My time.com piece on the Gulf oil spill report—and the impact it will have on the deepwater drilling industry—is up on the main page. Check it out here.
Energy
Oil Spill: Presidential Commission Recommends Safety-First Approach to Drilling
The National Commission of the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling released its final report this morning. (I know—you were watching the Verizon iPhone launch.) We’ll have a story up soon on the mainpage about the report and the impact it may have on the offshore drilling industry—I’m guessing not that much—I …
Oil Spill: How the Gulf Cleaned Itself—The Bacterial Way
Over on the TIME.com mainpage, I have a piece about the growing number of scientific studies that have examined the Gulf of Mexico since oil spill, and found a surprising fact. Most of the oil and other hydrocarbons released by the blown Macondo well seem to have vanished, broken down and digested by bacteria. It’s a sign that the Gulf, …
British Lawmakers: No Need To Ban Offshore Drilling
A report by a British parliamentary committee looking into the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster warned on Tuesday that Britain is not ready to handle a spill of the kind suffered by BP in the Gulf of Mexico, but found that a moratorium on drilling around British coasts was unnecessary because British safety standards are “superior to …
Government Commission: The Gulf Oil Spill Was Avoidable—But Corporate & Regulatory Mistakes Made It Virtually Inevitable
Internal medicine training programs in hospitals have what are called morbidity and mortality conferences—known as M&Ms. The reviews usually take place after unexpectedly poor patient outcomes—like deaths, for instance—and investigate what medical errors might have been made that contributed to the failure. M&Ms are dreaded by …
Energy: Can We Run Out of Oil and Other Natural Resources?
Over at the New York Times, resident libertarian-contrarian John Tierney has a column about a bet he took in 2005 with the late energy analyst Matthew Simmons. Simmons—the author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy—was a prominent believer in peak oil, the theory that we’ve reached the end …
Oil Spill: Providing Clean Energy for the Victims of Deepwater Horizon
Last week I wrote a column asking the question: whatever happened to the Gulf oil spill? Thanks to presidential commissions and great investigative reporting, we know a great deal about why the spill happened and what impact it might have on the land and the water of the Gulf. In the news, though, the spill seems largely gone.
But …
Greenpeace’s New Board Game
Looking for the perfect gift for your radical, left-wing activist nephew? Greenpeace has just the product for you: a free downloadable board game called “Deepsea Desperation” that pits oil industry versus Greenpeace for control over deapsea oil reserves.
According to the Greenpeace website, the game is for two players, or teams of …
Energy: Research Vs. Deployment
It’s become fashionable among energy and climate thinkers to call for greatly boosted government investment in energy research, to face up to what Energy Secretary Steven Chu has called America’s “Sputnik moment.” Certainly that was the overriding message from yesterday’s Energy Innovation 2010 conference in Washington that I …
Energy: The Future Will Be a Gas
That was one message from yesterday’s Energy Innovation 2010 summit at the National Press Club in Washington, put on by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Breakthrough Institute. And it came from a high-level source: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter. Richter—who helped put together a group of 34 …