CategoryCauses

The Trump environmental disaster begins

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For the last few months, I’ve written at least a half dozen posts about the massive environmental catastrophe that awaits America and the world if Donald Trump were to be elected president. Clearly, not enough voters were focused on these issues when they pulled the lever on Tuesday. Now, barring the unexpected, Trump will be the president of the United States from January 2017 to January...

Meet the small La. town with America’s highest cancer risk

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I’ve written on this site about problems in what the locals in Louisiana call “Cancer Alley” — the massive petrochemical facilities that mostly line the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. For decades, this industrialized corridor has reflected the push and the pull between Louisiana’s desperate need for well-paying blue-collar jobs and...

The drip, drip, drip of Big Oil on La.’s fragile environment

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More than six years ago, this blog was created largely in response to one gigantic and catastrophic event: The massive BP oil spill in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That tragedy has had dozens of story lines — from the toxic dispersant that made so many clean-up workers ill, to the deaths of sea creatures from dolphins to endangered turtles, to the destruction of...

How natural gas poisoned a poor Alabama town

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It’s been going on for decades — poor towns in the Deep South, often with a predominantly black population — getting dumped on, whether it’s by Big Oil or by chemical plants or by toxic-waste disposal firms. Many of my earliest cases as an environmental lawyer were in these off-the-beaten track places such as Brookhaven, Mississippi or Martha, Kentucky, where oil companies...

Climate breakthrough is another reminder of the stakes in November

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With all of the crazy things that have happened — or are happening right now — in the 2016 presidential race, it’s easy to lose track of the issues that really matter. The non-stop flow of groping and assault allegations swirling around Republican Donald Trump, or the hacked emails of aides to Democrat Hillary Clinton, are sensational stories that tend to drown out any serious...

The truth about Hurricane Matthew and climate change

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As I write this, Hurricane Matthew — a monster Category 4 storm — is just hours away from striking the central Florida coast. Millions of people have evacuated over the last day or so, and those who’ve stayed behind face an enormous risk from winds as high as 140 mph, from storm surges as great as nine feet or more, and other hazards such as falling trees. The entire nation...

A new twist in the fight against ExxonMobil’s climate lies

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The push is on to hold the world’s largest energy company accountable for decades of unchecked pollution and for its lies about greenhouse-gas pollution that have served as its unsteady foundation. The company in question is ExxonMobil, the fossil-fuel conglomerate known for setting world records for quarterly profits, raking in billions of dollars every month. With its secretive ways...

The damage from Deepwater Horizon that can’t be restored

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The 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is back in the news again, thanks to this weekend’s release of the blockbuster Hollywood movie about the rig explosion. Once again, Americans are talking again about a story that had seemed to fade from the picture — even though it would be a huge mistake to anyone to forget the worst ecological disaster in American history. It will certainly be...

Giant gasoline leak in South more proof of pipeline vulnerability

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Transporting fossil fuels across North America has become the hot-button environmental issue of the 2010s, and understandably so. Big Oil’s technologies for sucking oil from locations that were once unreachable — like the Bakken oil field in North Dakota or the Canadian tar sands — may be environmentally flawed, but they still remain light years ahead of our mid-20th Century...

New York Times on climate change: It’s here

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Labor Day weekend hasn’t been a holiday from fear along the East Coast — especially at the Jersey Shore, which is normally booming with tourists from the traditional end of summer vacation. As I write this, Tropical Storm Hermine is strengthening into a hurricane — just as it was when it battered central Florida on its meandering journey northward — and threatening to lash...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
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