Political Climate Articles
As oil spill damages Gulf, will U.S. change energy use?
WASHINGTON -- The Gulf oil spill has triggered a crisis of confidence, shaking Americans' views about BP, the oil industry, technology and President Barack Obama and slowing a planned expansion of domestic offshore oil drilling.
Are the worst spill in U.S. history and images of dead birds and toxic syrup lapping at Gulf shores shocking enough to be a tipping point for energy policy and consumer behavior, however?
Will Americans rush to smaller cars or spend more to buy hybrids? Will politicians embrace gas taxes and charges on large carbon polluters or adopt other measures to punish fossil-fuel burning and encourage alternative energy use?
It's probably too soon to say. Public willingness to change - and the political courage to provoke change - may hinge on how long the spill continues, how the wind blows, how the cleanup goes and the extent of damage to wildlife, seafood, jobs, tourism and real estate.
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The Gulf Disaster, in Perspective
How big is the Gulf spill? Over at Beowulfe.com, you can use Google mapping technology to see what it would look like over your town.
Andy Revkin talked to the site creator, Andy Lintner, about what inspired him to develop it. "I realized that if more people understood the actual scale of the spill, they would be angry too," said Lintner. "That anger is necessary to force the change we need to prevent this kind of thing happening again."
I mapped it over my current home in Washington, D.C., but it stretches almost all the way up to my hometown in southern New Jersey. The thought of a giant pool of oil stretching from the Capitol dome all the way to my family's farm is indeed shocking.
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The Gulf oil spill in context: US oil consumption
The US government has now confirmed that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the United States' largest oil spill and perhaps the nation's worst environmental disaster. While poor government oversight and negligence by oil giant BP certainly contributed to the disaster, the fact that the US is drilling over a mile below the surface in one of its most important marine ecosystems is directly related to US consumption of oil: the highest in the world.
In 2007 the United States consumed 20,680,000 barrels (868,500,000 gallons) of oil every day, or approximately 7.5 billion barrels (or 337.5 billion gallons) of oil during the year.
The federal government says that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has currently released approximately 504,000 to 798,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf based on forty one days of leaking: about 2-4 percent of the United States' one day consumption.
Given its huge rate of consumption, the US is also the number one importer of oil in the world. In 2007, two thirds (66.19 percent) of the nation's oil was imported from abroad.
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Why Obama Should Put BP Under Temporary Receivership
It's time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP's operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped. This is the only way the public know what's going on, be confident enough resources are being put to stopping the gusher, ensure BP's strategy is correct, know the government has enough clout to force BP to use a different one if necessary, and be sure the President is ultimately in charge.
If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP's north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
The Obama administration keeps saying BP is in charge because BP has the equipment and expertise necessary to do what's necessary. But under temporary receivership, BP would continue to have the equipment and expertise. The only difference: the firm would unambiguously be working in the public's interest. As it is now, BP continues to be responsible primarily to its shareholders, not to the American public. As a result, the public continues to worry that a private for-profit corporation is responsible for stopping a public tragedy.
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BP CEO Tony Hayward: 'I'd Like My Life Back'
The millionaire CEO of foreign oil giant BP, Tony Hayward, is upset at the inconvenience caused to him by his company's devastation of the Gulf of Mexico. BP's offshore drilling explosion claimed 11 lives on April 20, and has since spewed 20 to 100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. At least 491 birds, 227 turtles and 27 mammals, including dolphins, have been found dead. On Sunday, immediately after apologizing, Hayward then complained about the effect of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on his personal life, saying "I would like my life back":
We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.
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Ed Markey: BP 'Lying Or Incompetent' About Scope Of Gulf Oil Spill
Ed Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of a House energy committee investigating the oil spill, slammed BP's response to the disaster in an appearance on "Face The Nation" Sunday morning. He suggested that the oil company has misled the public about the magnitude of the spill, and warned the public not to trust what the company is saying.
From the very beginning, Markey said, BP low-balled the size of the oil leak, saying publicly that it was 1,000 barrels per day when in fact they believed that it could be upwards of 14,000 barrels per day. And they did so, he charged, in order to insulate the company from potential liability. "BP has a stake in their own liability here," Markey said. "By that I mean the fine that can be imposed upon them is dependent upon how many barrels per day are going out into the Gulf. If it's 1,000, it's a relatively low fine. But if it's 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000 barrels per day, it could end up as billions of dollars in fines that the BP executives have to pay to the federal government. They had a stake in low-balling the number right from the very beginning, in terms of the amount of oil going out into the Gulf."
