A federal judge in Louisiana ruled that BP will be held liable for a portion of the damages owed by Transocean stemming from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The company will not be held liable for any punitive damages.
President Obama effuses about turning the US into “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas”—as new EPA studies find water wells contaminated with toxic chemicals from “hydraulic fracturing” across the country, sparking anger from affected residents.
President Obama denied a permit for the controversial Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, saying the deadline imposed by Congress did not leave enough time to conduct the necessary review. Developer TransCanada said it will re-apply.
Citing inadequate progress on nuclear weapons reduction and proliferation, and continuing inaction on climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it has moved its famous “Doomsday Clock” to five minutes to midnight.
The Pentagon’s new “strategic guidance” document foresees a shift to the Asia-Pacific theater as the primary focus of US global policing. Budget cuts would only bring the US back to 2007 levels—still ahead of the 10 nearest rivals.
Bill Weinberg interviews Andrew Kliman of the Marxist-Humanist Initiative, author of The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession.
Climate Justice Now!, a broad coalition of social movements that coordinated protests at the Durban summit, assailed the last-minute agreement, charging that “the richest nations have cynically created a new regime of climate apartheid.”
The usually cautious International Energy Agency warns that without far-reaching action in the next five years, the world will lock itself into high-emissions energy sources that will push climate change beyond the “safe” 2 degrees Celsius.
Risk analysis and mapping company Maplecroft released the Climate Change Vulnerability Index, examining the climate risks and adaptive capacity of 193 nations. Many of the top-listed nations are now being devastated by floods.
The Occupy Wall Street movement reports demonstrations in over 1,500 cities across the globe Saturday, including over 100 US cities from coast to coast. Scores were arrested in New York, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Sacramento and San Diego.
Earth’s protective ozone layer above the Arctic was pierced by a hole of unprecedented size last winter and spring caused by a long cold period in the stratosphere, according to new NASA research published in the journal Nature.
Virginia’s North Anna nuclear power plant, shut down by power failure after the East Coast earthquake, had seismographs removed in the 1990s due to budget cuts. Four other plants experienced “unusual events” due to the quake.
