Essential reads
FRACKING:
Leaked Talking Points Show Oil Companies Dont Give A Frack About The Truth
An industry executive accidentally dropped a talking points memo in an Ohio woman’s driveway after coming to her home to talk about leasing her land for hydraulic fracturing. The memo reveals the extreme lengths that oil and gas companies will go to in order to ensure that people lease their land for hydraulic fracturing.
Fracking also a climate change risk, study says
THE Democratic Alliance’s water and environmental affairs spokesman, Gareth Morgan, has alerted Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa to a peer review study that reveals hydraulic fracturing gas extraction (fracking) releases more methane than previously thought.
AP: Pa. accused of rubber-stamping gas permits
Pennsylvania environmental regulators say they spend as little as 35 minutes reviewing each of the thousands of applications for natural gas well permits they get each year.
OILSPILL:
BP victim’s father: ‘You rolled the dice and lost’
Just prior to Dudley’s recital, Antonia Juhasz, an activist shareholder from the Gulf Coast, read a letter written by the father of one of the men killed. She read the letter with the vocal support of many in the audience, and despite an attempt by BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg to cut her off.
AP Enterprise: Experts fear another oil disaster
With everything Big Oil and the government have learned in the year since the Gulf of Mexico disaster, could it happen again? Absolutely, according to an Associated Press examination of the industry and interviews with experts on the perils of deep-sea drilling.
BP oil spill: Gulf protesters denied access to meeting
A number of people have been thrown out of BP’s annual meeting in London after trying to storm the stage in protest against the oil giant.
BP AGM as it happened April 14, 2011
Good morning. Bob Dudley has spent all night trying to secure BP’s Russian operations but today he faces another big battle: his own shareholders for the first time since the catestrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil giant’s annual general meeting will start at 11am at the Excel Centre in London. But for most investors it isn’t about Russia, it’s about the spill: how it happened, how much it’s going to cost, and who’s going to take the blame.
BP faces protests at London AGM
BP faces waves of protests at its shareholder meeting in London on Thursday as fishermen from the U.S. Gulf Coast complain about poor compensation for the oil spill and institutional investors protest against excessive executive pay packets.
JAPAN NUCLEAR CRISIS:
Japan eyes possible damage to spent nuclear fuel
Japanese regulators discounted concerns about damage to the still-potent spent fuel from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s No. 4 reactor Thursday, saying high radiation levels reported earlier this week “most probably” came from outside debris.
WHO: Real risk if radiation contaminates food
Japan needs to act quickly and ban food sales from areas around the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant if food there has excessive levels of radiation, the World Health Organization said Monday.
