Military Veterans Against the Oil Spill

Didn’t get a chance to link to this earlier, but on the way back from New Orleans on Friday I wrote and posted a piece on the mainpage about a trip I took to see the oil spill with military veterans from Operation Free. It’s a new think tank/advocacy group that is making the oil dependency and climate change case on national security grounds, based on reports like this one. It was a chance not just to see the effects of the spill again—there’s less oil that I’d seen during a June reporting trip, but the fringes of many of the marshes in southeastern Louisiana have been well oiled—but to see the costs of oil dependence from another angle. There’s even a hook: a new study out in Environment Magazine today argues that the military cost of securing Middle East oil amounts to an invisible subsidy for petroleum—something I heard from several of the Iraq veterans on our trip. Check out my story here.