Investor-owned utilities spent more than $98 billion last year, while electricity demand was essentially flat. So why are utilities spending so much money? And who is giving them the money to spend? In addition, why is that only “regulated utilities” are spending money?

In a new wrinkle to the revelation that Exxon Mobil knew about global warming for about 40 years, New York State’s attorney general is now investigating the company and others to ascertain whether they misled investors on climate change’s causes and ramifications.

The opening of an investigation of Exxon Mobil by the New York attorney general’s office into the company’s record on climate change may well spur legal inquiries into other oil companies, according to legal and climate experts, although successful prosecutions are far from assured.

Without a single, comprehensive tool for evaluating the costs and benefits for emissions reductions, policymakers are often left to cobble together expectations for various policies from a hodgepodge of reports and studies that rarely share the same data and methodologies. Last month, San Francisco-based think tank Energy Innovation (EI) unveiled its Energy Policy Simulator, a one-stop shop for testing dozens of decarbonization strategies in the U.S. economy and evaluating their costs.

Energy Innovation, a San Francisco-based think tank, has created what may be the coolest tool for energy nerds I’ve ever seen. It’s called the Energy Policy Simulator, and it lets anyone see the impacts of their energy policy choices on a whole range of outputs, including US greenhouse gas emissions.

Thanks to San Francisco-based clean energy think tank Energy Innovation LLC, we now have a grip on the 15 most cost-effective policies for accelerating US clean energy and reaching our 2025 decarbonization targets.

Emissions data, temperature data, fossil fuel extraction data: the climate debate is awash with numbers. But it can be hard to find answers in the mass of information. Here are seven tools that can help.

Think of it like a low-fi SimCity, except instead of municipal policy, you get to tweak nationwide approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The immensely detailed Energy Policy Simulator is a digital tool that shows the impact of an astonishing variety of climate change policies.

The new Energy Policy Simulator is a responsive, thought-provoking way to understand what kind of system would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, how much it might cost, and which individual energy policies really move the needle.

For as long as renewable energy has been a threat to the conventional power sector, it has been plagued by warnings that too much wind and solar would destabilise the grid. Intermittent renewable energies could never power advanced economies unless they were backed up by large-scale affordable battery storage — a technology that had always seemed a distant dream. Yet, the dream seems to suddenly be not only achievable, but imminent and inevitable.