Hundreds of thousands of juvenile land crabs are being threatened by an oil spill on Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean.

By early next year, there will be more deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico than there were in the days leading up to the largest oil spill in U.S. history, Jonathan Fahey of the Associated Press (AP) reported on Friday.

Safety slighted before blow out was the conclusion of a new independent report by the National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council citing multiple flawed decisions from a deficient overall systems approach to safety among the corporations that ran the drilled of the Macondo well. The report says the petroleum industry and federal regulators focused more on exploration and production than safety in the years leading up to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, setting the stage for the worst offshore environmental disaster in US history.

Not only is this a shaming report but it raises urgent questions about what has changed that will force and enforce safety first.

BP in a high-stakes court filing on Monday accused Halliburton of destroying damaging evidence about the quality of its cement slurry that went into drilling the oil well that blew out last year and caused the worst U.S. offshore oil spill.

“Greedy Lying Bastards” is a new feature length documentary, scheduled to be released in 2012, investigating the role the oil industry plays the world over  in all facets of people’s lives  from politics and economics to the environment. Filmmaker Craig Rosebraugh traveled the globe including Tuvalu, Peru, England, Uganda,Kenya, Belgium, Denmark , Germany and the U.S., to expose the industry’s  practices of exerting their considerable influence and power to the benefit of themselves with no regard for the human or environmental impacts.

The film includes interviews with scientists, industry experts, international political delegates, climate change victims as well as deniers, and people affected by the practices of the fossil fuel industry. Among them: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon; Rep. Henry Waxman; former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman; leading climate science skeptics Myron Ebell, Christopher Lord Monckton, and Jay Lehr; Ken Wiwa, the son of the slain Nigerian environmentalist; farmers in Peru and Uganda; and Mike Robichaux, one of the few doctors willing to treat Gulf residents sick with chemical poisoning from the BP spill, Republican Presidential candidates, Texas governor Rick Perry and Minnesota representative Michele Bachman, as well as other prominent politicians like Senator James Inhofe, from oil-rich Oklahoma.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill will forever be a part of history, and has recently been a major driver for a change of protocol and regulation. One aspect of this disaster that is a direct consequence is how marine life has been impacted since April 20^th, 2010.

 Marine mammals have been greatly affected by the spill and populations may never fully recover. The three main species of marine mammals affected are already vulnerable populations. They are bottlenose dolphins, sperm whales, and Byrd’s whales. The physical damage of these species is critical, as the spill has caused oiling and inhalation of toxic fumes, but there is an equally critical and perhaps less known impact. The spill happened during the reproductive cycle for bottlenose dolphins, which will likely have a significant impact on the population. Many were found dead and many more were stranded and stillborn or neonates. However, this has not been officially linked to the spill even though many were covered in oil. Even a small number of calf deaths has a significant effect on the dolphin population. This holds true because the dolphins have made homes in many isolated areas of the Gulf. The effects on sperm and Byrd’s whales are not as known at this point, but with both species being endangered, the oil and toxics left behind cannot be good for the population.