Another Lesson from the BP Disaster: The Need for Better Risk Assessment
Apparently, the lease grant to BP was exempted from environmental review, according to the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin: The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -- and BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions -- show that neither federal regulators nor the company ant...
CONTINUE READINGThe Public Power Option: Birch Rod or Risky Business?
The election season approaches, and first up in California is a June primary laden with important choices – not the least of which is a ballot measure sponsored by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) designed to make it harder for local governments to exercise the public power option. Referred to as Proposition 16, PG&E’s measure would require that local governments go before the voters and receive 2/3 support prior to creating or expanding a muni...
CONTINUE READINGHow bad? More than bad enough
Earlier today, Dan asked "How bad is the spill?" He quoted a New York Times story which suggested that concerns about the spill were overblown. Not so fast. Probably the only thing we can say with confidence right now is that it's still too early to tell exactly how much environmental or economic damage the spill will do. But there's good reason to think that the NYT's spin may have been too optimistic. First, as Tom Turner points out on Earthjustice's UnEarthed blog,...
CONTINUE READINGEcology Law Quarterly, Volume 37, number 1
We have been remiss in not noting the publication in March of another issue of Ecology Law Quarterly. In this issue are the following articles: Managing the National Forests through Place-Based Legislation, Martin Nie & Michael Fiebig Read Article (PDF) A Comparative Guide to the Western States’ Public Trust Doctrines: Public Values, Private Rights, and the Evolution Toward an Ecological Public Trust, Robin Kundis Craig Read Article (PDF) Fast-Fish, Loos...
CONTINUE READINGOf Electricity Deregulation, Financial Meltdown, and Spilled Oil
As we contemplate the implications of the BP oil spill, California approaches another ominous milestone: the tenth anniversary of the series of electric power price shocks that came to be known as the California Energy Crisis of 2000-2001. Meanwhile, many try to unravel the economic crisis that walloped the U.S. and world economies so decisively over the last two years. Unfortunately, these disasters have a lot in common. First, the oil spill. Yesterday, Californi...
CONTINUE READINGHow Bad is the Spill?
Not as bad as it could be, according to the NY Times, The ruptured well, currently pouring an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the gulf, could flow for years and still not begin to approach the 36 billion gallons of oil spilled by retreating Iraqi forces when they left Kuwait in 1991. It is not yet close to the magnitude of the Ixtoc I blowout in the Bay of Campeche in Mexico in 1979, which spilled an estimated 140 million gallons of crude before the gusher co...
CONTINUE READINGEverything You Ever Wanted to Know About Biofuels — And More!
Click here for videos of a conference at the University of Illinois Law School on the current state of play in the biofuels world....
CONTINUE READINGWill the BP Oil Spill Change Public Policy?
The oil spill catastrophe now engulfing the Gulf Coast brings home in incredibly vivid detail the ways in which human activity can damage the earth. This is in stark contrast to climate change, for example, where the changes caused by accumulating greenhouse gas emissions are hard to see and where actions today will only affect the climate many decades from now (Eric has previously blogged about the political difficulties raised by the fact that even with serious regu...
CONTINUE READINGDeepwater Horizon and the Dark Side of the Stevens Legacy
A few weeks ago, Dan wrote a nice post suggesting that retiring Justice John Paul Stevens has been a principal architect of modern environmental law doctrine. The Deepwater Horizon disaster shows another example of this pattern -- although probably not in ways that Stevens' environmentalist admirers (of whom I am one) are very proud of. How much will British Petroleum have to pay out in damages for the Deepwater Horizon disaster? Perhaps a lot, but in no small part...
CONTINUE READINGA Brief History of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout
2001. Manufacture of the BOP (Blowout Preventer), a huge block of steel and valves that that holds the well pipe.The BOP has the ability to slice through the pipe and seal the well. The BOP used by the Deepwater Horizon remains with the rig for the next nine years. April 19, 2010. Halliburton completes pumping slurry down the borehole to seal in the pipe, approximately 19 hours before the accident. It is unknown whether this might have any connection with the later ...
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