Judge Carl Barber of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana on Jan. 27 issued an order that British Petroleum (BP) will be held liable for a portion of the damages owed by Transocean stemming from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. BP will be required to indemnify Transocean against any damages directly created by the pollution itself that are awarded through the litigation pending against it. BP will not be required to pay any punitive damages or civil fines as a result of these suits. The court did not rule on whether BP or Transocean would be held strictly liable, negligent or grossly negligent for the equipment failure and subsequent oil spill that created the pollution. Transocean is the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that was contracted by BP, which subsequently caused the oil spill. This ruling is separate from a ruling issued by Barber in August, which permits punitive damages against BP, but that ruling pertained to claims brought against BP directly.

President Obama in his State of the Union address Jan. 24 said: "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy." On Jan. 27, he effused before a crowd in Las Vegas: "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly a hundred years, Developing it could power our cars, our homes and our factories in a cleaner and cheaper way. And experts believe it could support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade... We, it turns out, are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. We've got a lot of it.... We only have about 2% of the world's oil reserves. So we've got to have an all-out, all-in, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every source of American energy." While Obama did not explicitly invoke hydraulic fracturing, this amounts to an endorsement of the controversial practice. The Bureau of Land Management estimates 90% of natural gas drilling on public lands involves "fracking," in which a mixture of chemicals, sand and water is injected into shale formations to open fissures and allow gas to come to the surface. (Bloomberg, LAT, Gannett, Jan. 26)

President Barack Obama denied a permit for the controversial Keystone XL oil sands pipeline Jan. 18, saying the deadline imposed by Congress did not leave sufficient time to conduct the necessary review. "The rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline's impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment," Obama said in a statement. Late last year, Republicans attached to an unrelated short-term payroll tax cut extension a provision that compelled the White House to make a decision on the pipeline within 60 days.

On Jan. 10, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) announced that it has moved the hands of its famous "Doomsday Clock" to five minutes to midnight. The last time the Doomsday Clock moved was in January 2010, when it was pushed back one minute from five to six minutes before midnight. In a statement, BAS noted: "Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007." (See Doomsday Clock Timeline.)

President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey released an unclassified version of the defense strategic guidance Jan. 5 at a Pentagon press conference. The document, entitled "Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense" (PDF), calls for $487 billion in proposed defense budget cuts over the next 10 years, amounting to some 8% of the Pentagon's base budget. The defense budget planned for next year is $662 billion, $43 billion less than this year. If automatic "sequestration" cuts mandated by last year's budget deal take effect, the Pentagon could lose some $500 billion more. "The US joint force will be smaller and it will be leaner," Panetta said. "The Army and Marine Corps will no longer need to be sized to support the kind of large-scale, long-term stability operations that dominated military priorities...over the past decade." The army is slated to cut back to 520,000 active duty troops from 565,000 after 2014. The Marine Corps, which has swelled to 202,000, plans to drop to 186,000. This will place US troop strength essentially at the pre-9-11 level. US troop strength grew by some 100,000 after the attacks, and now stands at 1.4 million.

In the fifth YouTube edition of the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade, World War 4 Report editor Bill Weinberg interviews Andrew Kliman of the Marxist-Humanist Initiative, author (most recently) of The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession, who argues for Marx's law of the Long-Term Falling Rate of Profit, and analyzes both the potentials and limitations of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

After an all-night overtime session, negotiators at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) climate summit in Durban on the morning of Dec. 11 issued a formal agreement to work towards a new legally-binding treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions and applying to all 194 member governments of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The "Durban Platform for Enhanced Action" pledges a new "agreed outcome with legal force" to be negotiated by 2015 and to take effect by 2020. In principle, the treaty is to ensure that Framework Convention member states take measures to meet the goal agreed to at last year's climate conference of keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

The usually cautious International Energy Agency (IEA) warned last week that without far-reaching action in the next five years, the world will lock itself into high-emissions energy sources that will push climate change beyond the 2 degrees Celsius considered relatively "safe" by many scientists and officials. "As each year passes without clear signals to drive investment in clean energy, the 'lock-in' of high-carbon infrastructure is making it harder and more expensive to meet our energy security and climate goals," said IEA chief economist Fatih Birol. The IEA predicts that coal consumption could jump 65% by 2035, and that oil prices are likely to hit $150 a barrel. Subsidies of renewable energy are predicted to jump by four times, hitting $250 billion annually—but this is still well below current fossil fuel subsidies of $409 billion.

The Climate Change Vulnerability Index, published by UK-based risk analysis and mapping company Maplecroft, was released last week, examining the climate risks and adaptive capacity of 193 nations. A total of 30 countries were classified as being at "extreme risk," with Haiti, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Madagascar making up the top five most in peril, while India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Thailand all ranked in the top 30. (ENS, Oct. 28; CNN, Oct. 26; Maplecroft, Oct. 21)

Under the slogan "From Tahrir Square to Times Square," the Occupy Wall Street movement reports demonstrations in over 1,500 cities across the globe Oct. 15, including over 100 US cities from coast to coast. In New York, 74 were arrested as police attempted to block thousands of marchers behind barricades in the Times Square area, where the protesters had marched from the Financial District. In the evening, hundreds of protesters converged on Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, staying until police arrested 14 for violating the park's curfew after midnight. Another 24 were arrested after they entered a nearby Citibank, with the aim of closing their accounts en masse. Management said they called police after the protesters did not respond to a request to leave. (Fox News, Oct. 14; Daily News, New York Post, WSJ, Oct. 15)