An already fragile population of killer whales that hunts Prince William Sound never recovered from the Exxon Valdez oil spill and is doomed to die off, biologists said this week.
Marine mammal biologist Craig Matkin of Homer has tracked the animals since the mid-1980s and said he never thought he'd see an entire population of whales -- even a small one -- disappear.
"To blame it all on the spill would not be fair, but that's the final death blow," Matkin said.
Twenty-nine years ago, President Jimmy Carter adopted the radical and dangerous policy of using military force to ensure U.S. access to Middle Eastern oil.
WASHINGTON - A proposal issued in the final days of the Bush administration to expand offshore drilling in previously banned areas will move forward under the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, an Interior Department spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday.
Shortly after being sworn in on Tuesday, Obama ordered all federal agencies and departments to halt pending regulations until they can be reviewed by incoming staff.
The international body that advises most major governments across the world on energy policy is obstructing a global switch to renewable power because of its ties to the oil, gas and nuclear sectors, a group of politicians and scientists claims today.
The experts, from the Energy Watch group, say the International Energy Agency (IEA) publishes misleading data on renewables, and that it has consistently underestimated the amount of electricity generated by wind power in its advice to governments.
Only yesterday, it seems, we were bemoaning the high price of oil.
Under the headline "Oil's Rapid Rise Stirs Talk of $200 a Barrel This
Year," the July 7 issue of the Wall Street Journal warned that prices that high would put "extreme strains on large sectors of the U.S.
For a while it seemed that Shell had stopped pretending. The
advertisements that filled the newspapers in 2006, featuring
technicians with perfect teeth and open-necked shirts explaining how
they were saving the world, vanished.
SAN FRANCISCO - The federal government is taking steps that
may open California's fabled coast to oil drilling in as few as three
years, an action that could place dozens of platforms off the Sonoma,
Mendocino and Humboldt coasts, and raises the specter of spills, air
pollution and increased ship traffic into San Francisco Bay.
If IkpoBari Senewo had not been conducting an exam for his secondary school students in the Niger Delta village of Bane one afternoon in May of 1994, he believes he would have been killed. As it was, members of the Nigerian military who came to Senewo's house that day found only his father at home, so they flogged the elderly man with a section of high-tension cable and then burned the house down.
The millions of dollars Exxon Mobil Corp. has surrendered as punishment for the Prince William Sound oil spill have started hitting the streets, nearly 20 years after the disaster.
Several commercial fishermen who joined in the lawsuit against Exxon reported receiving direct deposits in their bank accounts Monday. Paper checks are expected to go out in the mail in the next week.
The payments mark the beginning of a process to distribute $383 million among nearly 33,000 commercial fishermen and other plaintiffs.
President-elect Barack Obama introduced his principal national security Cabinet selections to the world Monday and left no doubt that he intends to start his administration on a war footing. Perhaps the least well known among them is retired Marine Gen. James Jones, Obama's pick for national security adviser. The position is crucial -- think of the power that Henry Kissinger wielded in Richard Nixon's White House. A look into who James Jones is sheds a little light on the Obama campaign's promise of "Change We Can Believe In."
