BILOXI, MS – It’s five in the morning, St. Patrick’s Day 2011; I’m in a cheap motel 75 yards from the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve opened the door to let in cool pre-dawn air. I hoped to hear the surf but it’s drowned out by the hum of electric lights outside and the [...]
To date, NASA has launched 132 space shuttle missions. Two – Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 – were catastrophic failures, killing all the astronauts onboard each shuttle. Low incidence, high consequence; it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s bad.
So it is with deepwater and/or high pressure oil drilling. [...]
I found Clio in her cave, high above the Aegean Sea. She looked up from the scroll she was writing when I entered; dozens of other scrolls lay half-unrolled, perched on rocks or unwinding across the floor.
“The technology, of course is unprecedented,” she said, knowing already what subject I’d come to discuss, “The other [...]
Forty days and forty nights into the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and BP is still sticking to the corporate cover-your-ass play book Exxon wrote after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and may even be adding a new chapter or two.
As I mentioned two weeks ago, BP’s doing a much better job on the news [...]
Race to the Bottom: Homestretch
In this space the first week of January 2004, I predicted it would be the year that would determine whether or not American democracy would survive. In the last month of that same year, I was forced to conclude, with sorrow, that American democracy is doomed. Although I’ve been allowed brief moments of hope since [...]