For the last couple of weeks, we've been consumed with the never-ending fallout from BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster. Some 29 months after the explosion that killed 11 people and spewed 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, we've seen a hurricane toss BP's oil onto our once pristine beaches all over again. And we've also been fighting it out in the legal arena -- to make sure that people whose livelihood and whose health has been harmed by the recklessness of Big Oil receive justice. Sometimes it seems like a complicated tale, but actualy what happened off the coast of Louisiana is actually fairly simple. In order to feed society's increasingly desperate addiction to fossil fuels, BP was attempting something that's very, very hard: Drilling for oil way offshore, under one mile of seawater. Despite the inherently dangerous nature of this enterprise, emails and other evidence show that BP was remarkably careless in its safety and testing procedures, and government regulators were lax in their oversight. The accident was proof of the worst-case scenarios with such high-risk drilling. Because of our recent troubles here in the Gulf, it's been appalling to see another icon of Big Oil, Shell, forge ahead ...
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