Slap on the wrist?: The federal government announced yesterday that BP will pay a record $4.5 billion in fines and plead guilty to 11 felonies as a result of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 people and polluted the Gulf of Mexico. Critics immediately decried the penalties as far too small for a company that raked in $5.4 billion in profits in the last quarter alone and wondered why no one in BP’s top management was going to jail. Times-Picayune, Mother Jones, FuelFix
Get the picture?: Climate change skeptics aren’t fond of computer modeling (mainly because they don’t like the results -- kind of like conservatives and the recent election, amirite?) So they'll probably really hate that a supercomputer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is producing easy-to-visualize images (like the one above) of the atmospheric and environmental data it’s crunching. Its models show that “the Earth is getting hotter, that weather patterns will change, that our Arctic ice will shrink more, and that sea levels will rise.” Bad Astronomy
Horse thieves: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar threatened to “punch out” a Colorado newspaper reporter who asked him questions last month about the Bureau of Land Management’s sale of wild horses to a livestock hauler suspected of illegally selling them to Mexican slaughterhouses. (The whole thing was captured on tape.) Hey look, Mr. Secretary, the idea makes us mad, too -- but not at the guy asking the questions. Columbia Journalism Review
E-rat-ication: Wildlife specialists in western Canada are trying to rid an archipelago in British Columbia of all its rats. The rats are an invasive species (as they are throughout the Western Hemisphere), and killing off the islands’ nesting seabirds at an alarming rate. Hey guys, once you finish rat-proofing those islands, we’ve got a big one right here in New York City that we wouldn’t mind you taking a look at, ‘kay? Scientific American
Gas glut: Natural gas is really inexpensive right now, since we used a lot less of it during last year's warm winter, and we’re drilling so much more of it out of the ground, thanks to the fracking boom. This is leading some (namely, the utility companies) to argue against clean tech development and energy efficiency measures, saying they don’t make economic sense when gas is just so darn cheap. The thing is ... gas won’t always be cheap, and then, hey, maybe it would be nice if we had some alternatives. Slate
Peak reprieve: In a deal with environmental groups and community advocates, one mining company has agreed to stop blowing the tops off of mountains in order to extract coal. The mountains say: thanks, guys -- but you couldn’t have figured out this was a bad idea a long time ago, when we still had tops? Charleston Gazette
Tips: @OnEarthMag (tag it #greenreads)
Image: NASA
