|
|
Chances are you’ve heard about—if not read—Al Gore’s 7,000-word essay in Rolling Stone on America’s ongoing failure to act on the climate crisis. (If the whole piece is a bit too much for your Wednesday lunch hour, Mother Jones has a nice summary.) The media, unsurprisingly, has focused Gore’s criticism of President Obama’s inaction on [...]
Crossposted from Curious Capitalist You can practically set your watch by it. As petroleum prices soar—and with them, oil company profits and pain at the gas pump—sooner or later members of Congress will haul Big Oil executives into a hearing and Demand That Something Be Done. It happened in 2008, the last time oil prices [...]
There was good news of a sort for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Congress on Wednesday. The Senate voted down several bills that would have blocked the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. That collection included one bill—co-sponsored by Republican Senators James Inhofe and Mitch McConnell—that would have [...]
Amid all the political agony over the tax compromise taking shape in Congress right now there are side measures that could be incredibly important for renewable energy in the U.S. The final bill is obviously still evolving, but the compromise agreed to by Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell contains a few provisions that will [...]
Food-safety reform advocates won a long-awaited—and rare—victory today in Washington. This morning the Senate passed a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s food-safety system, approving the Food Safety and Modernization Act by an unusually bipartisan vote of 73-25. The bill, which had been languishing in the Senate for more than a year despite support from both [...]
Since the Deepwater Horizon accident on April 20—and the moratorium on new deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that followed it—both the oil industry and environmentalists have been waiting for the White House to issue new rules on drilling. BP’s Gulf spill showed that there were clear problems with the way offshore drilling was [...]
The “static kill” is so called because that’s what BP aims to create—a static situation within its blown well, one where the drilling mud the company is currently pumping into the well offsets the pressure in the reservoir itself. If BP’s Houston-based drilling engineers want some advice on how to create a static situation, however, [...]
