I grew up in the L.A. area and am a die-hard Dodgers and UCLA Bruins fan. My wife, Lynn, is a sculptor and painter. We have two grown daughters who we’d like to call us more often. I also play guitar and bass in a klezmer band.
Posted September 3, 2010 by David Pettit in Moving Beyond Oil, Reviving the World's Oceans, U.S. Law and Policy
BP’s latest strategy: hold their clean-up funds ransom this holiday weekend. It seems BP’s claiming that they simply cannot promise to pay for the clean up that they already promised to pay for unless Congress eases off stronger drilling protections...continued→
Posted August 27, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution, Environmental Justice, Health and the Environment
On April 20, 2010, the day that the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up, my colleague Melissa Lin Perrella and I started trial in the American Trucking Association v. Port of Los Angeles case in federal district court in...continued→
Posted August 20, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution, Health and the Environment
Rep. Ed Markey held a hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday during which he very gently got NOAA senior scientist Bill Lehr to move off the “don’t worry, be happy” party line about how much BP oil is still in the...continued→
Posted August 12, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution
I was at an eco-salon at our Chicago office recently, talking about the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. The topic of BP’s activities in the Arctic came up and people started laughing when I described BP’s claim that, by drilling an...continued→
Posted August 10, 2010 by David Pettit in Moving Beyond Oil
The Wall Street Journal reported on August 10, 2010 that the Obama administration was close to sealing a deal with BP that would make the U.S. business partners with BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The idea is that...continued→
Posted July 30, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution
You make a mess, you clean it up. We learned this as kids. The oil spill bill introduced by Senator Reid, S. 3663, is true to this principle. But the Republican oil spill bill, S. 3643, would let oil companies walk...continued→
Posted July 20, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution
Last week, I went to New Orleans to meet with environmental and social justice groups that are working on the BP oil spill. A couple of locals were kind enough to take some of the attendees on a boat trip...continued→
Posted July 13, 2010 by David Pettit in Health and the Environment, Moving Beyond Oil, U.S. Law and Policy
On July 12, 2010, eighty-three days after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up and killed 11 workers, Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued his second moratorium on new drilling for oil on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf...continued→
Posted July 6, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution
With any luck, by the beginning of 2011 the BP Macondo well will have been capped and efforts can focus on repairing the livelihoods of millions of Gulf residents, the lives of wildlife that call the Gulf home and the...continued→
Posted June 22, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution, Environmental Justice, Health and the Environment, Moving Beyond Oil
Today, in a decision that increases the risk of another uncontrollable oil well blowout, U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman of New Orleans, Louisiana, issued an injunction that halts enforcement of the Obama Administration’s six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling...continued→
Posted June 17, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution, Moving Beyond Oil, Reviving the World's Oceans, Solving Global Warming
It was 87 degrees at 11 PM, with humidity that made me stagger as I left the air-conditioned Palladium Theater to walk the five blocks back to my hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida. I had just finished doing a filmed...continued→
Posted June 14, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution, Moving Beyond Oil
The federal Minerals Management Service (MMS), which is supposed to supervise oil companies’ drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), has come into a lot of criticism for the laxness of its own safety inspections and for its practices of...continued→
Posted June 4, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution, Moving Beyond Oil, U.S. Law and Policy
Some of the things that NRDC does get a lot of media attention; many get none. I want to tell you about something we just did that is likely to fall into the “none” category. There is a little-known agency...continued→
Posted June 2, 2010 by David Pettit in Curbing Pollution
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced on June 1, 2010 that the federal government is opening a criminal investigation into the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Attorney General Holder did not name any specific targets of the...continued→
Posted May 23, 2010 by David Pettit in Moving Beyond Oil, U.S. Law and Policy
In the last week or so, I’ve been getting calls asking whether the U.S. Government has the legal authority to take control of the Gulf oil spill away from clueless British Petroleum (BP). It does. The background for this authority...continued→
Switchboard is the staff blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the nation’s most effective environmental group. For more about our work, including in-depth policy documents, action alerts and ways you can contribute, visit NRDC.org.
