TagCalifornia

Remind me again why there’s fracking in California

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By this point, we’re all pretty familiar with the touchstones of the debate over fracking for oil and natural gas. During the early days of this unconventional drilling practice, the best argument in favor of fracking did have something going for it: Natural gas is a much cleaner burning power source than the fuels that it typically replaces, especially coal. Crude oil isn’t very...

America can’t afford to ease up on nuclear safety

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There was a brief scare earlier this week from the part of the world that gave us the Chernobyl nuclear disaster nearly 30 years ago, In the Ukraine, a strife-torn nation where good information is often in short supply, officials announced there had been an accident at one of the country’s nuclear power plants. It was only later that more information emerged that, at least according to the...

Eureka! Fukushima radiation plume nears California

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The U.S. news media continues to largely ignore both the ongoing massive problems at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan and the lingering fallout — literally and metaphorically — from the 2011 tsunami and accident there. That’s unfortunately, because practically every week there’s one or more significant developments that show the accident exceeding...

The most damning evidence against fracking yet!

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It’s hard to imagine how the news about fracking could get any worse. On any given day, my news feed is filled with reports from all across America, and sometimes from outside our borders, about the unintended environmental consequences of this extreme method of extracting natural gas from the shale formations under the earth. Just today, there was yet another report of an earthquake in...

Inside Big Oil’s sleazy secret spin machine

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There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about how Big Oil uses public relations, or PR, to achieve its political goals and try to steamroll its environmental opponents. One such episode played out recently in an unusually public fashion, as Politico, the website that’s popular with Beltway insiders, ran what amounted to a free ad for BP (not so coincidentally, one of its own...

Two days after California rejects fracking moratorium, new earthquake strikes L.A.

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Earlier this year, I told you that Southern California could be where the proverbial rubber hits the road for Big Oil and its decade-long adventure with fracking. Although the geology underneath Southern California is rich with natural resources including fossil fuels, the region also has special issues that make it a terrible candidate for the fracking process. One is that the drilling process...

Will California be where the fracking boom went to die?

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They struck oil early Thursday in Southern California. OK, that’s not really accurate: What really happened is that oil struck the streets of the Los Angeles suburb of Glenside, thanks to a massive pipeline accident: The Los Angeles Fire Department says a ruptured oil pipe near the suburb of Glendale has spilled about 50,000 gallons of crude oil onto streets. According to the Fire...

The insanity of manmade earthquakes from fracking

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Here’s a statistic that should tell you everything you need to know about what’s gone wrong with the fracking boom in America: Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California! And that is not some freak of nature. It’s all but certain that humans are responsible: The Sooner State may be better known for tornadoes. But since October, Oklahoma has had more quakes than...

Regulators can’t keep up with the many dangers of fracking

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Over the last five years or so, the average citizen has learned a lot about the environmental risks of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for the shale oil and gas that’s trapped deep under the American soil. Thanks to Josh Fox and his “Gasland” documentaries — and the indelible image of a rural homeowner lighting his kitchen tap on fire — a lot of the focus has been...

Is fracking causing earthquakes in Southern California?

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When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and ’70, they always used to talk about “the Big One” — a massive earthquake that was going to hit California and destroy life there as we know it. Well, that never happened, but there have been some major California quakes in my lifetime, such as the one in 1989 that flattened an expressway and killed 63 people. Maybe that’s...

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