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BP oil disaster is Cheney's Katrina
Bush Administration actions created unsafe circumstance, fostered oil addiction
Cheney and President George W. Bush — seen above delivering his 2006 State of the Union address, where he famously stated that "America is addicted to oil" — consistently catered to Big Oil and other special interests to undercut renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives that would set the United States on a more secure clean energy path.
Under Cheney-Bush, oil companies raked in record profits while benefitting from policies they wrote for themselves. These energy policies did nothing for our national security and left consumers to pay the price at the pump and on their energy bills, which rose more than $1,100 during the Bush administration, as this figure illustrates:
The following timeline outlines the administration's direction, consequent legislative steps and missteps, and the resulting circumstances that provided advantages to Big Oil companies and led to the establishment of a regulatory system that created the BP oil disaster.
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Under Cheney's Influence, Wyoming's Oil Ties Flooded MMS
In a speech last week on the disaster unfolding in the Gulf, President Obama told the nation that for decades, there existed a "scandalously close relationship between oil companies and the agency that regulates them," and that he took responsibility for a culture that had "not fully changed" [1] under his administration.
On that subject—the culture of coziness between the Minerals Management Service and industry—a non-profit Wyoming news service WyoFile [2] published a report today that details some of the ties between MMS internal culture, the state of Wyoming, and the state's native son, Dick Cheney. From WyoFile [3]:
The elite among Wyoming's legal and engineering professions, including several governors (past and present), have worked for energy industry clients. As a result, presidential administrations seeking an appointee sympathetic to the energy industry can find a plethora of candidates in Wyoming.
The Wyoming connection was especially evident from 2000 to 2008, during the two administrations of President George W. Bush and his vice president, Wyoming native Dick Cheney. A former chief executive of Halliburton, Cheney took an early and very active interest in energy policy and placed several Wyoming political friends in key positions in the Department of Interior.
Cheney drew on his Wyoming ties to help fill the Interior Department's top spots:
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DEEPWATER HORIZON NOT OBAMA'S KATRINA.
What are Americans expecting, for Obama to order the Marines to march into BP headquarters and force executives at gunpoint to plug the damn hole?
President Obama has been receiving increasing and unjustified flak – even from his own party and supporters – for his supposed lackluster response to the oil environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Attackers are comparing Obama's reaction to the spill to President George Bush's slow-off-the-mark reaction to Hurricane Katrina's devastation along the Gulf coast in 2005.
The only thing in common with the spill of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon and Katrina is the location of their occurrence – mostly, so far, on and near the coastline of the state of Louisiana. And that's where the comparison ends.
The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is the result of lax business regulation and deregulation beginning back in the 1980's, when Obama was in his 20's. Since the Reagan era businesses and industry have been saying they don't need government oversight, they can police themselves and government should stay out of the way. Generally, Congress and the White House have agreed for 30 years. The near collapse of the financial system in 2008 and the resulting Great Recession have proved deregulation folly in the banking sector. Deepwater Horizon proves the mistake of deregulation in the energy sector.
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Why BP is the Anti-Katrina
I think it's actually right to say that the BP oil spill is something like Obama's Katrina, but not in the sense in which most critics seem to mean it.
It's like Katrina in that many people's attitudes regarding the response to it reveal completely unreasonable expectations of government. The fact is, accidents (not to mention storms) happen. We can work to prepare for them, we can have various preventive rules and measures in place. We can build the capacity for response and recovery in advance. But these things happen, and sometimes they happen on a scale that is just too great to be easily addressed. It is totally unreasonable to expect the government to be able to easily address them — and the kind of government that would be capable of that is not the kind of government that we should want.
This conflates two very different things. Katrina was an example of the type of disaster that the federal government is specifically tasked with handling. And for most of the 90s, it was very good at handling them. But when George Bush became president and Joe Allbaugh became director of FEMA, everything changed. Allbaugh neither knew nor cared about disaster preparedness. For ideological reasons, FEMA was downsized and much of its work outsourced. When Allbaugh left after less than two years on the job, he was replaced by the hapless Michael Brown and the agency was downgraded and broken up yet again. By the time Katrina hit, the upper levels of FEMA were populated largely with political appointees with no disaster preparedness experience and the agency was simply not up to the job of dealing with a huge storm anymore.
