Barack Obama and Dilma Rousseff put climate change at the top of their agenda, with the US and Brazil agreeing to obtain up to 20% of their electricity from renewable power by 2030. “Brazil also committed to restoring up to 12m hectares of forest – an area about the size of England or Pennsylvania – in another attempt to reduce the carbon pollution that causes climate change.

The White House said the initiatives were part of a new US-Brazil climate partnership, loosely modelled on the historic US-China agreement reached during Obama’s visit to Beijing last November, intended to build momentum for a global deal to fight climate change in Paris at the end of the year.” [The Guardian]

The world’s volatile energy markets has benefited think tanks to a great extent, as they become  increasingly important to brainstorming, problem solving and working through some of the highest-stakes issues on the planet. Antoine Halff, head of the oil industry and markets division for the International Energy Agency, the research and policy advisory arm of the OECD countries, is joining Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, an up-and-coming academic think tank, as a senior fellow and director of the center’s global oil-markets research program. [WSJ Blog]

Duke Energy CEO, Lynn Good, has been given a raise a year after the country’s largest electric company confronted a coal ash spill that coated 70 miles of a North Carolina river in sludge containing toxic heavy metals. Duke Energy’s board of directors approved raising Good’s annual salary by $50,000 to more than $1.2 million, the only part of her pay package that’s guaranteed.

Bigger boosts in incentives could push her potential annual compensation to $10.5 million a year, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Good previously topped out at about $8 million a year if she met short- and long-term goals. [ABC/AP]