Sen. Hillary Clinton announced today that, along with a New York Congressman, she will chair a probe looking into the federal government’s response and environmental clean-up efforts in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“We need to examine what went wrong and assess whether the federal government is better prepared to respond to environmental hazards in future disasters,” Clinton said in a news release.

All the world’s great civilisations have depended on our planet’s bountiful resources.

But for a century or more, a new natural resource has driven the greatest civilisation the planet has ever seen.

For our fractious, First World global village, that resource has been oil.

Petroleum, the fossilised, compressed and geothermally baked remains of sea creatures and organisms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, drives just about everything we do - from our cars, trucks, aeroplanes and buses to power stations and central heating.

President Bush issued a formal national security directive yesterday ordering agencies to prepare contingency plans for a surprise, “decapitating” attack on the federal government, and assigned responsibility for coordinating such plans to the White House.

The prospect of a nuclear bomb being detonated in Washington without warning, whether smuggled in by terrorists or a foreign government, has been cited by many security analysts as a rising concern since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The next morning, three major oil pipelines were bombed, shutting down another 150,000 barrels per day of oil production. Total production shutdown by the insurgency is now on the order of 900,000 barrels per day. The insurgents have demonstrated that they have the capability of shutting down most, if not all, of Nigeria’s oil production.

Should this happen, we might find our imports running a million barrels a day short this summer, unless we can outbid the Chinese. Replacing this much lost Nigerian oil production will be very expensive at the gas pump.

A scientist for the Environmental Protection Agency is charging that the agency lied when it claimed the air at ground zero was safe to breathe in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

Dr. Cate Jenkins says she’s studied the research and, “At least in some measure, I believe (the EPA and its scientists who tested the air at ground zero) are” responsible for the health problems suffered by ground zero workers.