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Oil has spread into Florida waters open to fishing
Cross-posted from Wonk Room. With the headline “All Florida Waters Open to Fishing,” the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission claims the “state’s recreational and commercial fisheries have not been affected by the oil spill.” But a Wonk Room analysis finds that oil has spread into areas of the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast […]
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Is Wind Energy the Magic Bullet for our Energy Future? (Video)
Last year, the wind industry employed more workers than coal mining, according to a report released by the American Wind Energy Association. Wind energy jobs increased 70 percent to 85,000 in 2008, 4,000 more workers than are employed in coaling mining (based of Department of Energy figures). But is it the magic bullet that will […]
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Ohio Coal Plant Linked to $30m in Annual Economic Damage
This post was co-written by Nachy Kanfer, Associate Field Organizer for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign in Ohio. We regularly dispute Big Coal when they say coal is not bad for the environment – now we have another example of how this dirty, outdated power source is costing jobs and damaging the economy in […]
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In new ad, BP’s Tony Hayward thanks U.S. for ‘strong support’
Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. The foreign oil giant BP has launched a new series of advertisements to contain the damage to its reputation and stock price from its uncontrolled disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In a television advertisement that aired nationally this morning, BP CEO Tony Hayward promotes how his corporation is running […]
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Domestic offsets in the American Power Act: preserving the integrity?
This post was co-written with Sasha Lyutse. NRDC staff have posted assessments of a number of key elements of the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act discussion draft. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the domestic offsets program. I’ll give a brief overview of the program, as outlined in Part D of the bill (Sec. 731-741), […]
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Monbiot on “Beyond Petroleum,” circa 2006
“For a company that claims to have moved ‘beyond petroleum,’ BP has managed to spill an awful lot of it on to the tundra in Alaska. Last week, after the news was leaked to journalists, it admitted to investors that it is facing criminal charges for allowing 270,000 gallons of crude oil to seep across […]
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Louisianans take a break from oil-spill angst to celebrate local seafood
Seafood abounds at the Plaquemines Parish Seafood Festival.Photos: Emily PetersonThe sixth annual Plaquemines Parish Seafood Festival, held this past weekend, had the usual fixings one would expect at a South Louisiana festival: fried seafood, a solid lineup of live local music, and plenty of cold beer to beat the high humidity and 90-degree temperatures. One […]
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Tracking surface water on a warming planet
Keith Cherkauer studies mud. It’s a dirty business that has revealed a lot about global warming. As he trudged through rural Indiana farmland earlier this spring, Cherkauer, an agricultural and biological engineer at Purdue University, paid close attention to the way his boots sank more than an inch into the mud before they reached the […]
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10 ways cities and towns can kick the offshore-oil habit
With the Gulf oil spill continuing unabated, powering a 21st century economy on a 19th century fossil fuel looks less and less smart by the day. Luckily, we’ve got other options. I described the most promising steps the federal government could take toward reducing oil use in transportation systems last week. But local governments don’t […]
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Six reasons not to trust BP
Okay, so Top Kill failed, and we’re on pause for the next few days while BP preps for Plan, um, is it E? For the sake of the Gulf Coast, we hope this next fix-it option, a new kind of cap, works. But it’s getting harder to pull for BP. Here’s why: We don’t need […]
