Category Archives: Oil Spill Facts
Arkansas spill is like Deepwater Horizon on land
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A large global oil company ignores basic safety protocols, and a major accident ensues. From practically the first news report, this icon of Big Oil works to downplay the extent of the spill and to minimize the risk to citizens — often despite clear visual evidence to the contrary. And government regulators bend over backwards to represent the interests of the oil giant over the [...]
Read More »Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a revered name in environmental circles, and for good reason. As the son of an iconic, martyred U.S. senator and presidential candidate, and the nephew of the late 35th president, RFK Jr. could have surely coasted through life on the Kennedy family name. But instead, he has lived as a tireless crusader for a better planet, including a cleaner Gulf of Mexico. So when Robert [...]
Read More »This past weekend’s Memorial Day ceremonies were a special time for remembering the many men and women who were called to serve and who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. The troops who have fought for our country are truly special — and yet at the same time they embody something more fundamental about the American character. There is a deep instinct among so many citizens — not just [...]
Read More »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 »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 »I have to confess: I’m a little surprised — and gratified — at the extent to which mainstream media outlets have suddenly become focused on the lingering and sometimes catastrophic effects of both BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill and the botched cover-up-disguised-as-cleanup using the toxic chemical Corexit. BP has spent tens of millions of dollars of its gargantuan profits on a PR campaign to spin the American people that everything [...]
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 [...]
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