Enviro Links: Senate Shamed for Climate Fail, Safety System on BP Rig Disabled, and More


Today in climate news:

The New York Times editorial page calls out Obama for the Senate’s climate failure.

John Kerry (D-Mass.) tells Bloomberg that the Senate might take up climate in a lame-duck session, however.

And in oil disaster news:

Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon, told a federal panel this morning that the alarm system on the rig that should have warned workers prior to the explosion had been disabled, the Times-Picayune reports.

A report on conditions aboard the rig conducted a month before the explosions found that Transocean employees had entered fake data in order to circumvent safety systems, CNN reports. The report also found that employees were afraid to report possible safety concerns to superiors.

Two BP managers on the Deepwater Horizon have been listed as potential targets in the Department of Justice investigation.

The Interior Department Inspector General is looking into allegations that the agency may have altered the report used to justify the offshore drilling moratorium.

Tropical storm Bonnie has forced BP to suspend drilling operations on the relief wells in the Gulf.

The spill may cost $22.7 billion in lost tourism income alone.

BP posted the originals of those photos it admitted to doctoring.

About 630 gallons of oil have spilled from a pipeline in Alaska’s Kenai National Wildlife Refuge run by Chevron.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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