The Obama administration had already telegraphed that it was likely to impose what amounts to a ban on oil-and-natural-gas drilling off the Atlantic coastline and also in the Arctic waters near Alaska. At a moment when the world is looking to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels, neither the plan to expand drilling in the seafood-laden waters off the tourist beaches of the American South nor the...
The day climate change came to haunt tar sands country
The scenes that have been coming from Alberta, Canada, over the past week are truly tragic, and horrifying. Massive wildfires, whipped by high winds, have turned the area around Fort McMurray — heavily populated with energy workers in recent years — into a hellscape of towering flames and smoke. Some 245,000 acres of land have been burned, and firefighters aren’t anywhere close...
Hillary Clinton’s new stance on the Keystone XL is a win for the planet
It didn’t get all the attention that it deserved — maybe because for some odd reason this happened at almost the precise instant that Pope Francis touched down for his tour of the United States. But Hillary Clinton — who despite a number of challenges remains the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination and the most likely to become president — took another...
A cruel summer for oil spills
There hasn’t been as much talk lately about the Keystone XL project, the massive proposed pipeline that would take some of the dirtiest fuel known to mankind — extracted from the tar sands of western Canada — and ship it across the American heartland to the Gulf Coast, where most it will be shipped to overseas markets. My hunch is that the Obama administration — which...
Voters are waking up to the insanity of oil addiction
The Canadian province of Alberta is a pretty conservative place, or at least it used to be. Political analysts who follow developments there say it’s been comparable in the recent past to America’s so-called “red states” — somewhat similar to Idaho, with which it shares a border. But now — in the wake of an election that was held on Tuesday — the...
Obama’s Keystone veto: First step in a long journey
It doesn’t happen every day, but environmentalists got a rare dollop of good news this week. For months, supporters had been urging the president to veto any bill from the Republican-led Congress that would seek to mandate the Keystone XL pipeline, the project that would carry millions of barrels of dirty Canadian tar sands oil across the American heartland to facilities on the Gulf Coast...
Keystone XL setback isn’t end of the fight
I’m not going to write a long post on this because it was just two days ago that pointed out some of the reasons why the massive Keystone XL pipeline — which would take heavy tar sands oil from Canada and ship it across environmentally sensitive American prairie on its way to the Gulf Coast and then to foreign markets — is such a bad idea. The exploitation of the tar sands oil...
TransCanada pipeline accident is one more reason why Keystone XL must be stopped
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the pipeline accidents, crude-oil-by-rail disasters and chemical spills that are taking place in North America — amid a surge in domestic energy production — without a scorecard. Here’s news of one natural-gas disaster that happened this week in Canada that should be getting a lot more attention in the United States: A natural gas...
Tar sands creating a new “Cancer Alley” in Canada
I probably don’t need to tell you what concentrating a band of oil refineries, chemical plants, and environmentally challenging industrial facilities can do to a community. Here in Louisiana, we’ve been living with such a place, lining the Mississippi River and the surrounding countryside between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It used to be called the “petrochemical...