Category Archives: Legal
Every so often, I worry that I’ve lost my capacity to feel anger and outrage over the oily monster that is British Petroleum — but if there’s one thing that BP is very good at, it’s fueling…rage. Here on the Gulf Coast, we’ve been fighting for three years to make sure that BP — a massive multinational corporation that makes billions of dollars in profit on the backs of the [...]
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 »It’s hard to keep secret. But it’s really hard to keep a secret when hundreds, if not thousands, of American citizens have been sickened from exposure to a highly toxic chemical — even when it’s one of the world’s richest oil companies and people inside the U.S. government that are trying to pull off the cover-up. That’s the sad situation that is unfolding here in the Gulf of Mexico, as [...]
Read More »Today is the three-year-anniversary of the event that changed life for so many of us here on the Gulf of Mexico: The explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig off Louisiana, which killed 11 people and triggered the worst oil spill in U.S. history. I was in a private plane flying over the Gulf just hours after the blast and saw the thick plume of black smoke, and I still remember [...]
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 »This would not be the week that you’d want to begin work in the ExxonMobil PR department. Indeed, this seems to be the time when the oil giant — in fact, the world’s most profitable company, let us never forget — and its proverbial chickens are finally coming home to roost. Just in time for Earth Day, ExxonMobil’s environment-be-damned efforts to feed America’s addiction to oil are spoiling the earth, [...]
Read More »At the start of the BP civil trial now underway in New Orleans, I expressed my pleasure that more of the facts of what happened on the Deepwater Horizon rig on, and leading up to, the night of April 10, 2010, would finally be aired for the public to see, in an open court of law. Sure enough, the first couple weeks of the case — with billions of dollars [...]
Read More »Sometimes it feels like conversations about the Gulf of Mexico — nearly three years after BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe unleashed roughly 5 million barrels of fresh crude — take place in parallel universes. Inside a courtroom here in New Orleans, BP and its high-priced lawyers continue to push for lower estimate of how much oil was spilled, while their unending barrage of uptempo TV ads seeks to convince Americans that [...]
Read More »The ongoing BP civil trial here in New Orleans continues to expose two things: The human tragedy and sorrow of what happened aboard the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig on that night nearly four years ago, and the many blunders and greed-laced miscalculations that made it happen. Yesterday, we heard some heartbreaking testimony from one of the rig workers who survived the explosion, Transocean tool pusher Randy Ezell: Ezell was searching [...]
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