There wasn’t much fanfare in April when the 9th anniversary of the world’s largest-ever oil spill — the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that dumped more than 4 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico — came and went. Usually a 9th anniversary isn’t a big deal, after all. But the lack of attention might cause some folks to think the effects of America’s worst...
The relentless spin doctors at BP headquarters apparently don’t agree with me, but I think it’s time to close the book on the supposed debate over whether the massive 2010 BP oil spill was lethal to large numbers of dolphins. The evidence — first merely anecdotal, later more scientific — that dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico were getting sick and dying prematurely because of...
Coming up on five years after the BP oil spill, science has told us only a fraction of what we need to know about the catastrophe and its pernicious impact on the marine life of the Gulf of Mexico. For one thing, some key studies are just getting underway now, as research institutions are finally getting a tiny slice of the billions of dollars that have been promised for the Gulf by the British...
BP, with a huge assist from the popular Beltway-insider website Politico, stirred up the muddy waters of the Deepwater Horizon spill aftermath this week when it published a corporate-love-letter-disguised-as-news entitled, “No, BP Didn’t Ruin the Gulf.” Anyone expecting humility from a firm whose court-certified wanton negligence killed 11 people and seriously polluted...
Note: As promised, Part II of my in-depth report on the state of the Gulf. more than four years after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe: When the full extent of the Deepwater Horizon spill became clear in the spring of 2010, experts predicted the impact on the Gulf’s diverse ecosystem would last at least for a generation, if not longer. Unfortunately, they were working off a known template: The...
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 —...
A constant theme since I started this blog nearly four years ago has been the impact of the BP oil spill on the marine life in Gulf of Mexico. One reason for that is that it seemed like the federal authorities were happy to do the bidding of BP and tell the public that everything was nearly back to normal in a matter of weeks; even President Obama made a big show of coming to the Gulf Coast and...
Are Americans becoming numb to oil spills? You have to wonder sometimes. Over the last couple of years, as domestic fossil fuel production has surged, so have the number of accidents — along pipelines and railroads, on offshore drilling platforms and in barge collisions. And sure, these mishaps and misadventures have received some media coverage — but not all that much. Maybe the...
It won’t be long before the world marks the 4th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf, and the worst oil spill in American history. The story has never really left the news, and understandably so. That’s in part because the effort to make BP fully accountable for its sins — both in the civil and the criminal courts — has been a long and arduous...
There’s still a week left in 2013, but it’s pretty clear that America is going to start the new year pretty much the same way that that current one began: Hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels. This week I saw a story in the news that pretty much sums up where this nation is at, as we prepare to celebrate the holidays. While there has certainly been some good news this year on the...
