One Unlikely Malfunction After Another

Over at his new blog, The Oil and the Glory, Steve Levine posts highlights from an early draft of an investigative report on the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Check out the diagram he got his hands on—it gives you a sense for just how many things had to go wrong for a spill this gruesome to take place. Key quote: "[A]n accident of this magnitude required an almost perfect chain of events: One unlikely malfunction needed to be followed precisely by another, then another, and so on." Office 2007 Pro is so great!

 

(And do check out Levine's blog—he's written a number of pieces for TNR on the geopolitics of energy, including this one and this one, and it's great that there's now a clearinghouse for his work. It's a crucial topic that doesn't get nearly enough coverage.)

Over at his new blog, The Oil and the Glory, Steve Levine posts highlights from an early draft of an investigative report on the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Check out the diagram he got his hands on—it gives you a sense for just how many things had to go wrong for a spill this gruesome to take place. Key quote: "[A]n accident of this magnitude required an almost perfect chain of events: One unlikely malfunction needed to be followed precisely by another, then another, and so on." Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.

 

(And do check out Levine's blog—he's written a number of pieces for TNR on the geopolitics of energy, including this one and this one, and it's great that there's now a clearinghouse for his work. It's a crucial topic that doesn't get nearly enough coverage.)

Over at Newsweek, Sharon Begley notes that a couple of newspapers have now retracted some of their "Climategate" allegations. The Sunday Times of London, in particular, just published a long mea culpa for a piece Jonathan Leake wrote claiming that the IPCC's work on rainforests in its 2007 assessment was "bogus." The fact that the Times had to retract shouldn't come as a surprise—as I pointed out back in February, Leake's story was incredibly sloppy and he had apparently misquoted the climate experts he interviewed.