E2-Wire

The White House released a national strategy Friday for balancing energy- and minerals-development and conservation in the Arctic.

The document contains three policy aims — advancing national security interests, responsibly managing the Arctic ecosystem and bolstering international relationships. The White House will develop an implementation plan for the interagency effort in the coming months, a senior administration official said during a media call.

The Arctic issue is politically sensitive for President Obama, who is juggling demands from green groups to address climate change while also encountering pressure from Republicans and the oil-and-gas industry to ramp up drilling.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have surpassed 400 parts-per-million, the government announced Friday.

The Senate is slated to vote next week on Ernest Moniz, President Obama’s nominee to run the Energy Department.

Lawmakers reached an agreement Thursday to proceed with the vote on Moniz, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist who served as undersecretary of Energy in the Clinton administration. It will occur as early as Tuesday.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had been holding up a vote over his concerns about federal management of a program in his state to transform weapons-grade plutonium into fuel.

But the Senate’s “unanimous consent” agreement reached Thursday to allow the vote to proceed means Graham has lifted the procedural block on Moniz. Graham’s office did not comment Friday morning.

The oil industry is pushing back against a federal decision to postpone oil and gas lease auctions on public land in California, The Associated Press reports.

Offshore drillers say there are not enough qualified auditors to comply with an upcoming federal rule requiring third-party reviews of safety systems, the Houston Chronicle writes.

Slate says a cold March increased United States skepticism about climate change.

Republicans on a subpanel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee argued that wind tax credits harm electric power grid reliability, Platts reports.

Prince Charles says that climate change skeptics are turning Earth into a "dying patient," The Guardian reports.

The email from Organizing for Action (OFA) is the latest effort by the pro-Obama group to criticize GOP climate skeptics. 

The path forward for EPA nominee Gina McCarthy hit a snag Thursday — and could hit more in coming weeks.

Vice President Biden is rebutting claims that the Obama administration hasn’t pushed hard enough on climate change and defending President Obama’s first-term record.

Asked by Rolling Stone magazine why the administration doesn’t “use the bully pulpit to talk about climate change like it does for gun control,” Biden replied: “We have.”

“The president used the biggest settings he had, in the inaugural address and the State of the Union. In his inaugural address, he said, ‘We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,’” Biden said in the wide-ranging new interview.

The Obama administration has launched an online tool to bolster research into links between climate change and health and inform “more effective responses.”

The interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program on Thursday unveiled its Metadata Access Tool for Climate and Health (MATCH) platform.

“It is a publicly accessible digital platform for searching and integrating metadata ... extracted from more than 9,000 health, environment, and climate-science datasets held by six Federal agencies,” said Tom Armstrong, executive director of the interagency climate program, in a blog post.

The rollout dovetailed with President Obama’s order that directs federal agencies to make more data publicly accessible and easier to search, which The Hill's Ben Goad wrote about Thursday on our Hillicon Valley blog.

White House press secretary Jay Carney accused Republicans of a "historic level of obstructionism" after a boycott of a scheduled vote on the president's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

"There has been a historic level of obstructionism from the Senate on this nomination and others. … It just demonstrates the predilection for obstructionism that is bad for the functioning of the federal government in important areas," Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One.

The White House spokesman went on to "call on Republicans to stop the theater and to move forward."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested he might rescind his hold on Energy Department (DOE) nominee Ernest Moniz if the White House agrees to drop plans to study alternatives to a nuclear fuel project in his state.

Graham said he worries the Obama administration might abandon the Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) program, sticking South Carolina with a cache of weapons-grade plutonium and no way to get it out of the state.

“I’m going to stay on this as long as it takes,” Graham told reporters Thursday in the Capitol.