The rent may be too damn high all over, but many gas tanks are nearly running on empty as prices at the pump remain costly just about everywhere. Read more»

Consumer prices rose by an average of 7% in U.S. cities last year, the steepest rise in decades, and they grew even faster in the Phoenix metro area, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read more»

As the U.S. economy ended 2021 with a lot of uncertainty, three economists highlight inflation, workforce participation and real wages as key indicators they’ll be following closely in the new year to better understand how the economy is doing. Read more»

Mexico announced plans to end all oil exports by 2023, a bid by to make the country "self-sufficient" and better control the price of gasoline - but experts aren’t as positive that such self-sufficiency would be good for Mexico, and even doubt that such a goal is economically viable. Read more»

While some of the country’s absolute wealthiest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg, occasionally sidestep federal income tax entirely, a subset of the ultrarich does it year in and year out. Read more»

Wages are high, jobs are plentiful and more than a third of states cut taxes in the past year as their revenues soared - yet the highest inflation spike in three decades has many policymakers digging for ways to ease the strain on families’ pocketbooks. Read more»

President Joe Biden ordered the release of 50 million barrels of oil from America's emergency stockpile - the Strategic Petroleum Reserve - in response to soaring gas and energy prices, while his administration continues to grapple with historic rates of inflation. Read more»

President Joe Biden on Monday said the administration will move to prevent oil and gas development for two decades near Chaco Canyon, an area in northwestern New Mexico that’s culturally significant to the area’s Native American communities and important for biodiversity. Read more»

President Biden, speaking at the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, urged the international community to transition to clean energy and curb greenhouse gas emissions, and also apologized for his predecessor exiting the Paris Climate Accord. Read more»

Nearly half of Americans still don’t think climate change is caused by human activities, but Democrats were far less likely than Republicans to hold those views, a new VICE News and Guardian poll has found. Read more»

University of Massachusetts Boston scholar David W. Cash, who worked at senior levels in state government for a decade, describes how the Department of the Interior will implement the Biden administration's ambitious plans to scale up leasing for offshore wind energy projects. Read more»

Arizona projects got $110 million last year and will get another $159 million in the fiscal year that started this month, or more than 9% of all funding nationally under the Great American Outdoors Act for those two years. Read more»

Proposals targeting specific areas for conservation in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and federal waters off Louisiana's coast made their way into the gigantic budget reconciliation bill that Democrats are moving through Congress. Read more»

President Biden called for major clean energy investments as a way to curb climate change and generate jobs after the White House released a report that found that solar power could generate up to 45% of the U.S. electricity supply by 2050, compared to less than 4% today. Read more»

By downplaying the urgency of the climate crisis, the fossil fuel industry has new tools to delay efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions - and worse yet: even industry critics haven’t fully caught up to this new approach. Read more»