CategoryLegacy Lawsuits

All in the family: Does Jindal have a conflict of interest on BP legislation?

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It’s not surprising that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has served as a handmaiden for the oil-and-gas industry during his six-and-a-half years in Baton Rouge. For one thing, it’s in keeping with the pro-business-at-any-cost, environment-be-damned-philosophy of today’s Republican Party. What’s more, Jindal has been on the receiving end of more than $1 million in campaign...

Bobby Jindal’s folly

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This weekend, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal had a clear choice. He could follow the advice of the state’s attorney general — his fellow Republican Buddy Caldwell — and many other legal scholars. That would mean vetoing a poorly drafted, ill-thought-out measure that came about from Big Oil’s desperation to block legal action that would force it to pay millions to restore the...

Something’s happening in South Louisiana, and the “Dirty Dozen” doesn’t get it

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Every day, there’s more evidence that the healthy winds of change are blowing through Louisiana. That’s especially true in the southern part of the state which has been battered by events that have been both epic in scale — the BP oil spill and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina — and more prosaic, like the Bayou Corne sinkhole and the day-in, day-out toxins pumped into the...

Louisiana awaits 2015 to undo the damage caused by Big Oil

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Sometimes it’s a struggle to find the kernel of good news amid the morass that is our corrupted political system, especially in my home state of Louisiana. Earlier this year, I told you about the big reactionary push in Baton Rouge, by the oil giants against the state’s up-and-coming environmental movement. The Republican pro-business majority, with control of the legislature and with...

Saving the wetlands: The empire strikes back

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In the last week, there’s been a lot of discussion about the 4th anniversary of the BP oil spill — and how Louisiana’s critical wetlands had been pummeled and degraded by an onslaught of crude. These marshes aren’t only places of great natural beauty and biological diversity, but they’re also a critical buffer — the buffer, actually — between a major...

Why Big Oil’s assault on Baton Rouge must be stopped

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 The other day I told you that Big Oil — alarmed in Louisiana about the citizenry finally fighting back after decades of environmental abuse, and uncertain about their political prospects past 2015 — is launching an epic legislative assault in Baton Rouge. Their army of lobbyists is seeking no less than a rollback of anti-pollution standards in the state, back to a time before the...

Stop the polluters from taking back Louisiana

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The next two years will be more critical for Louisiana and its beautiful yet fragile environment than any time in the state’s history. On one hand, the surge in oil and gas production across the United States is placing new pressures on my home state in the terms of more rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, more pipelines crisscrossing the state, more barges coming down our waterways and more tanker...

Respected general declares war — on the abuses of Big Oil

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There’s been more environmental news than usual in recent weeks, and so it’s been a while since I’ve given readers an update on the giant sinkhole in Bayou Corne, the slow-motion ecological crisis that’s been assaulting the Louisiana bayou for more than 14 months now. That doesn’t mean that the situation is better. To the contrary, some experts say the sinkhole may...

Magazine exposes how Big Oil lobbyists run Louisiana

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The new November issue of Harper’s magazine — available on newsstands now — features a must-read article on the issues that launched this blog in the first place: Big Oil’s domination of Louisiana politics and its fight to protect polluters over landowners whose property has been dumped on. The piece entitled “Dirty South: The foul legacy of Louisiana oil,” by...

Wall Street Journal relies on debunked data to make the case for Big Oil on legacy lawsuits

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“Louisiana has had its fair share of oil troubles…” Those are the opening words of an editorial that ran in the Wall Street Journal recently, and its hard to disagree with that. While oil exploration and drilling has been a source of jobs and revenue for my home state, it’s also been the source of a lot of unnecessary environmental woe. The Deepwater Horizon spill and the...

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