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'Energy Town Hall' Oil Bus Tour Run by GOP Team At American Energy Alliance
The American Energy Alliance (AEA), a new polluter front group, is touring the nation to smear President Barack Obama's clean energy reform agenda. Employees riding the "American Energy Express" bus are spreading the conservative lies that the American Clean Energy and Security Act will "cripple our sluggish economy." AEA is the 501 c(4) offshoot of the Institute for Energy Research, a right-wing oil-industry think tank run by Robert Bradley, a former speechwriter for Kenneth Lay. E&E News reports that AEA's "Energy Town Hall" bus tour pictures workers in hard hats:
The American Energy Alliance, which is affiliated with the conservative Institute for Energy Research, has begun a four-week bus tour to county fairs, sporting events and public meetings in several coal-reliant states. Representatives of the group will travel in a large blue bus carrying the slogan "Stop the National Energy Tax, Save American Jobs" and a picture of workers in hard hats. They will cross Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and Virginia. Yesterday, AEA officials participated in a rally with another group, Americans for Prosperity, in Zanesville, Ohio; a day earlier, they visited a county fair in western Pennsylvania.
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"Mad Hatter" Throws a Tea Party for Koch and ExxonMobil
A group called Balanced Education for Everyone (BEE) is backing an effort to force the Mesa County, Colorado, school board to mandate school instruction of the "other side" of the so-called debate about global warming, in what may be a national test case on how global warming is taught. Attorney and Tea Party activist, Rose Pugliese — working with the support of Balanced Education for Everyone — presented the board with one petition demanding that global warming not be taught and, ironically, another demanding that political views be kept out of the classroom. At the meeting, Pugliese and her supporters said if warming is taught the "other side" should be too. BEE is a project of the Independent Women's Forum, which, in turn, is an arm of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation -- an industry front group that reportedly gets most of its funding from from oil companies Koch Industries and ExxonMobil. AFP organized last summer's Astroturf Hot Air tour, in which oil company employees posed as average citizens opposed to climate legislation.
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Christopher Monckton: Lies, damn lies or staggering incompetence
John Abraham's Critique Devastates the Florid Lord's Denier Diatribe
Christopher Monckton, the self-celebrating Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, toured Canada and the U.S. last year calling the world's best climate scientists and activists "liars" for setting out their concerns about the dangers of climate change. In his presentations and his PowerPoints, Monckton was graceless and taunting in tone, making fun of Al Gore's accent along with his science. The record now shows that Monckton was also wrong - and frankly, wrong is such a way that he himself must be found to be either a flagrant and shameless liar or the most incompetent compiler of information since church scholars gathered to argue for the flatness of the earth.
The new critique was assembled by John P. Abraham, an engineering professor at St. Thomas University in St. Paul Minnesota. A diligent - even painstaking - researcher, Abraham is also unreservedly respectful in his own presentation, giving Monckton the benefit of every doubt.
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Rep. Don Young (R-AK) says BP oil gusher is 'not an environmental disaster.'
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) adds, 'Acts of God are acts of God.'
Last week, Obama administration officials admitted that the Deepwater Horizon blowout is the worst oil disaster in American history, exceeding the Exxon Valdez spill, as they estimated that the gusher had spewed between 15 and 40 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Around the same time, however, Rep. Don Young (R-AK) declared that the oil pumping into the Gulf is "not an environmental disaster":
Young said: "This is not an environmental disaster, and I will say that again and again because it is a national phenomena. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. During World War II there was over 10 million barrels of oil spilt from ships, and no natural catastrophe.… We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sealife, but overall it will recover."
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As oil arrives on Mississippi beaches, will dirty energy lobbyist-turned-Governor Barbour continue to praise BP
...and mock news coverage of the spill?
The Biloxi Sun Herald reports that oil began covering two miles of Mississippi's Petit Bois Island yesterday as a "larger glob crept close to Dauphin Island in Alabama, and the edge of the main slick has moved to within about 35 miles of Mississippi, about half the distance it was last week." Much of the oil hitting the beaches had "escaped detection because it was floating a couple of feet below the surface." Reacting to the looming disaster, Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) sounded the alarm to local press yesterday. "This could turn out to be something catastrophic and terrible, but that has just not been the case so far," said Barbour.
Barbour's new rhetoric strikes a very different note from his upbeat tone since the disaster started (see "As oil continues to gush into the Gulf, Mississippi offers $75 gas cards to tourists"). In this repost, TP has the story of the effort to whitewash this environmental nightmare by dirty energy lobbyist-turned-Governor Barbour.
