Category Archives: Regulation
It was a terrible week on Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” This narrow strip of the bayou country between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is home to more chemical plants and refineries than just about any area in the world, let alone the United States. Over the decades, these plants have been a source of both jobs and income for a state in desperate need of both. But as the nickname implies, [...]
Read More »You don’t need to be a rocket scientist — or a top geologist, or that matter — to understand that fracking for natural gas is not only a highly risky but a poorly thought-out process. In the half-dozen years since the boom in drilling for shale gas spread from the oil belt of Texas to new regions like the Marcellus Shale underneath Pennsylvania, we’ve watched poorly designed fracking rigs pollute [...]
Read More »Did you hear about the latest iPhone app? It alerts you when you find yourself under aural assault, when the decibel level where you’re at reaches the point where it could actually damage your hearing, or worse. If you’ve been paying attention to the posts here about noise pollution over the last couple of years, you probably won’t be surprised at all where the inventors headed to test their creation: [...]
Read More »Last weekend Bonny Schumaker from On Wings of Care — a tireless advocate who’s been our not-so-secret weapon in the war for salvation of the ecology of the Gulf Coast — went up in the skies over Bayou Corne, the small Louisiana town that’s been ravaged by a sinkhole caused by a collapsing sinkhole, an epic tale of neglect. The latest news from there is not good. The sinkhole, which was already [...]
Read More »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 »Nobody likes being a guinea pig. But apparently that’s what happened in Pennsylvania and some of the other places where the boom in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, first hit in the late 2000s. Thousands of acres were leased — often by farmers and other property owners in economically depressed areas — and then rigs began to dot the rolling hillsides, But all of this happened before the key regulators — [...]
Read More »It’s hard to believe, but with summer upon us we’re also getting closer to the one-year anniversary of the sinkhole fiasco in Bayou Corne. That means that roughly 350 residents of this bayou community 70 miles west of New Orleans have spent months now out of their homes in a forced evacuation, fleeing the smell of methane, an ever-widening hole in the earth that could now accommodate the Louisiana Superdome, [...]
Read More »We’re now roughly five years into the surge on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas that has been trapped under shale formations, deep below the earth. The sharp rise in this fairly new type of drilling has overwhelmed states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, formerly coal states where intensive drilling for fossil fuels hadn’t taken place for generations. One important consequence is that state regulators have been totally unprepared [...]
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 »Some folks are born New Orleanians (like me) but many others fall in love with the Crescent City and adopt it as their own, including some Hollywood celebrities. Harry Shearer — star of “This is Spinal Tap” and TV’s “The Simpsons,” and formerly of “Saturday Night Live” — is one of these. He’s done a lot more than just buy a home here — he’s become quite an an active [...]
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