WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama stands to win a bump in voter support for his decision to tap emergency oil reserves, but the gains from lower fuel prices run the risk of evaporating before next year’s election, political experts said.

The United States agreed on Thursday to release 30 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of the Paris-based International Energy Agency’s plan to release 60 million barrels to protect the fragile global economy.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama took withering fire from the oil industry and Republicans for agreeing to release the nation’s emergency oil supplies, a decision that senior officials said was prompted by the need to prop up the ailing economy.

Critics blasted the release of 30 million barrels of oil — half of a global injection coordinated by the International Energy Agency — as an ill-timed misuse of reserves at a time when U.S. supplies are relatively high, despite the loss of Libya’s exports for the past three months.

WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) – The United States would
increase its use of corn-based ethanol next year to 13.2
billion gallons as required by Congress, but will cut its
target for advanced biofuels for the second year running, the
Environmental Protection Agency proposed on Tuesday.

The EPA proposed cutting the amount of cellulosic ethanol
that must be produced next year to between 3.45 million and
12.9 million gallons from the original goal of 500 million
gallons. The target was cut to 6 million gallons this year from
the 250 million gallons required by Congress.

WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) – The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency is set to unveil next year’s mandate for
renewable fuels as soon as Tuesday, likely cutting back the
target for making the fuel from cellulosic sources for a second
year, industry and agency sources said.

While the 2012 target to produce 13.2 billion gallons (60
billion litres) of corn-based ethanol are unlikely to be much
altered since the industry is already exceeding the volume, the
second-generation biofuel producers have failed to thrive due
expensive enzymes needed to make the advanced fuel.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Environmental Protection Agency, under pressure from Republicans and big utilities, said on Monday it had extended a deadline by two months on draft rules that would for the first time limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The EPA said it had moved the date for proposing the rule from July 26 to September 30 after listening to businesses and states that will have to implement the regulation.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is ripe for a boost in wind power that would create domestic manufacturing and maintenance jobs as long as the right policies are adopted, said the chief of Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s top supplier of wind turbines.

“The potential over here is enormous,” Ditlev Engel, the president and CEO of Vestas, who visits Washington periodically to meet with lawmakers and others, said in an interview on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON, June 9 (Reuters) – Snowpack declines in the
Rocky Mountains over the last 30 years are more significant
than during any other period in past centuries and foreshadow a
strain on summer water supplies for more than 70 million people
across the Western United States, a U.S. government study said.

Despite this year’s record snowpacks in the Rockies and
resulting floods, declines over the three decades have shown a
an unusual pattern compared to reconstructions of snowpacks
going back 1,000 years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey
study released on Thursday, in the journal Science.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Oil consuming nations said they stood ready to tap into emergency stocks if Saudi Arabia didn’t quickly pump more oil, responding with dismay to OPEC’s failure to agree an increase in output Wednesday.

Unusually blunt references from both the White House and the International Energy Agency to drawing down the industrialized world’s 1.5 billion barrels in government-controlled oil inventories follows the shocking breakdown in talks of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Oil consuming nations reacted with dismay to OPEC’s failure to agree an increase in output on Wednesday, with the International Energy Agency urging key members to hike production and the White House keeping open the option to tap U.S. strategic stocks.

The quick response to an extraordinary breakdown in OPEC talks in Vienna underscored the deep unease within the industrialized world about the danger of $100-plus oil prices to a fragile world economy, and the increasingly politicized effort to find new ways to fight them.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Oil consuming nations reacted with dismay to OPEC’s failure to agree an increase in output on Wednesday, with the International Energy Agency urging key members to hike production anyway and an influential U.S. lawmaker suggesting Washington may tap strategic stocks.

The quick response to an extraordinary breakdown in OPEC talks in Vienna underscored the deep unease within the industrialized world about the danger of $100-plus oil prices to a fragile world economy, and the increasingly politicized effort to find new ways to fight them.