Shortly after the spill, Barbour encouraged tourists to "enjoy the beach," even as dead dolphins were washing ashore. In another instance, Barbour incredulously declared, "some in the news media keep forcing this on the public as the equivalent of Exxon Valdez. Well, the difference is just enormous."
And as early as last week, Barbour went on CNN to blame "news coverage" for the state's woes, telling Wolf Blitzer that "we haven't had enough oil hit Mississippi's beaches to fill up a milk jug." Barbour went out of his way to lavish praise on BP, exclaiming that the British oil conglomerate has been completely cooperative:
BARBOUR: But we haven't had, really, any impact. I mean, we haven't had enough oil hit Mississippi's beaches to fill up a milk jug. Now, we're prepared and we're prepared for the worst. But thus far, we haven't had any kind of incursion, except the news coverage is killing our tourist business. Everybody thinks that the Gulf Coast all the way around is ankle deep in oil. And, of course, it's not. [...]
BARBOUR: We have. BP has never said no to any requests we have made. Now, some requests we've made they haven't been able to perform. But they have never said no. The federal government, whether it's the Coast Guard or whomever, has worked hard with us. Like I say, they're giving a lot more attention to Louisiana and should be. But we are satisfied that they're trying as hard as they can and that they are being very cooperative. I'm not going to complain.
Watch it:
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Contractor: BP is trying to hide dead animals, since the ocean will eventually wash away the evidence
In recent weeks, reporters and photographers for major news organizations around the country have been speaking out about the attempts by BP to prevent them from getting a first-hand look at the Gulf Coast oil spill. A CBS News crew was threatened with arrest when it tried to photograph the spill, and a BP representative in Louisiana told a Mother Jones reporter that she couldn't visit the Elmer's Island Wildlife Refuge without a BP escort. TP has the story in this repost.
On Monday, journalists from the New York Daily News were also "escorted away from a public beach on Elmer's Island bycops who said they were taking orders from BP." However, they managed to get a covert tour of the Queen Bess barrier island from a BP contractor who is fed up with the oil company's attempt to cover up the disaster:
"There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don't want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It's important to me that people know the truth about what's going on here," the contractor said.
"The things I've seen: They just aren't right. All the life out here is just full of oil. I'm going to show you what BP never showed the President." [...]
The grasses by the shore were littered with tarred marine life, some dead and others struggling under a thick coating of crude.
"When you see some of the things I've seen, it would make you sick," the contractor said. "No living creature should endure that kind of suffering."
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Under Pressure to Block Oil, A Rush To Dubious Projects
In response to the widening disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, government officials have approved a plan to intercept the oil by building a 45-mile sand berm. But scientists fear the project is a costly boondoggle that will inflict further environmental damage and do little to keep oil off the coast.
Oil continues to gush from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, with the U.S. Geological Survey estimating that as many as 28 million gallons of oil have been released into the Gulf, compared to 11 million gallons from the Exxon Valdez spill. BP may not be able to stop the flow until August when the drilling of a relief well is completed. Oil is already hitting the beaches and wetlands of Louisiana and is rapidly approaching Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle. The environmental and economic impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill cannot be overstated: This may become one of the greatest ecological catastrophes in history.
Given the enormity of this environmental disaster, it is understandable that there is tremendous political and societal pressure to stop the flow and clean up the mess. However, in their rush to react to growing public pressure and do something, federal and state officials are waiving scientific review of emergency measures and embracing dubious solutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the proposal to begin building a long sand berm to prevent oil from reaching wetlands and beaches in Louisiana. The White House has announced that this project is now moving forward, despite serious concerns among coastal scientists, including myself, that it will not be effective in keeping oil from the coast, could do more environmental harm than good, and would be extremely expensive.
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Countries hiding real rate of CO2 emissions - claim
EU MEMBER states and other developed countries have been accused of engaging in "creative accounting" to hide an estimated 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions every year – in their trees.
The figure, referred to by environmentalists as a "gigatonne gap", is equivalent to Spain's total annual emissions or half those of Germany, and all of this was "going to go missing in the accounts if these guys get their way", one of them warned.
Seán Cadman, forest campaign co-ordinator for the Wilderness Society in Australia, said only Switzerland was standing out against "this massive logging loophole" in the negotiations to agree a deal on land use, land use change and forestry – known as LULUCF.
