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."
(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.)