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2015 is already bringing new challenges — including a congress that’s set on ignoring climate science and fighting for the fossil fuel industry instead of the American people.

If you had Googled “fossil fuels” and “stranded assets” a few years ago, you would have probably got no hits. But how times change.

The new year has started just like the old one ended, with the oil price continuing its downward slide. This morning oil dropped to five and a half year low as over supply continued to spook the markets.

New technologies like fracking––along with government subsidies––have ushered in an energy boom reliant on extreme extraction methods to produce oil and natural gas. Now the Uinta Basin is ground zero for what threatens to become the next phase in extreme energy extraction: strip mining for tar sands and oil shale.

Through public land leases, infrastructure subsidies, and some very expensive tax breaks, taxpayer money is supporting what could become one of the dirtiest, most destructive chapters in American energy history.

And so the free-fall continues. The price of Brent crude has fallen this morning below $60 a barrel for the first time since July 2009. The price of US crude is below $55.

Last week we exposed ExxonMobil’s Outlook for Energy as a corporate fantasy rather than a forecast. ExxonMobil's head of public affairs called our work ill-informed and "odious" but chose not to answer our arguments...