In January 2020, I sat down with my editors at the L.A. Times office and pitched them on a series of stories that would eventually become Repowering the West. I would hopscotch the region's most glorious and scarred landscapes, exploring power-line routes and solar-farm construction sites and huge hydropower dams and trying to figure out how we could put together the pieces of a climate-friendly electric grid without causing more environmental damage than necessary.
Three big oil companies are challenging the federal government's power to force them to remove oil platforms they once owned off the coast of California, in a case that could end up forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for cleaning up abandoned fossil fuel infrastructure, should the oil companies succeed. Here's the in-depth story from E&E News' Heather Richards.