June 14, 2010

Oil Execs on the Hot Seat Tomorrow

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It will be another busy week of hearings related to the Gulf oil disaster, kicking off with a panel of the top executives from five of the country’s largest oil companies Tuesday morning.

The Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment will host the five execs at a hearing titled “Drilling Down on America’s Energy Future: Safety, Security, and Clean Energy.” Appearing at the hearing will be BP America President Lamar McKay, as well as Rex Tillerson, chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil; John Watson, chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation; James Mulva, chairman and CEO of ConocoPhillips; and Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil Company. That hearing starts at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow, and we’ll be live-Tweeting from it.

The hearings get even hotter on Thursday as the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations puts BP CEO Tony Hayward on the hot seat for the first time since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon on April 20. Up until now, other BP executives have been called on to testify; now Congress will get a crack at the top guy (and source of so many flubs in the past weeks).

The hearing on “The Role of BP in the Deepwater Horizon Explosion and Oil Spill” will take place Thursday at 10 a.m. Investigators have already sent a detailed list of questions they expect Hayward to answer about evidence that the company took a number of shortcuts that potentially caused the disaster.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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