The White House oil commission has concluded that cost-cutting by BP was at least partly to blame for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. It identified nine decisions that increased risk; BP was involved in all nine decisions. Seven of those decisions saved time and (hence) money.
The conclusion could expose BP to billions more in compensation claims.
As we enter the era of peak oil, with extraction moving to ever-more-inaccessible places, the fear is that we'll see more of these sort of disasters in the coming years.
But the commission refused to back calls for a halt to all offshore drilling - and, as a telling detail is towards the bottom of this follow-up article in The Guardian, notes that BP shares rose 2.8 per cent on the news.
A study published in Nature magazine reports a 40 per cent fall in the amount of plankton in the oceans. This may or may not sound very dramatic, but it's potentially far, far more significant than, say, the global financial crisis. Yet it barely rated a mention in the media.
Former management consultant Tim Kruger wants to dump massive amounts of lime in the oceans. Why? Because oceans absorb about a third of all carbon dioxide released by human activity, sucking it out of the atmosphere. So wouldn't it be great if oceans could absorb more CO2.
Here's something I didn't appreciate. Forty per cent of fish caught in the world's oceans are used to make fish feed to feed farmed fish. In fact, more fish by weight is caught in the oceans than is produced by the fish farms they feed. The process is one of feeding low-grade fish to grow more prized species such as salmon. It turns out farming seafood, certainly as it is practised now, is not the solution to the overfishing of the planet's oceans that I'd hoped.
