oil spill
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Critical List: Wind power can be dangerous; the U.S. gets average marks on clean energy
Wind power's not entirely safe: A watchdog group warns that "one of these days, a turbine's going to fall on someone.”
The U.S. gets a C for renewable energy development from an alternative energy analyst.
Colorado's going to require fracking companies to disclose what's in their fracking fluid.
The natural gas boom is also creating demand for silica sand. -
Critical List: Yellowstone pipe could have carried tar-sands oil; L.A. survived Carmageddon
The Yellowstone River spill could have included heavier, more corrosive tar-sands oil, federal officials said. This type of oil eats through pipes more quickly, and if ExxonMobiil was using those pipes to transport tar-sands oil, that decision could have contributed to the spill.
Carmageddon = over. And it turns out that, given the choice to avoid the freeway by plane or bike, it’s faster to bike.
It's not the best idea to buy meat from Japan right now. Just saying.
Your fish oil tablets are destroying marine ecosystems. -
Exxon vs. state government: Yellowstone clean-up now has dueling command centers
A week after an ExxonMobil pipeline burst under Montana's Yellowstone River, spots of oil have been found more than 80 miles downstream from the original spill. Exxon is on the clean-up case; more than 500 Exxon clean-up workers are on the scene, and the company has put down 8,000 feet of absorbent booms and 150,000 pads to soak up the oil. But the company is also being so sneaky in their proceedings that Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer and his team huffed out of the incident command center and set up their own clubhouse.
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Documents show Exxon downplayed time it took to seal Yellowstone spill
ExxonMobil told federal officials and Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer that they had sealed the pipeline leaking oil into the Yellowstone River within 30 minutes. But federal documents show that sealing the pipe took 56 minutes -- almost twice as long as the company originally said.
The company told the AP that the error came about because the Exxon representative who briefed officials was providing information without the benefit of notes. In other words, not really intended to be a factual statement. -
ExxonMobil, historic flooding join forces to spread oil through Yellowstone River
The oil leaking from an ExxonMobil pipe into the Yellowstone River in Montana spread farther than the company said it anticipated. The reason, according to ExxonMobil’s spokespeople, is historic levels of flooding on the river. By Tuesday, Exxon had 280 people on the case, but still hadn’t managed to fight through floodwaters to reach the break in the pipeline. Exxon says the river is preventing its clean-up crews from going out on foot or in boats to look for oil on the river's banks.
Exxon did shut down the busted pipeline, but not before spilling more than 40,000 gallons of oil that they say it’s not yet safe to clean up, due to the floods. The company had been warned twice that it needed to check the pipeline for corrosion and update its emergency plans -- but now that there is actually a broken pipeline and an emergency, it’s obviously all the river’s fault. -
Critical List: Oil spills into Yellowstone River; Americans are driving less
42,000 gallons of Exxon oil spilled into the Yellowstone River in Montana over the weekend. Regulators had warned the company that the pipe wasn't safe.
The river's particularly high, which isn't helping clean-up.
Atmospheric pollution from China's coal use temporarily masked global warming: sulfur particulates reflected more light back into space, keeping the planet’s temperature from rising too fast. But over time the carbon dioxide released from the coal will push temperatures upwards. -
Pipeline industry funded two-thirds of pipeline safety studies
Wondering whether natural gas and oil transportation pipelines are safe? Why not ask a neutral objective party -- like, say, the pipeline industry? The federal government’s Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration is supposed to study and regulate pipeline safety. But as the San Francisco Chronicle discovered, in practice, the agency tends to hand that responsibility back over to the pipeline industry.
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Critical List: John Bryson’s green credentials; biodegradable cups end as methane
John Bryson, Obama's new pick for commerce secretary, is a dyed-green-in-the-wool environmentalist (he co-founded NRDC), who's taken a swing through the corporate world. The U.N. carbon market shrunk for the first time since it was founded in 2005. Who's to blame? The U.S. Senate, of course! (Well, among others, but we have the most fun […]
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Keystone pipeline spilled tar-sands oil 11 times in past year. Do we really want to supersize it?
The routes of the existing and proposed Keystone pipelines. Image: RL MillerThe State Department is currently weighing whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar-sands oil some 2,000 miles southward, from Alberta, Canada, to Houston and Port Arthur, Texas. It would be an expansion of the now-operational Keystone pipeline that goes as […]