The Guardian reports from US State Department cables released by Wikileaks that the oil and gas giant, BP, experienced a platform disaster in the Caspian Sea off Azerbaijan in September, 2008, very similar to last summer’s Deep Water Horizon platform explosion. BP was reported to have covered up the details of the catastrophe even from […]
Category
- Africa (125)
- Animals (1)
- Asia (701)
- Authoritarianism (125)
- Cats (1)
- Culture (371)
- Dehydration (1)
- Democracy (178)
- Dissent (266)
- Economy (555)
- Education (59)
- Elderly (2)
- Energy (915)
- Environment (1,167)
- Europe (640)
- Featured (2,070)
- fiction (5)
- Food (7)
- Guns (9)
- History (184)
- Human Rights (908)
- Immigration (17)
- International (632)
- Islamophobia (260)
- Juan Cole (264)
- Latin America (51)
- Latinos (3)
- leisure (21)
- media (341)
- Middle East (6,274)
- Arab World (4,225)
- Iran (672)
- Israel (643)
- Israel/ Palestine (1,583)
- Israel/Palestine (8)
- Kurds (235)
- Turkey (368)
- military (103)
- Modernism (1)
- nationalism (98)
- NATO (4)
- Natural Disasters (11)
- nuclear weapons (41)
- Patriarchy (1)
- Peace (63)
- Persian mythology (1)
- Popular Culture (22)
- Poverty (5)
- privacy (19)
- racism (256)
- Rape (5)
- religion (722)
- Rights (124)
- Romance (1)
- science (97)
- Secular (West) (7)
- Secularism (19)
- Sexual Assault (2)
- South Pacific (1)
- Spirituality (20)
- Statelessness (14)
- Surveillance (255)
- Terrorism (1,003)
- Tolerance (4)
- Uncategorized (8,021)
- United Nations (64)
- Urbanization (3)
- US Foreign Policy (448)
- US politics (2,926)
- Anti-War Movement (5)
- Campaign Finance (23)
- Censors (21)
- Central Intelligence Agency (56)
- Civil Rights (75)
- Constitution (236)
- crime (3)
- Democratic Party (438)
- Democratic Socialists of America (2)
- Domestic Terrorism (15)
- Drone Warfare (24)
- Espionage (108)
- Ethnicities (218)
- Far Right (156)
- FBI (34)
- Foreign Policy (193)
- Gay Rights (12)
- Guns (58)
- Immigration (148)
- Israel Lobbies (73)
- Marijuana (1)
- Militarization (207)
- National Security State (363)
- Native Americans (20)
- Nuclear arsenal (5)
- penitentiaries (6)
- Pentagon (251)
- Police (19)
- prison reform (3)
- Puerto Rico (25)
- Religious Right (1)
- Reproductive Choice (7)
- Republican Party (1,700)
- Supreme Court (41)
- Voter suppression (18)
- Whistleblowers (3)
- Xenophobia (7)
- Veterans (17)
- Voting Rights (4)
- War (224)
- Western Religion (345)
- White Supremacists (46)
- wikileaks (8)
- women (258)
- workers (112)
- Writing (5)
- Youth (111)
Energy
Dec. 6: Top Ten New Wikileaks on Greater Middle East
Here are this weekend’s top ten Wikileaks revelations for the Greater Middle East: The US and India wanted to slap United Nations sanctions on Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and his group, Jama’at al-Da’wa, for terrorism. But Pakistan asked China to block this move at the UN, and Beijing complied. The Jama`at is widely considered a front […]
Google imagines an Atlantic Wind Grid
One of the problems with new green energy installations is the need to funnel the power, facility by facility, into the existing electricity grid. Google is trying to resolve that problem on the Atlantic seaboard by starting with an “Atlantic Wind Connection” that “will be able to connect 6,000MW of offshore wind turbines.” Networking the […]
Engaging the Muslim World Out in Paperback
Today is the official publication date for the paperback edition of my most recent book, Engaging the Muslim World. Click here to purchase It is somewhat revised, taking some of the stories into 2010. Here is a link to David Sanger’s generous review of the book in the New York Times.
Worst Reporting on Green Energy of the Week
This week’s award for bad environmental reporting goes to John Spear of the Toronto Star for his article on the cost of wind power in Ontario “when we don’t need it.” Spear manages to write the entire article as though the only comparison between wind power and other energy should be about the conventional pricing, […]
Nakhai: Bushehr Plant Going Hot
Nuclear engineer Behrad Nakhai writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment A brief overview of Bushehr nuclear power plant startup (Simplified) Finally, nuclear fuel loading of Bushehr nuclear power plant started on Saturday 21 August 2010, aided by the Russians. In technology, Russia has always trailed US, although they have somehow been able to […]
Portugal’s Green Energy Revolution and the true Cost of Gas, Coal and Oil
Don’t miss Elisabeth Rosenthal’s important and well-written piece at NYT on Portugal’s energy policy. With remarkable clarity given the potentially technical subject matter, she explains exactly how the Portuguese government went from generating 17% of its electricity from alternative sources a few years ago to 45% today. (That is electricity, not all energy; so they’re […]
Take that, Dennis Miller; Climate Change is Real and Dangerous
I have a bone to pick with comic Dennis Miller. We all know about his famous shift to the political right after the September 11 attacks. Although I can remember an interview in which he said it went back further, to when he used to hear liberals complain about Mayor Rudolph Giuliani´s law and order […]
Dietrich: Energy and the Future of U.S. Diplomacy
Christopher R. W. Dietrich writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment: Energy and the Future of U.S. Diplomacy In a paper written in conjunction with Lloyds of London, Dr. Paul Stevens of Chatham House recently predicted that oil could arrive at $200 per barrel by 2013. As the events in the Gulf of Mexico […]
© 2019 All Rights Reserved