Tagcoal

Why does W. Va. want MORE toxic water pollution?

W

It wasn’t that long ago when the issue of water pollution in West Virginia was front-page national news. You may remember the incident that happened just over three years ago, in January 2014, involving a company called Freedom Industries. To paraphrase the old Janice Joplin song, “freedom” was just another word, in this case, for corporate neglect. A holding tank filled with...

Trump’s veep pick Pence would be a disaster for the environment

T

When it comes to the environment, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is something of a wild card. Before entering politics, Trump’s views on critical issues such as climate change — to the extent they were known — tended to be within the range of conventional opinion. But as the Manhattan billionaire got deeper into his bid for the GOP nomination, he...

A President Trump would undo years of environmental progress

A

It took a long time, but President Obama finally has many — not all, but many — aspects of U.S. environmental and energy policy moving in the right direction. Even with a U.S. Congress that is led by deniers of climate change, the Obama administration has been able to promulgate new rules to restrict greenhouse-gas pollution from U.S. coal-fired power plants, and recently signed onto...

Supreme Court blow to climate change shows why election so important

S

Democracy was in the air last night. All of the TV news coverage was focused on the state of New Hampshire, where voters in both parties were taking part in an America tradition, the first-in-the-nation presidential primary. CNN was showing long lines outside polling places in the Granite State, and even traffic jams in some locations — a sure sign that U.S. citizens have an extremely keen...

The Supreme Court’s mercury poisoning

T

There’s been a lot of excitement about the U.S. Supreme Court as it wrapped up its 2014-15 session, and understandably so. On Friday, many people took to the streets in celebration when the High Court ruled that same-sex marriage is now legal in all 50 states. In fact, that ruling was held up as a sign that the nine justices were, as a whole, becoming more liberal — building upon two...

The war on water

T

“Industry does everything they can and gets away with it almost all the time, whether it’s the coal industry, not the subject of this hearing, or water or whatever. They will cut corners, and they will get away with it.” — West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller. Water is our most precious natural resource — I don’t know anybody who would dispute that. But it’s appalling the...

Fossil fuel production poisons water again — this time in West Virginia

F

I write about energy a lot, but not every often about coal. That’s not surprising — in recent years coal has been fading as an energy source here in the United States. That’s in large part because of the rapid growth of extraction of natural gas — a cleaner burning source of energy — and oil through the process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Yet coal still...

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

Follow Us

© Stuart H Smith, LLC