With the blown Macondo well essentially sealed, and with the oil remaining under the water dissipating (though to uncertain ecological effects), focus is now turning to the ongoing investigations into the cause of the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. Wednesday morning BP released the results of its own internal investigation into the …
Energy
Oil Spill: BP’s Blown Well Is Finally Neutralized
After about 4.9 million barrels of oil, 136 days, over 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants, over 10 million feet of shoreline boom, 411 controlled surface burns, over 4,000 vessels and nearly 30,000 people mobilized, BP’s blown well has been effectively neutralized. Yesterday BP successfully removed the Macondo well’s original …
Oil Sludge Blights Beaches of Party Mecca Goa
Black tar balls and oil sludge have surfaced this week on the famed beaches of Goa, the small Indian state so beloved by the day-glowed ravers of yesteryear. According to the AP, pudding-like oil deposits some six inches deep have soiled popular beaches like Colva, Candolim and Calangute, the likes of which draw millions of tourists …
Of Cheap Couches, Swedish Meatballs, and Geothermal Heat
Oh, IKEA. Always going that extra kilometer. As if the affordable bedside tables and mid-store meatballs just when we are getting hungry (you always know!) weren’t enough, the world’s favorite Swedish home furnisher is now trying to give America a gentle shove into the age of renewable energy. IKEA is working with U.S. Department of …
Energy: Bill Gates’s Climate Heresy
Bill Gates—through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—revolutionized the health world by focusing vast amounts of money on diseases of the developing world that hadn’t responded to traditional philanthropy. (That’s why TIME put Gates, his wife Melinda and U2 frontman Bono on the cover as People of the Year in 2005.) Lately, …
Oil Spill: New Study Says Bacteria Are Breaking Down the Crude
We’ve learned so many wonderful new terms during the more than four-month old BP oil spill: top kill, static kill, bottom kill, Corexit, junk shot. It’s time to add one more: Oceanospirillales. That’s that name of an order of proteobacteria that are currently chowing down on the plumes of underwater oil created by the spill—and …
Oil Spill: Aboard the Arctic Sunrise
There seem to be two rules to being a passenger on a Greenpeace ship. One: if you take a beer from the refrigerator, always remember to log it on the drinks sheet. (And pay your bar bill before you leave the boat—otherwise, I believe they make you walk the plank.) Two: there is no such thing as a passenger on a Greenpeace ship. …
Niger Delta Oil Spills in Spotlight
With the world’s gaze focused on the dangers of oil spills, attention turned this week to a relatively overlooked environmental calamity: oil spills in Ogoniland, a part of Nigeria’s Niger Delta. If the BP rig disaster was a geyser, the spills in Ogoniland have been a slow bleed
Oil Spill: Is the Claims Process Fair?
Twice over the past month and a half I’ve sat with groups in Louisiana and Florida while Kenneth Feinberg—the booming Boston lawyer who is running the multi-billion dollar oil spill compensation fund—made his pitch. The audiences couldn’t have been more different—worried and wary fisherman in the tiny Louisiana village of Port …
Oil Spill: Meet the New Blowout Preventer
For all the attention over undersea oil plumes and seafood toxicity and depressed Gulf residents, it’s easy to forget that this well technically still hasn’t been killed. And now it looks like the final end of BP’s cursed Macondo well won’t be happening any time soon.
After days of struggling over how to deal with concrete that had …