At least the worst-case scenario—for once—isn’t happening in the Gulf of Mexico. When forecasters warned last week that a tropical depression was forming in the Carribean, Coast Guard officials cautioned that that they would need to shut down containment operatons over the blown well for as much as two weeks if the storm came to …
Oil
Why Paying Damage Claims for the Gulf Oil Spill Won’t Be Easy
It might take King Solomon to properly decide the hundreds of thousands of damage claims on the oil spill that will likely be filed before the crude is finally cleaned up. We don’t have King Solomon, but we might have the next best thing: Kenneth Feinberg, the Washington lawyer who ran the compensation fund for victims of 9/11. Feinberg …
Why Aren’t People Getting Angrier at the Gulf Oil Spill?
Over at his new blog on the New Republic, Jonathan Cohn—the TNR writer who covered health care like Darrelle Revis on a wide receiver—asks where the public outrage is on the Gulf oil spill:
Two months after the Deepwater Horizon rig first exploded, where are the marches on Washington? Where are the phone calls lighting up Capitol
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EPA Says Dispersants OK—But Major Questions Remain
This afternoon, on Day 72 of the Gulf spill, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the results of its first round of toxicity testing on the chemical dispersants being applied to the crude. Let’s break it down good news/bad news, because that seems kind of bloggy.
Good news: the EPA’s initial tests found that the …
Optimism and the Oil Spill
I’m not by nature an optimistic person. If there’s a dark side of the moon, or anything else, I’ll usually find it, and my glasses only come half empty. Getting excited—not something you’ll witness me doing very often. Maybe it’s growing up a Philadelphia sports fan (the Eagles alone being enough to pummel the optimism out of any …
Solving the Oil Spill: A $10 Million Prize
I’m at the TEDxOilSpill event in Washington DC, which has just broken for lunch. (What’s the diet of very smart people—and the journalists who listen to them? Roast beef sandwiches.) The first half of the conference focused first on communicating just what’s happening down in the Gulf—both from people on the ground, including …
TED Takes on the Oil Spill
I’m in Washington DC today to attend the TEDxOilSpill conference. As I wrote in an earlier post, TED is a California-based nonprofits that puts on conferences that connect very smart—and sometimes very wealthy—together to discuss outside the box approaches to global problems. And if there’s one problem that needs some outside the box …
Protesting the Oil Spill with Hands Across the Sand
Greens used to be great when it came to protesting—top of the table. Activists could chain themselves to trees—or just live in one, like the devoted Julia Butterfly Hill—to protest logging. Anti-nuclear protesters were able to capitalize on the legacy of Three Mile Island, helping to end the construction of new plants. Lois …
Storm Seems Likely to Miss Spill—But Politics Won’t Stop Onshore
Bad news good news. The bad news is that the tropical depression that had been forming in the Caribbean has now officially become a tropical storm—named Alex—the first of what’s likely to be many in a rough season. The storm may even strengthen to become a minimal hurricane by the time it makes landfall. The good news is that it’s …
Stormy Days for the Oil Spill?
It doesn’t take much to disrupt the jury-rigged system BP has designed to contain some of the oil spewing into the Gulf. Just a few days ago an underwater remote operated vehicle bumped into a venting system, requiring BP to remove the containment cap for about half a day—during which time oil flowed from the well virtually …