TagArctic drilling

Obama’s blind spot on Arctic drilling

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President Obama has been having quite a summer. In fact, some political pundits are calling 2015 the most successful year of his presidency — his nuclear-weapons deal with Iran, congressional approval of his Asian trade deal, seeing his health-care plan ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court and pushing a sweeping overhaul of the criminal-justice system. In the seventh year of his presidency...

A new chapter in the insanity of Arctic drilling begins

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So far, 2015 has been a mostly gloomy year in the arena of fighting back against fossil fuel. Neither the plunging prices for oil and gas nor the growing realization — even embraced this week in the corridors of the Vatican — that greenhouse gases threaten the health and welfare of entire planet have made much of a dent in our mad rush to drill deep under the sea, in bitter...

‘President Obama isn’t connecting the dots when it comes to oil’

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Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, has an article on the Huffington Post this week that seems to ask the important environmental question of the moment: What, exactly, does President Obama and his administration think it’s doing when it comes to fossil fuels? (He also wonders, interestingly, if the president is cursed when it comes to oil and gas, since every time his...

Can citizens in kayaks stop Shell when President Obama won’t?

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Everyone knows that drilling offshore for oil in the unforgiving waters of the Arctic is a fool’s errand. Three summers ago, Shell’s initial foray into this extreme quest for crude oil was an unmitigated disaster, ending with the bizarre yet tragically predictable saga of its oil rig the Kulluk breaking loose and slamming into the rocky coastline of Alaska. Now, Shell has been making...

The wreck of the Kulluk, and how to make sure it never happens again

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I’m worried, frankly, about the long-term effect of the steep drop in the price of oil. Lower prices at the pump – some places are registering under $2 a gallon for the first time in years – could cause rising fuel consumption, especially if motorists in America and elsewhere are tempted to buy SUVs and other less-fuel-efficient vehicles. That, of course, will lead to more greenhouse-gas...

Why are we still discussing the folly of Arctic drilling?

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William Faulkner once wrote, famously: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner — who’d probably be appalled at the environmental havoc that Big Oil has wreaked upon his native state of Mississippi over the years — could easily have been describing the saga of British Petroleum. Here on the Gulf Coast, we are forever talking about BP’s...

BP hasn’t learned from mistakes, plans risky Arctic venture

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Will BP ever learn? I’m beginning to think the answer is ‘no.’ The company is back in federal court in New Orleans this week, for the next phase of determining how much oil actually spilled in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident, and BP’s level of negligence. The U.S. government is trying to show that the British oil giant should pay as much as $17.5 billion in pollution...

Yet another reason not to drill offshore in the Arctic

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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...

Government and Lubchenco dispersing lies about Corexit to the Arctic now

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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...

Shell on ice: Arctic drilling scheme in trouble

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Just a short update on the Shell Arctic drilling fiasco that I wrote about here last week. It’s beginning to look as if the federal authorities who greenlighted this risky scheme are having second thoughts: WASHINGTON — The Interior Department on Tuesday opened an urgent review of Arctic offshore drilling operations after a series of blunders and accidents involving Shell Oil’s drill ships...

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