Category Archives: Illnesses
As I’ve noted several times recently, the tide has changed when it comes to public perceptions of the Gulf of Mexico, more than three years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For a while, the mega-millions that BP had spent on slick marketing, and bland pronouncements from public officials, had lulled not only the public but even journalists to sleep. But now, good science and some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting has changed [...]
Read More »Like most people, I try to stay optimistic in life, but I have to say that the latest flurry of news out of the Gulf region — which coincided with the three-year anniversary of BP’s massive oil spill — has been discouraging. Every day for the last week or two, it seems, my contacts in the environmental community send me a new news report, or a scientific study, bearing bad [...]
Read More »Is a little-seen academic paper the smoking gun that blows the lid off the growing Corexit scandal in the Gulf of Mexico? You’ll recall that Corexit is the brand name of the oil dispersant manufactured by Illinois-based Nalco and deployed heavily by BP in the first couple of months of 2010′s Deepwater Horizon spill. In fact, with the acquiesence of the federal government, the oil giant used an unheard-of amount [...]
Read More »When it comes to fracking — the popular term for the natural-gas drilling technique also known as hydraulic fracturing — the approach has been to shoot first and ask questions later , even if thousands of innocent civilians are caught in the line of fire. Nobody in America outside of a small circle of oil- and gas-men and some engineers had even heard of fracking in the mid-2000s when Dick [...]
Read More »One of the more important topics I cover here at this site is noise pollution, particularly in my hometown of New Orleans. Over the last few years, I’ve worked together with a website www.HearTheNOLAMusic.org, where you can find a lot of critical information about the harmful health impacts from unregulated noise. That is why communities pass noise and other quality of life ordinances: It is, quite literally, a matter of [...]
Read More »If you’re a regular reader of the blog, it will come as no surprise to you that the ecological health of the Gulf of Mexico in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill is considerally worse than depicted in much of the mainstream media — let alone by the tens of millions on dollars of bogus PR spin that BP has purchased on your television screen. Over the last 36 [...]
Read More »It just keeps on getting worse for ExxonMobil and its major oil pipeline spill in Mayflower, Ark. This week, officials were bracing for a major storm that threatened to send more of the spilled oil from the Canadian tar sands into nearby Lake Conway — a major, environmentally sensitive waterway: Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel says he’s concerned about the effect heavy rainfall could have on dispersing oil that spilled [...]
Read More »We’re seeing this more and more often: The world’s best-known medical-device makers are creating shoddy and dangerous products, failing to warn doctors and their patients about the risks, and then compounding their error by trying to cover their tracks rather than inform the public. As a result, good people get injured — and they don’t always know where to turn. Johnson & Johnson is the largest manufacturer of medical devices and [...]
Read More »Too many corporations think they have too much to gain by not telling the truth. That’s been a common theme from Day One of this blog — whether the culprit has been oil giants like BP, lying about the extent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or the natural gas companies who don’t want you to know what they’re doing with fracking wastes, or dishonesty by some of the planet’s [...]
Read More »The environmental issues that I most typically blog about here are really part of a larger problem in our society. It’s something we see time and time again — government failing to protect the little guy, and instead kowtowing to powerful and wealthy interests. Certainly you see that in a matter like the BP oil spill, where the government was too lax in regulating off-shore drilling before the Deepwater Horizon [...]
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