Latest Articles
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Ask Umbra’s Book Club: Dive into the big blue
Greetings readers, As you all know, I am a bookworm of the highest order. In fact, I’m such a bookworm that my compost worms have their own library. I think it’s important to surround them with good literature, but they just keep eating the pages. And so must we all surround ourselves with good matter […]
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Mos Def and Lenny Kravitz sing the blues for the big blue
Mos Def and Ben Jaffe wrote it. Lenny Kravitz, Trombone Shorty, Tim Robbins, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band all joined in to make a song to help the non-profit, Gulf Aid. It’s a song dedicated to BP called “It Ain’t My Fault.” It’s a great number, but I still prefer the t-shirt I heard […]
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Evidence of climate change springs ahead with blooming wildflowers
Spring certainly seems to arrive earlier these days than it used to. But is it a sure sign of global warming or just natural variability? After decades of careful research on wildflowers, University of Maryland ecologist David Inouye has some definitive — and disturbing — answers. This summer Inouye returns to the Rocky Mountain Biological […]
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Are we banking too much on BP’s relief wells?
It seems so long ago that we had those brief, crazy flings with “junk shots,” “kill shots,” and “top kills.” Those were engineers doing improv. But there was always a net: Engineers know relief wells, we’re told, and once the two wells currently being drilled are finished in August, the problem will be solved. Now, […]
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Report: Coal Industry Harms TN and WV More Than It Helps
Two reports released this week reveal that when it comes to the bottom line of state budgets, the coal industry costs Tennessee and West Virginia more than it provides. These reports are among the first to examine actual revenues and expenditures related to coal industry employment, taxes and subsidies in Tennessee and West Virginia. Downstream […]
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‘Reasonably high’ chance BP files for bankruptcy
Bankruptcy expert Peter S. KaufmanPhoto: Gordian GroupThere is a reasonably high chance that BP could file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the next few years, or even months, and the result would be an “absolute horror” for the government, according to a bankruptcy expert. Peter S. Kaufman, the President of investment bank Gordian Group and […]
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Gulf oil spill: A timeline of the estimates
The image says it all, I think: As has been remarked elsewhere, if the latest low-end estimate is accurate — that the leak is spewing approximately 2.5 million gallons per day — then the rupture is emitting as much oil about every 4 days as the Exxon Valdez did in total. Here’s the timeline: April 20: […]
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Judge who ruled against offshore drilling moratorium invests in oil industry
The federal judge who overturned Barack Obama’s offshore drilling moratorium appears to own stock in numerous companies involved in the offshore oil industry — including Transocean, which leased the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to BP prior to its April 20 explosion in the Gulf of Mexico — according to 2008 financial disclosure reports. So Yahoo […]
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Dispatch from the U.S. Social Forum
SocialForumists taking to the streets of Detroit. (Tom Philpott) DETROIT, MICH. — As the economy falters, another war lurches into chaos, and our nation’s gravest environmental calamity plays out in slow motion at the rate of at least one Exxon Valdez spill per week in the Gulf, a kind of sour despair has taken root […]
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Big Pork squeals over unicorn-meat marketing. Yes, unicorn meat.
We’ll have a rainbow roast, please!(ThinkGeek.com)One has to feel sorry for Big Pork. First there was that nasty swine flu that put everyone off pork chops, even though the industry managed to get the name changed to H1N1. Profits are down for producers like Smithfield. Despite America’s love affair with all things bacon, pork consumption […]
