TagCrude Justice

Kicking the fossil fuels habit

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My recent book — Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know About the New Environmental Attack on America — is mostly a chronicle of what I’ve learned during a quarter century of taking on the oil giants and their environmental abuse of communities and workers across the American South. In the end, I note that — while it’s been a fulfilling...

“Bypassing Big Oil’s Alliance With Government”

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I’m very grateful to writer Mark Hand and the popular website CounterPunch for reviewing Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know About the New Environmental Attack on America. I thought Mark’s piece really captured the essence of the book. Here’s an excerpt: Early in his career, Smith said he learned that big oil and gas companies operated in a...

BP: “Never mind the tar mats and dead dolphins, the Gulf is healthy”

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BP just keeps stepping in it — this time I mean almost literally. The British oil giant is desperately trying to get out front of the 5th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy with a series of exculpatory moves, includes a website that tries weakly to contradict the damning flood of scientific research about the ongoing environmental problems in the Gulf of Mexico. This week, BP took...

BP has a website to trash the research it pays for

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Over the last five years, it’s gotten a little easier to understand why BP committed the series of monumental errors that led to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig catastrophe. The company seems to have no idea what it’s doing. Recently, we’ve seen the British oil giant argue vociferously in court on behalf of its multi-billion settlement with Gulf businesses and ailing residents...

Book excerpt: “Colluders in Crude: The Oily Politics of How the Obama Administration Sided with BP Over the American People”

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My feelings about BP and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe have been consistent from Day One. Working closely with dedicated environmentalists from Louisiana and elsewhere, we have never fully trusted the oil giant’s public version of events. We have fought for safety and protection of workers and wildlife — ever skeptical of early reports that seafood from the Gulf of Mexico was...

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”...

Keystone XL and an ‘outrageous abuse of the law’: My interview with Tavis Smiley

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Last week, it was my honor to fly to Los Angeles to sit down for an interview with PBS’ Tavis Smiley for his nationwide late night show, to discuss my new book Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know About the New Environmental Attack on America. It was a fast-moving conversation that touched a lot of ground, including my early cases over radioactive oil...

“The Gulf will never recover in the near future”: The Huffington Post covers ‘Crude Justice’

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I continue to be flattered by the good notices and coverage of my new book, Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know About the New Environmental Attack on America. This week, an environmental activist and writer that I’ve known for years, Jerry Cope, interviewed me for the Huffington Post, and we talked about the book — and how Big Oil’s ever-growing...

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