CategoryRestoration

More evidence that BP got off too easily

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Last week I wrote here that BP’s $54 billion payout for damages and restoration from the 2010 Gulf oil spill just wasn’t really enough — both because of the ongoing environmental damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil that continues to wash up on our beaches and because dollars trumped real accountability. You won’t hear that critique too much from public officials, who are...

BP can never pay enough for what it’s done

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If anything has the ability to cut through the clutter in our 24/7 frenetic news cycle, it’s Wall Street. Say what you will about the capital markets, but the way that investors react to important news is a pretty good reality check. This week, there was a major development in the quest for just compensation for the 2010 BP oil spill, the ongoing crisis that sparked the creation of this...

ExxonMobil up to its old dirty tricks in New Jersey

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ExxonMobil is arguably the world’s most powerful corporation, with annual revenues greater than many developing nations and a penchant for CIA-grade secrecy. It’s headquartered in a fortress-style building just outside of Dallas that some employees jokingly call “the Death Star.” But if you remember “Star Wars,” you know that even “the Death Star”...

While you were out, Big Oil polluters win…again

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There’s something that people who work in the news business call “the Friday night news dump.” It’s a situation that occurs when a source of news – say, a government agency, or a big business – has information that they’re not excited to make public, but was bound to come out eventually. So they release it late on a Friday afternoon. Why? Because more people out for dinner or to Happy Hour on...

BP’s new outrage: We can’t pay because oil is too cheap

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Every time that I hear or read about what the folks at BP are up to lately, I have the same thought: Can you believe these guys? Forget — if you can, for one minute — that these are the people whose gross negligence and corner-cutting caused 5 million barrels of crude oil to spew in to the Gulf of Mexico. in an accident that also claimed 11 lives. But since then, it’s been...

BP’s Politico puff piece wasn’t just shady journalism ethics — it was mostly a lie

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BP, with a huge assist from the popular Beltway-insider website Politico, stirred up the muddy waters of the Deepwater Horizon spill aftermath this week when it published a corporate-love-letter-disguised-as-news entitled, “No, BP Didn’t Ruin the Gulf.” Anyone expecting humility from a firm whose court-certified wanton negligence killed 11 people and seriously polluted...

How Big Oil staged a coup in Baton Rouge

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This weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy — and rather remarkable — look at what happened when a New Orleans levee board decided to take seriously its mission of restoring the Louisiana environment to its original health. If you’ve been reading this blog, the story of New Orleans historian John Barry, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East (also...

A terrible quick fix for the Louisiana sinkhole

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Remember the people who brought you the Louisiana sinkhole, the Texas Brine Co? These are the folks whose drilling activities in a salt cavern underneath a small isolated community about 70 miles west of New Orleans caused problems that were overlooked by state regulators in Baton Rouge and ultimately led to a collapse and a massive water hole near the center of the town. That hole grew to the...

Did BP help poison a poor Florida neighborhood?

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If you follow environmental issues, you know and understand this basic fact of American life: Poor communities — especially those populated by people of color — are much, much more likely to get dumped on than places where affluent folks live. If you show me a lead smelter, a trash incinerator or a hazardous-waste dump, there’s an excellent chance that the people living on the...

It’s time for arrogant BP to pay up…now, not later

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I’ve been an environmental attorney for a while now, and at this stage of my career it takes a lot to shock me. But in the last four years, the arrogance of BP and its actions after devastating the Gulf of Mexico with its 5-million gallon oil spill fiasco has continually stunned me, time and time again. Sometimes, the British oil giant is so out there with its arrogance on full display that...

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