"A dirty LULUCF deal is a dirty climate deal," he declared, adding the consequences for the climate would be "disastrous". He called on delegates from other developed countries, such as Norway, to "stand up to this disgraceful scandal" at the Bonn climate talks.
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Post BP Disaster: Support grows for comprehensive energy bill that makes carbon polluters pay
The League of Conservation Voters commissioned a poll by the Benenson Strategy Group, President Obama's pollster in 2008, to measure public support for clean energy reform in the wake of the BP oil disaster. The central finding is that the public wants real changes in our energy policies:
In the aftermath of the spill, people firmly believe Congress needs to do more than just make BP pay. They understand America needs more than a band-aid; we need real, comprehensive energy reform.
BSG surveyed 800 people nationwide from May 25 to June 1, and compared the results to a similar poll taken in May. The poll found growing support – and intensity – to "regulate corporate polluters" instead of simply to "invest in clean energy sources."
Two thirds of the respondents in June supported more regulation on corporate polluters, up from 65 percent in May, less than a month ago. Similarly, 65 percent of people support increased investment in clean energy sources, up from only 57 percent in May. The number of those who feel most strongly about additional regulation increased by nearly twenty percent.
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BP's Spill Plans Had Few Ways to Stop a Blowout
Containment domes, top hats and top kills. By now BP and the government have tried to stop the growing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with a series of different techniques, each with an odder name than the next.
But where are all these ideas coming from, we've wondered. Did BP or the government have plan in place in the event of a blowout?
The answer, so far as we can see: No. None of the documents and plans we've been able to find have details on how to deal with a blowout.
A blowout plan certainly wasn't laid out in BP's initial exploration plan [1] for the well.
Nor is it in the 582 pages of BP's Oil Spill Response Plan [2] for the Gulf of Mexico region. (As we've noted, the document is interesting to look at for a comparison of what BP said prior to the disaster in the Gulf [3] and what it has said since.)
That Gulf-wide plan spells out the organization of the team responding to an incident. It names many of the now-familiar methods of minimizing an existing spill's environmental impact, including the use of booms, skimmers and controlled burns. But instructions on how to stop a spill are scanty:
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BP Refuses to Provide Oil Samples to Scientists Investigating Underwater Plumes
The giant deepwater plumes of oil in the Gulf of Mexico have been confirmed by the government [1], but one thing the testing couldn't confirm was that the oil below the surface is definitively from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. (The other possibility is the plumes are the result of natural seepage.)
According to a lead scientist involved in the testing, an oil sample from the BP well would have helped ID the origin of the plumes, but BP refused to provide any samples [2], reported the St. Petersburg Times. "I was just taken aback by it," said the scientist, David Hollander, who's a professor of chemical oceanography at the University of South Florida. "It was a little unsettling."
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Scientists Criticize BP's Claims About How Much Oil It's Siphoning
Yet another scientist on the government-assembled group estimating flow rates has spoken up and voiced skepticism about BP's claims.
Steve Wereley, a Purdue University engineering professor and a member of the Flow Rate Technical Group [1], criticized BP for mischaracterizing how much oil it is capturing with its containment cap, according to The Associated Press.
Current estimates are that the cap is currently capturing 630,000 gallons [2] per day—that's 15,000 barrels of oil. The official estimate of the overall leak is between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels a day. Wereley told the AP [3] that it's more likely that between 19,000 and 43,000 barrels of oil have been spewing into the Gulf daily. From the AP:
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BP Rig Not the Only One Leaking Oil in Gulf
The catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico has been portrayed as a one-of-a-kind disaster, a perfect storm of bad equipment, bad planning and bad luck.
But it's far from the only spill that's taken place this year – or even the only spill occurring in the Gulf right now.
On June 7, the Mobile Press-Register reported that the Ocean Saratoga rig has been leaking into the Gulf [1] [1] since April 30. Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff confirmed the next day that "small amounts of oil" were leaking from the wells beneath the rig, about 10 miles from Louisiana's southeastern coast.
Taylor Energy, the well's owner, said in a statement [2] [2] that it was engaged in an "ongoing well intervention plan" with the government to fix damage caused by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and that no significant new spill had occurred.
The Deepwater Horizon isn't the only recent spill for BP, either. On May 25, according to Reuters, an accident on the Trans-Alaska pipeline [3] [3] spilled thousands of barrels of oil and forced the pipeline to be shut down for more than three days. BP is the largest owner of the pipeline operator, controlling 47 percent.
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