ABSTRACT
Under President Obama, the United States also began taking significant actions to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly through the EPA's Clean Power Plan. Federal and state regulation of coal, natural gas, and oil has focused on prices and competition within each energy sector. Congress has adopted public policies to deal with all of these environmental effects resulting from energy production and use, from clean air and water laws to nuclear waste disposal, surface mining control, and oil spill prevention measures. Environmentalists have argued for an early and rapid shift away from fossil fuels and nuclear power and toward solar power, wind energy, geothermal sources, use of biomass, and other forms of renewable energy. The political dynamics of the energy debate changed in 2005 as gasoline and other fuel prices, and public discontent over them, rose. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has leaned even more heavily than the Forest Service toward the resource use end of the spectrum.
