By Kalpa, who blogs at big picture agriculture. Kalpa’s formal education was in medicine, science, and the humanities. Having seen the destruction that industrial agriculture has done to the biosystem of the Midwestern Plains, where she grew up, she writes on the comprehensive picture of economics in agriculture, ag science, ag policy, food security, energy, […]
Read more...The New York Times reports on a welcome development: some banks are getting cold feet about lending to projects that are legal but still produce environmental damage: After years of legal entanglements arising from environmental messes and increased scrutiny of banks that finance the dirtiest industries, several large commercial lenders are taking a stand on […]
Read more...A breaking story at the Washington Post, based on a new analysis of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, puts the total at 4.9 million barrels: BP’s Macondo well spewed 62,000 barrels of oil a day initially, and as the reservoir gradually depleted itself the flow eased to 53,000 barrels a day until the well was […]
Read more...It looks as if Team Obama has reverted to form. In a repeat of its perfromance post the financial crisis, it appears to believe that no problem cannot be solved by PR, which puts it in league with the perps. Hat tip Glenn Stehle:
Read more...This post first appeared on February 5, 2007 We have to admit to being a little slow on the uptake from time to time. We reported on the FT’s February 2 editorial, which commented on the publication of the first of four reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Media watch item: still no […]
Read more...Readers may recall that we harped on BP’s refusal to try to contain oil around the site of the leak, and later, its failure to do proper booming to contain and remove oil and so reduce the amount that came ashore (note that the US also failed abjectly as a second line of defense; the […]
Read more...The Financial Times highlights a concern we had raised early on about the effort by BP to drill a relief well to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. While many analysts have acted as if the BP forecast, that the well would be completed by August, there is no reason to assume the […]
Read more...Gulf resident and fisherman’s wife Kindra Arnesen took advantage of the offer extended to her to visit cleanup sites and staff meetings: At any rate, I was invited the following week to go behind “enemy lines.” They gave me, of all people, security clearance to go into the base of operations meetings in Venice, Louisiana […]
Read more...By Wallace C. Turbrville, the former CEO of VMAC LLC who writes at New Deal 2.0 In the 1930s, a great many Southerners had no access to electricity. The Roosevelt administration perceived an enormous opportunity to restructure the region’s economy. By building facilities to bring power to the rural South, jobs would be created from […]
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Read more...By Glenn Stehle, an engineer who began working in the oil industry in 1974. After a two-year stint with Cities Service Oil Company, he worked for two years for Henry Engineering, a petroleum engineering consulting firm. Upon leaving Henry Engineering he worked as an independent engineering consultant in all facets of the oil and gas […]
Read more...Hat tip Francois T:
Read more...By Gonzalo Lira, a novelist and filmmaker (and economist) currently living in Chile and writing at Gonzalo Lira On the occasion of the BP oil spill disaster, President Obama’s delivered an Oval Office speech last night—a masterpiece of milquetoast faux-outrage. The speech was all about “clean energy” and “ending our dependence on fossil fuels”. Faced […]
Read more...The latest updates on BP, both via Bloomberg. We noted that Rolling Stone had reported that the median of estimates by scientists who has access to the leak data was 55,000 barrels, and there were reasons to take the dire estimates seriously. The latest estimates are allegedly based on a more careful reading of the […]
Read more...FT Alphaville has a very useful chart and related discussion based on Citigroup research, on the question of whether BP could segregate its operations as a precursor to some sort of “good company/bad company” restructuring. Such a move would no doubt be presented as a way to remove the cloud of uncertainty over BP, but […]
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