On Monday, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced that the EPA would set about repealing the Clean Power Plan. The end of the Obama-era policy has been a long time coming, but its final death rattle has triggered a wave of anti-energy protests from both private organizations and state governments.

While these protests boil up, however, individual states have taken it upon themselves to pioneer their own environmental future. You know, rather than moan and groan in idle.

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Colorado is the front line for fracking in the United States. In a country that seems evenly divided on the practice of hydraulic fracturing, Colorado is a good microcosm of the argument. The state is rich in shale and oil reserves, which means fracking is a particularly relevant topic. More importantly, however, Colorado is home to an incredibly diverse array of people who represent an equally diverse amount of perspectives.

And as any Colorado resident can tell you, the people who live there are also not shy about voicing those opinions. In the wake of a federal court ruling that has revoked a series of Obama-era regulations that banned fracking on federal lands, two Colorado counties are working quickly to make sure that their voices are heard.

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If the United States government believed that Venezuela would crumble in the wake of a fresh round of sanctions, it was sorely mistaken. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro responded to the sanctions by taking a drastic action on Friday, when the nation published its oil prices in the common currency of China, the yuan.

In case the decision wasn’t a direct enough stab at the US, Maduro doubled down on the decision by calling it an attempt to free Venezuela from the “tyranny of the US dollar.” It’s a bold move from a country that does a whole lot of oil and gas business with the United States. Maduro’s shift is enough to make some industry experts stop and take notice.

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