Latest Articles
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The Gulf spill video roundup
So, the Gulf oil spill has been going on for more than a month now. The open wellhead is spewing thousands of gallons of oil every day, and in that classic the-cure-is-worse-than-the-disease way, BP has been dispersing the rogue oil with highly toxic chemicals. Eleven rig workers are already dead. Now the lives of hundreds […]
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Oil gusher forces State Dept. into awkward diplomacy with Cuba
Add this to every other sort of headache the Gulf of Mexico spill has caused: It’s now an international relations problem too. As Brendan DeMelle reports, the State Department has sent diplomatic notice about the spreading oil threat to Mexico, the Bahamas, the Marshall Islands, and even Cuba, a nation with which we do not […]
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GM bets Volt will move Californians to buy American
Chevy hopes the Volt takes California by storm.Photo: Todd WoodyIf you happened by an empty parking lot near San Francisco’s waterfront baseball park Tuesday morning, you would have seen some people putting a low-slung black sedan through its paces on a makeshift track outlined by fluorescent orange pylons. What was remarkable was not so much […]
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Tea Party helps pass carbon tax
Maryland’s Montgomery County Council passed the nation’s first county-level carbon tax on Wednesday thanks in part to a little heckling from a group of rowdy Tea Party protesters. It would be hard to dream up a more delightful twist to cap off a campaign that was about as dramatic as they come in the world […]
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BP: The gulf between image and reality
The devastating and escalating events in the Gulf of Mexico underscore an amazing collection of problems: reliance on polluting energy, absence of a coherent national energy plan, the problems with lax government oversight, and dozens of others. Perhaps most clearly, it shows the gulf we should have seen years ago between the image of BP […]
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Safety ‘#1 priority,’ coal chief Blankenship assures Congress
Poor Don Blankenship. The Massey Energy CEO had to sit quietly through a Senate hearing yesterday while the head of the United Mine Workers called his company’s safety performance “deplorable,” and West Virginia’s finger-wagging, Democratic senator, Robert Byrd cried “shame” on Massey’s “alarming record.” But in his first appearance before Congress since 29 Massey miners […]
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Love, in the Time of Blasting
This is the scene, when the coal-fired electricity that lights up New York City’s neon theatre district lowers on stage: We are inside the home of Marie and Hovie, a young couple living in the mountain holler of Eagle Creek. With their family’s 150-year-old homestead threatened by a planned mountaintop removal strip-mining operation, Hovie, a […]
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Where are the oil protests? In New Orleans, they’ve finally begun
A few days ago, Dave asked a question that seemed to strike a chord with readers. In the face of coal miner deaths, the Gulf oil leak, the corrupt regulators that enabled it, and freak weather such as the Nashville flood, he asked: And yet where are the protests? Where are the people in the […]
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Remembering my last oil spill
It’s been three years since a container ship, the COSCO Busan, spilled 53,500 gallons of bunker fuel into San Francisco Bay, just after my return home to live on the bay by the sea that I love. Remnant oil still sometimes surfaces after it rains and the bay’s herring fishery has yet to recover. Ten […]
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The three stupidest things said about the BP oil spill
Since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig went down in the Gulf last month, there have been two unstoppable gushes: one from the ocean floor and the other from the mouth of BP’s top executive, Tony Hayward. Here are three of his worst: 1. “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of […]
