Brazil is going to great lengths to protect its commons.

Seventeen executives, including American citizens, working with Chevron and oil rig contractor Transocean, have been charged with crimes against the environment in Brazil after an oil spill off the coast poured about three thousand barrels of oil into Brazilian waters last November. If found guilty – the corporate executives could face up to 31 years in prison.

Just after midnight, a series of errors on board the Exxon Valdez oil tanker led the ship aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound. About 30 million litres of crude oil leaked from the tanker's breached hull, causing massive destruction along hundreds of kilometres of once-pristine coast.

As the Obama administration prepares to issue final permits for exploratory oil drilling on the outer continental shelf off Alaska's Arctic coast this summer, the public is hearing some familiar promises from industry and government -- the risk of a catastrophic oil spill is small, best available technology will be used to prevent spills, any oil spill will be effectively contained and cleaned up, the government will keep a vigilant eye on industry and so on. We heard the same empty promises 40 years ago.

Seeking approval to build the Trans Alaska Pipeline back in the 1970s, government and industry promised the people of America that oil would be shipped safely from Alaska, and "not one drop" would be spilled. There were to be double-hulled tankers, a fail-safe tanker monitoring system, state-of-the-art spill response capability, and of course, the government would keep a vigilant eye on industry. But after getting approval to build the pipeline, the big money began to flow and all such promises were promptly forgotten.

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.

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.