RIP, Energy Bill: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he didn’t have the votes to pass a climate-change bill that puts a price on greenhouse gases. With that statement one of Obama’s major campaign promises crashed to earth, along with hopes for slowing global warming or using cleantech to jump-start the U.S. economy. In place of a real energy bill is an
The same day BP finally threw a cap over their spewing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico (which is expected to be as effective as celebrity rehab) the non-profit Artists & Athletes Alliance held a private discussion with Philippe Cousteau about the epic Gulf disaster. Event attendees, like Jorga Fox, Alyssa Milano, Stephen Baldwin and Jason Mraz, were treated to Cousteau’s inside information about the spill and it’s consequences, and got a rare glimpse of his feisty Irish side when discussing BP, the government, and our dependence on fossil fuels.
Frustrated with the media’s B-level response to the BP oil spill, Cousteau decided it was time for
This morning the President spoke on the news from the Gulf, emphasizing that while there may be good news, the work is not done containing the leak, and will not be until the relief wells are finished and functioning. After his opening remarks where he explained exactly what is happening, he was asked what his message for the people in the Gulf region would be:
(Reuters) – The Obama administration issued a revised moratorium on deepwater oil drilling Monday but will likely face another tough legal battle with the companies which have so far successfully sued to get the original drilling suspension lifted.
The Justice Department said it will now seek to have the court order blocking the original moratorium thrown out, with the administration arguing a pause
(Reuters) – Drilling of a relief well to halt the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a week ahead of schedule, the U.S. official overseeing the response to the disaster said on Tuesday.
The prospect of an earlier completion of the well, seen as the most promising way to plug the oil leaking from BP’s blown-out undersea well, could help bolster the energy giant’s battered shares, which rose about 9 percent in New York trade.
But Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen told
The companies now threatening to sue BP have only themselves to blame.
Call me a hard-hearted bastard, but I’m finding it difficult to summon up the sympathy demanded by the institutional investors now threatening to sue BP. They claim that the company inflated its share price by misrepresenting its safety record. I don’t know whether this is true, but I do know that the investors did all they could not to find out. They have just been presented with the bill for the years they spent shouting down anyone who questioned the company.
They might not have been warned by BP, but they were warned repeatedly by environmental groups and ethical investment funds. Every year, at BP’s annual general meetings, they were invited to ask the firm to provide more information about the environmental and social risks it was taking. Every year they voted instead for BP to keep them in the dark. While relying on this company for a disproportionate share of
Rep. Ed Markey has been among BP’s toughest critics in Congress following the Deepwater Horizon blowout, accusing it, among other things, of lowballing its estimates of oil flow.
Markey is at it again. As you may have read, the Boston Democrat released an internal BP document that shows that early company estimates for worst-case oil flow scenarios were far higher than the company has ever acknowledged — up to 100,000 barrels per day if all containment mechanisms were to fail. Take a look at the document for yourself.
The document is not dated, but a statement from Rep. Markey that accompanied its release said
In a series of images taken in and around the Gulf of Mexico in late June, a team of independent photographers have documented the ongoing fallout from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Collected as part of the TEDxOilSpill project, the photos — taken from chartered airplanes, fishing boats, and coastal communities across the region — will be shown at a June 28 conference in Washington, D.C. coordinated by TED Conferences, LLC. “From the source to Gulf Shores [Alabama],” says one of the project participants, “we saw oil ranging from sheen to much heavier all the way
The U.S. government last week launched an interactive resource that allows the public to follow developments in the BP oil spill and ongoing response efforts in “near-real-time.” Originally designed as a way to keep participants in the vast clean-up effort informed, the GeoPlatform uses the latest information from various federal, state, and local organizations to track the spill’s path, identify closed fishing areas and threatened coastal zones, and to map the latest response efforts. Numerous agencies, including the U.S. Coast Guard and the
(Reuters) – President Barack Obama on Tuesday pledged to do all he could to contain the BP Plc oil spill and help the Gulf Coast recover.
“We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused,” Obama said in a televised address.
Obama also said he was happy to take ideas from Democrats and Republicans on broad energy legislation but said the United States could not afford to avoid changes in its energy use.
The high-stakes address to the nation is seen as an attempt to restore public confidence in his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and drive forward his ambitious plans to cut U.S. dependence on fossil fuels.
BP’s efforts to curb the flow of oil into the sea suffered another setback when a fire aboard a ship collecting the gushing crude forced suspension of siphoning from the ruptured underwater well. But operations were restarted before Obama spoke.
The catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico has been portrayed as a one-of-a-kind disaster, a perfect storm of bad equipment, bad planning and bad luck.
But it’s far from the only spill that’s taken place this year – or even the only spill occurring in the Gulf right now.
On June 7, the Mobile Press-Register reported that the Ocean Saratoga rig has been leaking into the Gulf since April 30. Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff confirmed the next day that “small amounts of oil” were leaking from the wells beneath the rig, about 10 miles from Louisiana’s southeastern coast.
(Reuters) – President Barack Obama will press BP executives this week to set up an escrow account to pay damage claims by individuals and businesses hurt by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.
The move comes as Obama, who will address the nation about the spill on Tuesday night, faces questions on his handling of the disaster, which was in its 55th day. Millions of gallons of oil have poured into the Gulf since an April 20 offshore rig blast killed 11 workers and blew out the well.
The EPA may experiment with using containment booms made out of mushrooms to break down oil gushing from the Gulf, according to a leading mushroom scientist.
Paul Stamets, a pioneering mycologist, said he had been contacted “at the highest levels of the EPA” to discuss using long, floating cylinders of fungi to break down hydrocarbons floating in the Gulf from the BP oil disaster.
Stamets has experimented with a species of oyster mushroom, pleurotus ostreatus, that can withstand saltwater and establish itself on straw. Applied to diesel-contaminated soil, it cut the dirt’s oil content from 10,000 parts per million to 200 parts per million within 16 weeks.
In the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, 71 percent of Americans say President Obama and Congress should make developing clean sources of energy a high priority, an 11 percent increase since January, according to a new poll. The poll, conducted by Yale University and George Mason University, also revealed that 77 percent of Americans support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
On Thursday, the U.S. Senate will vote on a resolution by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that would block