Taylor Energy benefitted from lax regulation, now claims it can’t stop—or clean up—ongoing spill I didn’t know this was even possible. Did you know that an oil company can drill in the Gulf of Mexico and, when things go horribly wrong—as in “multiple wellheads pumping oil into the seawater for 14 years” type of wrong—the […]
One need only look at the record books to find the most dangerous era: today Nine “Intensity” categories. Six different all-time records for intensity were set between 2006 and 2016. Hurricanes and typhoons have intensified over the past decade. That is a plain fact. Two costliness categories. Three all-time records for costliness: two in 2017 […]
Unlike crude oil, what actually does belong in that great gulf? I’ve written often, here in my ULTIMATE ERROR blog, about catastrophic oil spills like “Deepwater Horizon” in the Gulf of Mexico. We know what happened there and the costs in dollars and cents. But what exactly is in there, in the Gulf of Mexico, […]
Newer studies also indicate possible exposure risk to humans Just three years after BP’s massive Deepwater Horizon disaster, environmental scientists were concerned not only about the ongoing damage done by the petroleum itself, but also about the BP-owned dispersant known as Corexit and its effects on the wide swaths of Gulf waters where the oil […]
Petroleum hits us coming and going: inbound spills and outbound greenhouse gases It’s time to have a look at year-to-date petroleum disasters worldwide. Not the everyday disasters of burning fossil fuels; the ones that lead Earth closer to extinction. Not the everyday spills that wreak havoc on ecosystems large and small. No, the petroleum industry […]
Last time at Port Fourchon, Louisiana: Sergeant Julius “Mack” McNamara and every other cop on duty in the tiny bayou town made a dusty bee-line toward the Select Oil Company staging site after hearing “shots fired” over their radios. This was a must-attend event in the sleepy community, and no PFPD officer was about to […]
Last time at Macondo: Murray Landau, a 72-year-old retired cop and security guard fell asleep and dreamed of chicken Parmesan while an unknown group of saboteurs bearing AR-15s and nightscopes shot up the 125 barrels of petroleum-eating bacteria swimming in saltwater that the guard was supposed to… guard. Murray managed to radio in the event, and […]
The Select Oil Company charged the nightshift it cobbled together near Port Fourchon with preparing for the morning’s cleanup. The international petroleum and gas conglomerate had sent out teams of managers in the afternoon to gather local day laborers and whoever else they could find to help unload the 30 semi-trailers headed for different locations […]
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with […]
It’s cynically called “Corexit,” and it’s not “basically dish soap” What does it say about the oil industry in general, and the Standard Oil-Exxon-BP partnership that brought the chemical compound to market in particular, that they call their product “Corexit” (as in “corrects it”)? Do they really think anyone will believe that spraying 2 million […]