Oh Greenpeace. Only PETA outshines you in the shameless publicity stunt department, and yet here I am, falling for your tricks, because this week your eco-warriors have attached themselves — literally — to a topic I can’t resist: the quest to find oil in the Arctic.
At 3AM on May 29, a Greenpeace team left the Esperanza, the …
I made my writing debut over at Foreign Policy this past weekend, writing a piece on Big Oil’s checkered attempts to fund clean energy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I conclude that the major oil companies—while they may make some smart investments, especially in biofuels—will never be a revolutionary force for clean energy:
What
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Crossposted from Curious Capitalist
You can practically set your watch by it. As petroleum prices soar—and with them, oil company profits and pain at the gas pump—sooner or later members of Congress will haul Big Oil executives into a hearing and Demand That Something Be Done. It happened in 2008, the last time oil prices breached …
With major oil players enjoying eye-popping profits on the back of high gas prices, there’s a growing political push to eliminate tax incentives for the petroleum industry. Senate Democrats and President Obama are behind a plan to strips billions in subsidies for the five biggest oil companies, with the money going either to clean …
After rising and rising in recent months, oil prices have taken a sudden fall over the past couple of days, sliding beneath $100 a barrel. What happened? Representative Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas, has an idea:
“What happened yesterday? Oh, the House passed a bill,” Burgess said.
“Here we are in the Senate
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For retired Navy Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, Osama bin Laden’s death was personal. McGinn was working at the Pentagon on 9/11, and his office was just 50 yards away from the spot where the hijacked plane eventually crashed. Had he not recently moved into an office with shatterproof glass, McGinn might have ended up as one of the more …
It can happen to any journalist—major news happens, but not on your beat. What do you do? You look for any entry point you can. But we don’t have to stretch too far to examine the implications that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s death might have on global energy markets—and especially oil. Born and raised in the petroleum cradle …
April 20, the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Gulf oil spill, has no shortage of news events. Environmentalists and fishermen along the Gulf coast offered tours of the shoreline, to show the spots where the oil still remained. BP—with its impeccable sense of timing—lodged a $40 billion lawsuit against Transocean, the …
Today marks a year after the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out, destroying the Deepwater Horizon and beginning the worst oil spill in U.S. history. We’ve worked up a few pieces that look back at the effects of the spill, and look forward on the future of offshore drilling. Click on them here:
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I have a Going Green piece up on the mainpage that examines the ecological impact of the BP oil spill on the Gulf and its coast, a year after the Deepwater Horizon sunk. The verdict: so far the environmental damage seems much less than many scientists feared initially, thanks to an aggressive response, hungry bacteria and a lot of good …