Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit – NYTimes.com

There may be no more important singular idea than the notion that corporations are persons.  Indeed, they are.

The Koch brothers continue to be the target of media attention and this time they are not strategizing or paying for it.  They are getting a freebee.  It appears that an environmental secretion from their pursuit of wealth function has piled up higher and deeper in the  eye of the media and in the middle of the “pristine” great lakes region.  Oil… of course.  Texas gold, or US black mud… or whatever earth exploiters and investors call it these days.  Environmentalists and world builders are colliding once again as they accuse one another about tree hugging the world on the one hand and exploiting it for  greed on the other.  In the meantime the real lesson at hand here goes unnoticed.

The key and central problem we see on the horizon today is not piles of environmental waste but the proverbial “free rider problem” which is as old as cave metaphors and necessary untruths.   It is big corporate money (to be sure corporate profits in the hands of ideologues) applied to our political discourse.  The NYTs points it out… but what are we to do?

“Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the …”

via Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit – NYTimes.com.

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Nuclear power: The dream that failed | The Economist

THE enormous power tucked away in the atomic nucleus, the chemist Frederick Soddy rhapsodised in 1908, could “transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling …

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Oil and the Huaorani : The New Yorker

This week, Patrick Radden Keefe reports on the long legal battle over environmental damages caused by Texaco’s oil drilling in the …

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Springtime for Toxics – NYTimes.com

Here’s what I wanted for Christmas: something that would make us both healthier and richer. And since I was just making a wish, why not ask that Americans get

via Springtime for Toxics – NYTimes.com.

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EPA Implicates Fracking in Groundwater Pollution | Julian Brookes | Rolling Stone

AP is out with a report that the Environmental Protection Agency is, for the first time, tying hydraulic fracturing – a controversial method of getting natural gas out of the ground known for short as …

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Japanese Split on Fukushima Radiation Cleanup – NYTimes.com

Futaba is a modern-day ghost town — not a boomtown gone bust, not even entirely a victim of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that leveled other parts of Japan’s …

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Marcellus Shale, Hydraulic Fracturing, and the E.P.A. : The New Yorker

Americans have never met a hydrocarbon they didn’t like. Oil, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, tar-sands oil, coal-bed methane, and coal, which is, mostly, carbon—the country loves them all, not wisely, but too well. To the extent that the United States has an energy policy, it is perhaps best summed up as:

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Republican Financial Plans – NYTimes.com

Our topic for today is: Where do the Republican candidates for president get their money?

The personal finances of the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls are important for two reasons. One is that we’re talking about …

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A Gold Rush of Subsidies in the Search for Clean Energy – NYTimes.com

Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on a former cattle ranch and gypsum mine, NRG Energy is building an engineering marvel: a compound of nearly a million solar panels that will produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 …

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Here Comes Solar Energy – NYTimes.com

“Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, …”

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Exxon Profits Soar: Why Big Oil Is Booming | Jeff Goodell | Rolling Stone

So the Big Oil juggernaut rolls on.  Yesterday Exxon Mobil announced profits of $10 billion, up 41 percent from a year ago.  And this is despite a fall in oil production and a decline in …

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The oil business: Big Oil’s bigger brothers | The Economist

BUSINESS could scarcely be better for the supermajors, as the world’s biggest listed international oil companies are known. A barrel of Brent crude has changed hands for $100 or more for most of the year and cash is gushing in. On October 25th BP announced quarterly profits of $5.1 billion. Two days later Shell reported profits of $7 billion and Exxon Mobil of $10.3 billion. But the tide of the oil business is …

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