On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and blowing out an oil well a mile below the ocean's surface. In the four frantic months it took to seal off the well, almost five million barrels of crude oil spewed into the Gulf, causing untold economic and environmental havoc. A year after the spill, Dr. Molly Redmond talks about the impact of the spill on the gulf. Redmond, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was on the scene in the gulf within a few weeks of the beginning of the spill and she is among ... Read More
The Death Throes of Pelicans and Presidents
August 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Although a discouraged office seeker fired the shot, the nation's best doctors probably killed U.S. President James A. Garfield. After Garfield survived the first night of the July 1881 shooting (much to everyone's surprise), his doctors decided their best course was to get that nasty lead out of the president. So for the next 11 weeks, they poked and probed with unsterilized instruments and bare hands — the fingers of 15 different doctors pushed into the president's side that first night — looking for the slug. Even though Joseph Lister's germ theory was not consulted during Garfield's ... Read More
The Oil-Soaked Are Least Likely to Favor Regulation
July 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the big oddities to come out of the Gulf oil spill has been this quirk of public-opinion polling: Residents along the coast overwhelmingly say their communities have been hurt by the disaster, but they're also among the least likely people in the country to support a moratorium on offshore drilling. An ABC News-Washington Post poll this week reiterated the theme on the heels of President Obama's second attempt to impose a moratorium. It found that 79 percent of people in the most affected counties along the coast labeled the spill a "major disaster," with 75 percent saying it has ... Read More
Standing in Line to Cap the Spill
June 8, 2010 • By • 4 Comments
In his long career, James Dehlsen has started and sold several green-energy companies and played an important role in making wind- and ocean-powered electrical generation commercially viable. So when BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, it wasn't long before Dehlsen started thinking about ways to cap a broken well that was spewing crude oil and gas 5,000 feet under water. "It was very much driven by the enormity of the potential catastrophe and just trying to think about what might be different solutions," says Dehlsen, CEO of Ecomerit ... Read More
Oil Spill Outlines the Limits of Government
June 2, 2010 • By • 13 Comments
Since oil started gushing into the Gulf of Mexico six weeks ago, government officials have cycled through a series of crisis-management messages. First they were monitoring BP's response, then working with BP, then keeping "a boot on the neck" of BP. Then they were distancing themselves from BP, refusing to share a podium with BP, and finally, this week, investigating BP. Amid the evolving debate about government's role in the disaster cleanup — a debate that has drawn fine distinctions between who's "responsible," who's "accountable" and who's "in charge" — one thing officials haven't ... Read More