On April 15, 2014, with the fourth anniversary of the massive Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just days away, British Petroleum – the rig’s operator — issued a press release that caught many people off-guard. BP announced that its “active cleanup” of oil pollution in the Gulf had officially ended. The statement by the British energy giant did not say that...
Over this Easter weekend, I had a chance to absorb quite a bit of coverage of what’s happened in the Gulf of Mexico in the four years since BP’s massive Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. I had a couple of thoughts. One was that with the passage of time, the news coverage of the BP anniversary has actually seemed to increase over last year. It’s good that the news media —...
How much oil can we dump atop the Gulf ecosystem before it simply collapses? At what point does the northern quadrant of the Gulf of Mexico – once the source of 40 percent of all seafood caught in the continental United States – become, for all practical purposes, a dead zone? Well, we may be faced with that tragic outcome much sooner than many of us would care to believe. The oil...
