Green Business

It might seem like an oxymoron at first glance, but perhaps it’s not so far fetched. As dicussed in the upcoming issue of OnEarth magazine, Frederick Kaufmann suggests that “industrial agriculture, is not only essential to, but could also be the future leader of, sustainable food production”.

The news from the Gulf of Mexico seafloor is good.

BP pumped the infamous Deepwater Horizon well full of cement on Thursday. The cement appears to be doing its job. And, after some pressure tests on Friday afternoon confirmed that fact, work on the relief well resumed.

Although it is the world’s most populous country, China’s only FIFA World Cup appearance was in 2002. China lost all three games in the first round and scored zero goals.

The companies that BP has hired to oversee the disposal of oil-soaked debris on the Gulf Coast say that everything is going smoothly. According to those companies, cleanup workers are gathering used booms, contaminated sand, tar balls, oily garbage, and all other spill-related toxic material, packing them away in sealed containers, and shipping them to landfills.

At a meeting of mayors in Louisiana on Monday, Roger Laferriere of the US Coast Guard put the Deepwater Horizon disaster in perspective: "Every day it's a new oil spill. In previous spills, we always had a known quantity of oil."

Laferriere is absolutely right. In this spill, the numbers have changed constantly.

BP is trying to borrow $7 billion.

Reuters reported on Friday that the company has put requests in with seven different banks, hoping that each bank would lend them $1 billion.

Oil company executives gathered on Capitol Hill on Tuesday at a Congressional hearing to discuss offshore drilling and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Leaders from ExxonMobil, Shell, Conoco-Phillips, and Chevron sat next to Lamar McKay, head of BP America, but they answered questions with the intention of isolating BP.

Inspired by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, Kevin Costner decided that the world needed a machine that would quickly and safely remove spilled oil from water. So he started building.

Last week, Patently Apple, a blog "celebrating Apple's spirit of innovation," noticed that Apple engineers, in 2008, had quietly filed a patent for a technology to embed solar cells under touch screens.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced on June 1, 2010 that the federal government is opening a criminal investigation into the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Attorney General Holder did not name any specific targets of the investigation, but it’s not hard to figure out who they may be. Holder named the Clean Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act as federal laws that might have been violated. I understand that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been working on this matter since very shortly after the spill occurred.