Deep Water Horizon

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pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

: BBC News, ‘Time-line: The Bank of Scotland’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7620761.stm; Robert Peston, ‘Lloyds to buy HBOS’, 17 September 2008, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/09/lloyds_to_buy_hbos.html; and BBC News, ‘UK Banks receive £37bn bail-out’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7666570.stm 216 Celebrate seven years without a notable accident: Ben Casselman, ‘Gulf rig owner had rising tally of accidents’, Wall Street Journal,10 May 2010. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704307804575234471807539054.html 217 Just as his own computer monitor exploded: ‘Blowout: the Deep-water Horizon disaster’, CBS 60 Minutes, 16 May 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml 218 Last been inspected five years before the accident: David Hammer, ‘Rig’s blowout preventer last inspected in 2005’, Times-Picayune, 26 May 2010, http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/hearings_rigs_blowout_prevente.html 218 For months BP engineers had been expressing concern: Ian Urbina, ‘Documents show early worries about safety of rig’, New York Times,29 May 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html?


pages: 435 words: 120,574

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Two miles to the north is Willows Springs, a black settlement on which in 1982 a hazardous waste management firm, Brown and Ferris International, dumped waste in open landfills, sickening the local citizens. Also to the north is Sasol, the mighty South Africa–based energy and chemical company, now building the first U.S. gas-to-liquids plant and the largest new industrial facility expansion in the United States. Beyond that, three hundred miles to the southeast, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deep Water Horizon oil rig had exploded in 2010 in the worst marine oil spill in world history. Bayou d’Inde was at the epicenter, I realized, of an entire petrochemical empire—and of the Great Paradox. Most of what polluted the bayou sank to the bottom of it—mercury, heavy metals, ethylene dichloride (EDC), and chlorinated dioxins.


pages: 501 words: 134,867

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice by Tony Weis, Joshua Kahn Russell

addicted to oil, Bakken shale, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, failed state, gentrification, global village, green new deal, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, liberal capitalism, LNG terminal, market fundamentalism, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, profit maximization, public intellectual, race to the bottom, smart grid, special economic zone, WikiLeaks, working poor

He has published several books with RED/Fernwood, including The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy; Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurt; and The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. Cherri Foytlin is a freelance journalist, author, advocate, speaker, and mother of six who lives in South Louisiana—an area inundated with industrial pollution. She is the co-author of the e-book Spill It! The Truth About the Deep Water Horizon Oil Rig Explosion, and regularly contributes to www.BridgetheGulfProject.org, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and several local newspapers. Sonia Grant is an environmental justice organizer and a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. While based in Toronto, Sonia was active in the grassroots movement against the Enbridge Line 9 reversal.


pages: 692 words: 167,950

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

Just days after the April 22, 2010, sinking of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, Bea pulled together the Deepwater Horizon Study Group (DHSG), a group of sixty experts from the United States, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and Norway, to undertake an independent investigation of what mistakes had led to the explosion of BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, and to recommend steps to avoid repeating those errors. Bea has investigated more than twenty offshore rig disasters—including the catastrophic blowout of Ixtoc I, a Pemex platform, in June 1979, which caused the biggest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico prior to the Deep-water Horizon. Most of these accidents were caused by human error—though Bea prefers the term human defect, meaning man’s “hubris, greed, and indolence.” In studying the causes of over six hundred engineering failures, he found that only 20 percent of such disasters are the result of intrinsic uncertainties, such as floods, tornadoes, and dust storms, while 80 percent are rooted in extrinsic uncertainties, or what Bea terms “the human factor.”