Energy

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Since the explosion on Tuesday, mine safety expert Davitt McAteer has been looking into what went wrong at the Soma mine and how the disaster could have been prevented. McAteer is the former head of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration and he joins me now here in our studios. Welcome to the program.

DAVITT MCATEER: Thank you.

Crude oil geysered high into the air in northeast Los Angeles early Thursday morning, creating a spill that fire officials say was knee-deep in some spots. The spill happened in an industrial section of Atwater Village, causing the evacuation of a nearby strip club.

Update at 8:10 a.m. ET: Oil Estimate Downgraded

After initially saying that "over 50,000" gallons of oil had spilled from a ruptured pipeline, Los Angeles Fire Department officials now say the correct figure is about 10,000 gallons.

Our original post continues:

More than 280 miners have died in Turkey with another 150 still missing. It's hard to imagine how so many can perish in a mine accident in modern times.

If Russia was aiming to target one of Ukraine's vulnerabilities, natural gas would be the bull's-eye. Ukraine gets about 60 percent of its gas from Russia.

Clifford Gaddy, a Russia specialist at the Brookings Institution, says as the dispute between the two countries grows, Moscow is more willing to use natural gas as a weapon.

As expected, an energy efficiency bill failed in the Senate on Monday, which makes a separate Senate vote on the Keystone XL oil pipeline unlikely before the November election.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had made a Keystone vote contingent upon passage of the energy efficiency bill, and letting one doom the other may have temporarily gotten him out of a bind.

Stanford University's decision to stop direct investments in coal mining companies is encouraging student-led divestment movements at other universities. Chloe Maxmin of Divest Harvard discusses her hopes following Stanford's announcement. Harvard University has the largest university endowment in the U.S.