EcocentricOil
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 …
EcocentricOil
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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EcocentricOil
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 …
EcocentricMedia
The media is not in a good way right now. Advertising has fallen off a cliff, taking revenue with it, and even if the economy recovers, it’s far from clear that those funds will ever flow to mainstream news organizations at the level they once did as the media landscape grows more crowded. Magazines and newspapers have been cutting back …
EcocentricUncategorized
Environmental NGOs in China and the U.S. are trying to redirect the world’s fixation on the new iPhone 4 to the environmental records of the factories where it and other mobile phones and computers are built in China. In particular, the groups have been revving up pressure on Apple to answer questions about pollution regulation …
EcocentricUncategorized
God knows this blog—and just about everyone else with a keyboard and Internet access—has been hammering BP and the government for failing to do enough to respond to the Gulf oil spill. But what if the best thing to do when oil leaks is…nothing? That was the tentative conclusion of several British experts at a briefing in London …
EcocentricPolitics
Other than maybe Jason in Friday the 13th, nothing has supposedly died and come back to life more often than climate legislation and carbon cap-and-trade. A year ago, thanks in part to fierce opposition from business interests led by the Chamber of Commerce, the cap-and-trade bill cosponsored by Henry Waxman and Edward Markey just barely …
EcocentricHealth
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—gingerly, gingerly—took a step on Monday towards addressing one of the most fundamental but unknown threats to public health: the overuse of antibiotics in animal food and water. The FDA said in a new policy document that the uses of antibiotics for agriculture should be limited to treated sick …
EcocentricPolitics
NASA junkies continue to howl at the Obama administration’s plans for human space exploration, and with good reason: there’s just no there there. Space partisans won’t be any happier with a 14-pg. policy statement released by the White House yesterday. (You can read a summery here at whitehouse.gov and download a PDF of the report.) But …
EcocentricTechnology
London may be known for its rainy climate, but the city’s annual rainfall is actually around half that of Sydney, and less than Dallas’ or Istanbul’s yearly precipitation. Indeed, the British Environment Agency designates the capital as “seriously water-stressed” and at risk of summer water shortages.
But now Thames …
