President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order directing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to dismantle Obama-era climate rules, including the Clean Power Plan, which sets limits on carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil-fueled power plants. Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions director Tim Profeta is available for comment.

Congress is awaiting President Donald Trump's budget proposal with the details about his vision of government, and some preliminary elements of that plan are trickling out. According to some reports, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may lose as much as a quarter of its budget. The Energy Star Program, which identifies and promotes energy efficiency in products, could be targeted. Billy Pizer, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions faculty fellow and Sanford School of Public Policy professor, comments for Marketplace.

During Fall Break 2016, the Nicholas School Energy Club sent fifteen graduate students from the Nicholas School of the Environment, Pratt School of Engineering and Fuqua School of Business to Denver, Colorado, as part of the club's annual Career Trek.

Energy poverty has become so severe in the Southeast, the Pacific Standard reports, that many households pay 600 percent more of their annual income on energy than the national average. The article cites research by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and the Georgia Institute of Technology that indicates that the South is the largest and fastest growing region in the United States, with 36% of the nation’s population and a considerably larger share of the nation’s total energy consumption (44%) and supply (48%). At a simplistic level residents of the south are using more energy per square foot than their counterparts in the rest of the nation.

Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and North Dakota saw more than 6,600 spills from fracking wells — or more than one spill for every five wells — from 2005 to 2014, according to a study released Wednesday by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. The results suggest that the oil and gas industry needs to have stronger, more consistent reporting requirements for spills, which can include oil, chemical-laden water, and other substances, researchers said. “As this form of energy production increases, state efforts to reduce spill risk could benefit from making data more uniform and accessible to better provide stakeholders with important information on where to target efforts for locating and preventing future spills,” lead author Lauren Patterson told ThinkProgress.

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions' Ocean and Coastal Policy Program intern Jill Hamilton writes about a two-day workshop hosted by the Nicholas Institute and the Nicholas School of the Environment that explored global support efforts to small-scale fisheries. The meeting, which gathered practitioners, philanthropists, fishers and scientists from across the globe, examined the Food and Agriculture Organization's voluntary guidelines for securing sustainable small-scale fisheries, the first internationally-agreed-upon tool to address small-scale fisheries, released in 2015

Hydraulic fractured oil and gas wells spill pretty often, according to a recent study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, led by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. That study, along with a companion paper which appeared in the journal Science of the Total Environment, analyzed spill data and behavior across four states—Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Pennsylvania—with the goal of identifying common causes of spills to help industries improve, reports Popular Science.

The nation's regulation of oil and gas development is a mish-mash of disjointed state oversight that makes it difficult to quantify the environmental impacts of drilling, reports Inside Climate News. A new study highlights just how inconsistent spill reporting is, showing that the range in requirements makes it impossible to compare states or come up with a comprehensive national picture. The research, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, pulled together some of the disparate data and found there have been about 5 spills each year for every 100 wells that have been hydraulically fractured. Of the states examined, North Dakota had the highest rate of spills while Colorado companies reported just 11 spills per 1,000 wells annually.

Two papers on unconventional oil and gas development highlight the need for states to develop standardized data collection and reporting requirements for spills to better identify and manage risks for nature and people, reports the Nature Conservancy's Cool Green Science blog. “State spill data holds great promise for risk identification and mitigation. However, reporting requirements differ across states, requiring considerable effort to make the data usable for analysis,” said Lauren Patterson, policy associate at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and the study’s lead author. “Given the rapid recent development of unconventional oil and gas development, data are scarce on both how often spills happen, what causes them, what materials are spilled, and what the long-term environmental effects are. There is a need to better quantify risk to people and nature.”

New analysis in the journal Environmental Science & Technology finds that 2 to 16 percent of hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells across Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Pennsylvania spill hydrocarbons, chemical-laden water, hydraulic fracturing fluids and other substances each year. It examines state-level spill data to characterize spills associated with unconventional oil and gas development at 31,481 wells hydraulically fractured or "fracked" in the four states between 2005 and 2014, identifying 6,648 spills in the 10-year period. Authors conclude that making state spill data more uniform and accessible could provide stakeholders with important information on where to target efforts for locating and preventing future spills. However, reporting requirements differ across states, requiring considerable effort to make the data usable for analysis.