Tag Archives: BP

What the Left Hand is Doing

Cognitive dissonance is name given to the discomfort caused by trying to simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas.  Policy dissonance might be the name applied when two conflicting ideas are the basis for government action.
An example: Texas is still in the worst single-year drought in its history and the hottest summer in Texas history just ended [...]

Faster Than Ever

It’s supposed to snow tonight. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow, tomorrow night and into the middle of Saturday morning. Except during the warmer, mid-day hours tomorrow, when it’s supposed to turn to rain and then back into snow.
Spring snow is not unusual around here, but tonight’s will probably carry radiation. It’s been [...]

Ask a Stupid Question

The presidential commission on the BP oil spill seems to be fulfilling the task of all such blue-ribbon commissions: ask the wrong questions, draw the wrong conclusions.
The commission’s general counsel, Fred Bartlit, burst across the media Monday with his claim that he could find no cost cutting leading to the April 20 blowout and the [...]

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. [...]

Broken in Two

I attended the Gulf Gathering at Weeks Bay, Alabama last week. It was a conference of grassroots groups from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, coming together to try and figure how to put their region together again after the BP oil disaster.
This being the gulf, implications from the other recent disaster – [...]

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 [...]