When he spoke at a briefing yesterday morning, Coast Guard Admiral Thad W. Allen told reporters that it would be a “very consequential 24 hours.” At the time BP had just connected the new, tighter cap over the blown well and was ready to begin pressure tests that—if successful—would have been one of the last steps to finally stopping …
I’ve already asked whether President Obama’s deepwater drilling moratorium is a smart policy, given the fact that it won’t do much unless we attack oil demand at the source. But I still thought that a temporary timeout for certain sorts of deepwater drilling made sense. The Deepwater Horizon accident proved not just that well blowouts …
A brief update on BP’s containment procedures while I wait for the presidential oil spill commission to begin its second day of hearings here in New Orleans. (By the way, you can watch the hearing, which begins at 9 AM Central, here.) Yesterday evening BP managed to successfully connect the new containment cap—the 3 ram stacking …
Frustrated twice by the federal courts—which had overturned his original temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling—President Obama Monday evening decided to do what most of us have probably wanted to do when denied by someone in a position of authority: he went ahead anyway. (Sometimes it’s good to be President.) Interior Secretary …
Well, not really—unless you spent a decade studying some of the most complex science in the world in college, graduate school and postdoctoral training, and know the ins and outs of a General Circulation Model. But as climate researchers struggle to cope with a changing media landscape, persistent skepticism and hostile attacks …
Greetings from New Orleans, where I’m about 1200 miles closer to BP’s complex containment procedures above the site of the Deepwater Hozion sinking—yet I’m pretty much still dependent on subsea camera web feeds like the rest of you. I’m here to check out how the spill—and the cleanup—are progressing, and how the community is …
The future of fish—at least the sort that end up on our dinner plates—is not in the ocean. As we’ve steadily overfished the seas, the stock of wild fish have been declining fast. Only around 25% of commercial stocks are in a reasonably healthy state, and some 30% of fish stocks are already considered collapsed. A famous study that …
Over at Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin has gotten his hands on a couple of documents being sent to the 831 researchers who will be contributing to the fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the report that sums up the state of research on global warming, and which is set to be finalized in 2014. Both have to do …
Of course, when we say “early,” it is important to remember that we’ve now passed Day 80 of the oil spill, and up to 150 million gallons of crude have already leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, if not more. But BP may be close to finally ending the leak. On Saturday, the company began a complex multi-day operation that involves removing the …
Well it only took about 80 days. On Thursday the Gulf coast woke up to some good news—the relief wells seen as the final tool to end the oil leak are proceeding faster than projected, and BP has raised the possibility that they may even be completed by July 27, far earlier than expected. Speaking to NBC and the Wall Street Journal in …