Category Archives: Oil

You Can’t Lose Them All

Michael Ruppert came through town last May. Not familiar with him? Mr. Ruppert is a former Los Angeles police detective, who in 1996 famously confronted then-CIA Director John Deutch with allegations that the CIA was heavily involved in drug trafficking in the United States.
From there he became something of a prophet. He [...]

Low Incidence, High Consequence

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. [...]

Cleanup Theater

BILOXI, MS – I’m back in the Gulf of Mexico, nearly six months after BP’s Macondo well blew out and spewed 4 million barrels of oil into one of the northern hemisphere’s most fragile and fecund ecosystems.
The government and BP will both tell you things are going great. They want this to be over. [...]

On the Bayou

I was asked this week to write something for a fishermen’s publication about the BP oil spew. Here’s what I sent them:
I was in the Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana in the weeks after the Deepwater Horizon blew out. I’m an environmentalist; I work for Greenpeace. I was there to see for myself what [...]

The Muse

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 [...]

Out of Commission

On May 20, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, leaders of the 9-11 Commission, told a congressional committee that six years after the commission completed its work, the federal government has not taken the steps needed to implement the commission’s recommendations.
The next day, President Barack Obama announced the formation of a commission to investigate the Deepwater [...]

“We’re Gonna Need Bigger Boat”

My neighbors are starting to refer to our block as “The Farm” because of all the fruit trees and vegetables that grow in our gardens. We have bees and chickens and the guys across the street make beer with hops that grow along our fences.
Margaret is our master gardener, dispensing advice. Last week [...]