Ivan Penn

Western oil companies have been fighting to recoup tens of billions of dollars that they say Venezuela owes them — debts that could play a prominent role in efforts by President Trump to compel U.S. businesses to produce more oil in the country.Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips top the list of oil companies with big financial claims against Venezuela, whose president, Nicolás Maduro, was captured by U.S. forces over the weekend in Caracas.American and European oil companies once had significant ope...

On Brazil’s third-largest river basin, deep in the Amazon, a massive hydroelectric power plant stands as a monument to the world’s oldest source of clean energy — and the big challenges it faces.Drought and time have taken their toll on the plant, the Tucuruí Dam and hydroelectric power project. Up close, visitors can see leaks that form little, unwanted waterfalls.Completed around 40 years ago, the Tucuruí plant and hundreds of others worldwide are coming under increasing pressure just as human...

Top U.S. government officials are skipping the annual United Nations climate summit for the first time in 30 years. And many American corporate executives appear to be following their lead.Though few executives have joined President Trump in calling climate change a hoax, some have recently suggested that it is perhaps not deserving of as much attention as it has been getting. Their attitude is not so much climate denial as it is a rejection of the past framing of the issue, a stark shift from t...

For years, Dan Harrison’s home in the western hills of Los Angeles would lose power when it was hot, when it rained or when it was very cold — sometimes the outages would stretch longer than 10 hours.So, he took matters into his own hands.Over the last six years, he has bought rooftop solar panels and batteries. Now, his house often helps keep the lights on across his neighborhood, near the University of California, Los Angeles.U.S. electric grids are increasingly under strain and utility compan...

The annual meeting of state utility regulators is typically a humdrum affair of dry speeches and panel discussions. But in November, the scene at the Marriott in Anaheim, Calif., had a bit more flash.The conference’s top sponsors included the nation’s biggest tech companies — Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Their executives sat on panels, and the companies’ branding was plastered on product booths and at networking events. Even the lanyards around attendees’ necks were stamped with Google’s colorf...

Early on the evening of Jan. 7, a resident of a neighborhood of homes backed up against the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California saw what he described as a bright white light, and then a small fire at the base of an electrical tower up in Eaton Canyon. Another neighbor reported that his lights flickered a few minutes before he saw fire underneath the tower.So far, many clues to the origins of the deadly Eaton fire, which started in the area just after 6 p.m. that evening and went on to k...

About 80 miles southeast of Louisiana’s coast, 100,000 metric tons of steel floats in the Gulf of Mexico, an emblem of the hopes of oil and gas companies.This hulk of metal, a deepwater platform called Appomattox and owned by Shell, collects the oil and gas that rigs tap from reservoirs thousands of feet below the seafloor. Equipment on the platform pipes that fuel to shore.Political and corporate leaders have pledged to reduce planet-warming emissions to net-zero by 2050. But oil companies like...