This was taken on Orange Beach, Alabama, more than 90 miles from the BP oil spill …
Source: Dave Martin via the Guardian
Ecology
I don’t know for sure what President Obama is going to say in his first-ever address from the Oval Office tonight, but I’m still wondering exactly whose ass he is planning on kicking …
Daniel Foster writes in National Review:
It was September of 1966, and gas was gushing uncontrollably from the wells in the Bukhara province of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. But the Reds, at the height of their industrial might, had a novel solution.
They drilled nearly four miles into the sand and rock of the Kyzyl Kum Desert, and lowered a 30-kiloton nuclear warhead — more than half-again as large as “Little Boy,” the crude uranium bomb dropped over Hiroshima — to the depths beneath the wellhead. With the pull of a lever, a fistful of plutonium was introduced to itself under enormous pressure, setting off the chain reaction that starts with E = MC2 and ends in Kaboom! The ensuing blast collapsed the drill channel in on itself, sealing off the well.
Great timing, folks. Does Transocean have a PR department? Excellent report from John Byrne on RAW Story: Five days after appearing before Congress to testify about its responsibility in one of the…
Is BP listening? Reports WGNO ABC26 News:
Kevin Costner is in town hoping star power and his oil spill clean-up machine will help in the gulf.
It promises to help clean up the oil spill. And it’s got some big backing. “Years before I got involved oil spills would come and, I would wonder why we couldn’t clean this up,” says Actor Kevin Costner. He’s invested in a company that invented a processing machine that turns oil into water. “It’s robust. Works at the speed that someone talked about, 200,000 gallons a minute. But it takes 99% of the oil.”
Using a small prototype of the machine, Costner demonstrated how it works for a group of stressed parish officials today. “We’ll take this any day over the black oil that’s covering south Plaquemines right now,” says Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser.
The larger centrifuge model can collect up to 3,000 gallons of oil a day and right now, 31 are available. The response: There are no better options. “I think it’s a no-brainer to try it,” says Jefferson Parish Councilman John Young. Nungesser says, “I think we need to put it to work.” And St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro says, “Let’s get this out there. See what it can do.”
Jon Bowermaster writes on TakePart: BARATARIA, Louisiana— It is the perfect blue sky, humidity-free spring day in bayou country that makes you feel like everything should be all right in the world….
PressTV reports: The firm that owns the leaking oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico has made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts, despite having caused a massive ecological disaster. Transocean,…
Tom Philpott writes for Grist: We finally know the main two dispersants that BP and the U.S. government are using to treat the ongoing Gulf spill. Both, by their maker’s own admission,…
The World Socialist Web Site writes: With each passing day, the scale of the disaster unleashed by the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico increases. Somewhere between 5,000 (the official…
With Earth Day 2010 on this 22nd of April, I wonder how much the Green movement and the greater media at large will debate this opinion from Lisa Hymas on Grist: In…
Via the Economist: Between 50,000 and 5,000 years ago roughly half of the earth’s larger mammals (species that were sheep-sized or bigger) went extinct. The distribution of these extinctions in time and…