Ken Layne, Gawker's America correspondent, is inaugurating his occasional series of reports from the field with a trip to the boom-rich oil fields of North Dakota's Bakken formation, from where he will be filing dispatches all week.
The precocious and progressive young students of Swarthmore College are currently urging their school to completely rid itself of any investments in fossil fuels. The school pointed out that this move could potentially raise each student's tuition costs by $13,000 per year. Is there any way to make divestment work?
On the heels of ExxonMobil's really tough couple of weeks sopping up that grievous oil tar sands spill in suburban Arkansas, America's largest, most profitable corporation is now trying to stop a different leak: a novel attack-ad campaign from an environmental group.
Ten days ago, an ExxonMobil pipeline pumping crude oil from the Alberta tar sands down to Texas refineries burst open in Mayflower, Ark., causing the evacuation of nearly two dozen homes and coating wildlife and the surrounding area in thousands of gallons of oil. I'm sorry, sludge. But there's a silver lining! And…
Trying to report on that oil spill (that's technically not oil, for tax reasons) that has devastated a small Arkansas community? Well, you're going to have to go through ExxonMobil before taking a good look at the area, and they're not being too keen on allowing reporters onto the site.
So you live in Mayflower, Arkansas, where that ExxonMobil pipeline sighed open last Friday, and now your street's been full of a stinky dark tar slurry, like diarrhea of the gods, spitting forth a stream of Canadian tar sands crude on your crape myrtles.
A pipeline carrying crude oil from tar sands in Canada ruptured Friday in the small Arkansas town of Mayflower, forcing the evacuation of 22 homes. The Pegasus pipeline, owned by Exxon, spilled almost 10,000 barrels of oil into a development, with the oil now sitting outside of homes and in wooded areas as emergency…
What is the ultimate representation of the magnificence that is our complex, dynamic, and hugely mysterious planet Earth? Could it be something as simple as the laughter of children? Is it our wondrous oceans? Or is it an intangible quality, like the fact that humans continue to labor toward improvement despite the…
Ever since it exploded on April 20, 2010 — killing 11 crew members — BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig has been a rotting carcass submerged in the Gulf of Mexico. In related news, the Coast Guard announced tonight that a mysterious substance is leaking from the wreckage and nobody knows what it is:
Lefty protesters have scored another (temporary) victory: The Obama administration has decided to delay its decision on building the Keystone XL pipeline until, most likely, after the next election.
President Obama announced that he'll pull (very nearly) all 41,000 remaining U.S. troops in Iraq by the end of the year, fulfilling his earliest campaign promise and finally wrapping this whole debacle up. This is fine news.
One of President Michele Bachmann's plans for beefing up American energy independence would be to drill the Everglades. Again, that's "drill the Everglades," as a supposed means of extracting mass quantities of fossil fuels. This idea may be just terrible enough to disgust some of her fellow Tea Partiers.
Former New York gubernatorial candidate Jimmy McMillan, who became a national sensation after saying "the rent is too damn high" many times in one debate last year, has concocted a clever self-marketing strategy. He takes his famous "the ___ is too damn high" formulation and fills the blank with whatever…
Libyan rebels today are expected to load up a tanker with crude for the first time near Tobruk, with the first shipment expected to be worth $100 million. That should buy a decent amount of weapons.
I realize we have a lot on our worrying plates, between all the tsunamis and Qaddaffis dominating the news these days—but if I could just momentarily direct your hopelessness in the direction of the adorable, oil-soaked rockhopper penguins above, I'd be much obliged. These faces are the innocent victims of yet another…
Bracing for a planned "Day of Rage" tomorrow, Saudi Arabia's scumbag foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said that the ruling family will "cut off any finger" that is raised against it. At a press conference yesterday, he told reporters:
Over the last several years, Libya has transformed itself from regional pariah into a country where foreign leaders are begging to pose for a grip-and-grin with Brother Leader Muammar el-Qaddafi. How did this happen?
An Ecuadorean judge yesterday ordered Chevron to pay—wait for it—$8.6 billion, for polluting the Amazon region. It's one of the biggest environmental judgments ever, if not the biggest. It comes after the case had dragged on for 17 years.
More great news from the wonderful world of Wikileaks: Saudi Arabia is running out of oil! According to a former top Saudi oil executive, as recorded in State Department cables between 2007 and 2009, "Peak Oil" — the pinch point at which global petroleum production reaches its maximum capacity — is a very real problem…
