"BP shoulders most of the blame for the disastrous 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill by acting with "profit-driven decisions" that amounted to "gross negligence," a federal judge ruled Thursday in a decision that could quadruple the billions of dollars in penalties the oil giant faces."
"A U.S. judge has decided that BP Plc was “grossly negligent” and “reckless” in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill four years ago, a ruling that could add nearly $18 billion in fines to more than $42 billion (25.73 billion pounds) in charges the company took for the worst offshore environmental disaster in U.S. history."
Multimedia conference coverage of SEJ's 24th Annual Conference, September 3-7, 2014 in New Orleans, is being posted here as it arrives (please send us your story links for inclusion). If you attended the conference, please take a few minutes to tell us how we did. What you think matters to us and your feedback helps SEJ make future conferences more valuable. Click here to take our online conference evaluation. Share your conference photos on SEJ's public Flickr page. Photo: Moderator Tim Wheeler and panel of Dead Zones, Hypoxia and Nutrient Loading: Is Pollution Trading the Answer? © Karen Schaefer.
"The largest food safety overhaul in generations is being starved of funding needed to enforce a host of new regulations for factories, farms and importers, safety advocates warn."
"The Australian who heads fishery management in the Western and Central Pacific has warned an international agreement is urgently needed to avert disaster for the tuna industry."
"Imaginary television weather forecasts predicted floods, storms and searing heat from Arizona to Zambia within four decades, as part of a United Nations campaign on Monday to draw attention to a U.N. summit this month on fighting global warming."
"The U.S. government is looking for trains to haul radioactive waste from nuclear power plants to disposal sites. Too bad those trains have nowhere to go."
"Summer is high season for 'frogging.' The North American Amphibian Monitoring Project has hundreds of volunteers crisscrossing the country to get a better handle on the fate of the nation's frogs.""
"Wednesday is biofuel's big moment: The first of three commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants comes online in Iowa. It took years of tricky engineering to get to this point. But that may prove the easy part, for the fuel's promise as a climate solution hinges heavily on federal policy."
"Extracting natural gas for energy from shale rock deep underground requires lots of water, but much of the world's shale gas is in regions where water is already scarce, including part of California, according to a study issued Tuesday."
