Category Archives: Research
One more reason to hate fracking: It wastes water
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 »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 »Two years after the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear accident that devastated Japan, we continue to keep a close eye on the secondary impacts of radiation, not just in Asia but also here in the United States. We’ve been keeping tabs on U.S. sailors who were exposed to radiation during relief missions and reporting that radioactive fish are still turning up across the Pacific, long after the Fukushima meltdown. But [...]
Read More »It’s looking more and more like the federal government’s massive civil suit against BP over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is actually going to trial — although you never know what’s going to happen until the judge bangs the final gavel. I do know this: If BP — and the people of the Gulf Coast — actually all do get our day (or weeks) in court, you’re sure to hear [...]
Read More »Just a quick follow-up on a post I wrote earlier this month about offshore drilling in the Arctic, which so far has been one disaster after another ever since Shell launched its project off Alaska this past summer. Recently, the feds who’ve signed off on this unholy venture have told the public that in a worse-case scenario, authorities or contractors could deploy dispersants like Corexit, the chemical used widely in [...]
Read More »There’s a couple of things we’ve learned about the U.S. government — and some of the people who’ve worked there — over the last three years. We saw in the Gulf of Mexico that when it comes to dispersing a major oil spill, the feds have no idea what they’re doing. But sadly, when it comes to dispersing bad info, the government is second to none. Now the feds are spilling [...]
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