Oil company Chevron must pay $744.6 million to restore damage it caused to southeast Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, a jury ruled on Friday following a landmark trial more than a decade in the making. The case was the first of dozens of pending lawsuits to reach trial in Louisiana against the world’s leading oil companies for their role in accelerating land loss along the state’s rapidly disappearing coast.
** Nevada is considering legislation that would allow the state’s natural gas utilities to use new ways of setting rates that have proven disastrous for customers in other states, allowing utilities to increase the capital expenditures that drive their profits.
** Solar industry officials say politically motivated opposition and hostility is stifling clean energy development in some rural Arizona communities.
** Thousands of trucking companies over the last two years have shut down operations for a variety of economic reasons. About 88,000 trucking companies and 8,000 freight brokerage firms ceased operating in 2023, Freight Caviar data revealed, and the trucking sector was further reduced by about 10,000 carriers in 2024, TruckInfo.net reported.
** South Carolina lawmakers pass a sweeping bill to streamline the state’s energy permitting process, create an appeals process for utilities, and fast-track the conversion of a former coal plant to a 2,000 MW gas-fired plant.
** Virginia residents express concern at local board meetings about Dominion Energy’s plans to build high-voltage transmission lines.
World
** Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, on Sunday lowered crude oil prices for Asian buyers in May to their lowest in four months, after a shock decision by the OPEC+ oil group to increase supply on Thursday.
** The world’s most profitable oil company is reporting major losses, all while clean energy continues to score big wins. Saudi oil giant Aramco recently announced a steep drop in income, with net profit falling to $106.2 billion in 2024, down from $121.3 billion the year prior, according to CNBC.
** Helge Lund, the chairman of BP is to quit in the wake of the company’s disastrous flirtation with green energy. The announcement comes amid a campaign by activist US hedge fund Elliott for more change at the company, which has already watered down green energy plans previously adopted under Lund.
** Volkswagen issued a memo to US dealerships and later obtained by Automotive News, that revealed that all rail shipments from Mexico would be temporarily halted. Furthermore, cars arriving by ship would be held at the port indefinitely.
** According to January 2025 sales numbers from JATO Dynamics, the Volkswagen ID.4 outsold the Tesla Model Y in Europe by a fairly wide margin. With 7,177 units sold in January, the Volkswagen ID.4 saw nearly a 200% increase in sales compared to January 2024.
** Mexico is slated to dump around 400 million gallons of sewage into the Tijuana River, which will mostly likely flow into the United States, a decades-old problem that has posed environmental repercussions for beaches and communities, officials said.