The EU is officially investigating Germany’s green policies to determine if they violate the bloc’s competition rules. On Wednesday the European Commission announced it was opening a probe of Merkel’s policy of exempting her country’s most energy-intensive firms from green surcharges tacked on to electricity bills to subsidize the cost of expensive renewables.

New Delhi, much like Beijing, is currently laboring under a cloud of toxic smog. Smog is proving a costly and resilient challenge to both India and China, and is a very tangible byproduct of rapid industrialization. Hastening the transition to an information economy could clear the skies of both BRICs members.

Now that Mexico’s energy reforms are all but certain to go through, countries around the world are preparing to move in on the imminently available new energy market. The US has the expertise to frack Mexico’s prodigious shale reserves, but Asia has the demand to make it a strong investor in Mexico’s hydrocarbon riches.

Canada has its oil sands, the United States has its shale boom, and now Mexico has its energy reforms. Add those three recent energy trends together, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a North American energy powerhouse. A new report from the Energy Information Administration paints an even rosier energy future for the US and North America.

According to a draft letter received by Angela Merkel’s government in Berlin, the EU is finally opening up an investigation into Germany’s green policies to see whether its exemptions to green energy surcharges, extended to Germany’s most energy-intensive companies, are giving the firms an unfair advantage. Germany’s energy policy isn’t just ill-conceived, it might also be illegal.

Sharks and wind don’t mix well, as anyone familiar with the SyFy movie Sharknado knows. Plans for a wind farm off the coast of Scotland were recently trashed so as not to disrupt the habitat of basking sharks in the area. It’s the latest in a string of offshore wind failures for Britain.

From China’s airpocalypse to the ACA’s fail fractal, Canada’s Arctic ambitions to Ukraine’s restless protesters, this week was a busy one. Here are some posts you may have missed.

The smog over Beijing was touted as a potential missile screen earlier this week, but more pressingly—and distressingly—it’s causing problems for airplanes attempting to land in China’s capital. To reduce flight delays, China’s civil aviation regulatory body will require pilots traveling in to the city on especially smoggy days be certified in instrument-only flight.

America averaged 8.075 million barrels a day in the first week of December, our highest total since 1988. It’s the latest in a string of milestones for the US, which continues to reap the benefits of shale. Fracking has changed the American energy landscape virtually overnight; the idea that the US might contemplate opening up exports of oil and gas would have been laughable ten or even just five years ago, but that’s where we are today.

We may soon be looking to our oceans for our freshwater. Or, more accurately, we’ll be looking underneath our oceans, where scientists have found vast reserves of fresh and near-fresh water. A new study estimates that there are roughly 120,000 cubic miles—more than 100 times the amount of freshwater we’ve drilled from the ground since 1900—of low-salinity water trapped underneath seabeds. Chicken Littles—wrong again.