TagExxonMobil

Obama throws down the gauntlet on Arctic, Atlantic drilling

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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...

EPA comes out with the truth on fracking and drinking water

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It was just a year and a half ago that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency came out with its first draft of a much-anticipated report about the impact that the boom in hydraulic fracking operations, or fracking, around the country was having on our drinking water. Environmentalists had encouraged such a study because the anecdotal evidence — people living near fracking rigs who...

How natural gas poisoned a poor Alabama town

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It’s been going on for decades — poor towns in the Deep South, often with a predominantly black population — getting dumped on, whether it’s by Big Oil or by chemical plants or by toxic-waste disposal firms. Many of my earliest cases as an environmental lawyer were in these off-the-beaten track places such as Brookhaven, Mississippi or Martha, Kentucky, where oil companies...

A new twist in the fight against ExxonMobil’s climate lies

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The push is on to hold the world’s largest energy company accountable for decades of unchecked pollution and for its lies about greenhouse-gas pollution that have served as its unsteady foundation. The company in question is ExxonMobil, the fossil-fuel conglomerate known for setting world records for quarterly profits, raking in billions of dollars every month. With its secretive ways...

World’s richest oil family is dumping oil because of climate change

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Well, this is rich…literally. The family of the legendary 19th Century titan John D. Rockefeller built its fortune across a sea of crude oil, just when the fossil fuel was starting to take over world markets in the mid-to-late 19th Century. By getting into the oil fields — first in Pennsylvania, then his home state of Ohio and eventually all over the world — before any of his...

It wasn’t just Exxon that said one thing on global warming and did something else

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The story broke last year, and it quickly became the environmental scandal of the decade: Evidence that the world’s largest oil company knew for decades that climate change — driven largely by fossil-fuel pollution — would cause catastrophic damage to Planet Earth if left unchecked. It seemed almost too cynical to believe that Exxon Corp., the massive forerunner to today’s...

ExxonMobil hits a new low

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For the world’s largest oil-drilling giant, ExxonMobil has a unique problem. It seems incapable of finding the absolute rock bottom — at least when it comes to its own moral compass. Just recently, I was writing here about the damning new evidence that top company executives knew as early as the late 1970s that fossil fuels would have a destructive impact on the world’s climate...

Exxon knew fossil fuels were causing climate change a long time ago

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Think about 1977. If you’re even old enough to remember, that was a long, long time ago. It was 38 years ago, to be exact. I was a teenager working toward my GED in New Orleans — law school and my career as an environmental attorney was still ahead of me. The city’s NBA basketball team was still the Jazz, not the Pelicans. Jimmy Carter had just been elected president the year...

How poverty and dirty oil refineries are closely linked

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For a long time, I’ve been writing about Louisiana’s so-called “Cancer Alley,” the seemingly endless line of oil refineries and chemical plants which — exploiting the state’s rich natural resources — line the Mississippi River banks from Baton Rouge all the way past New Orleans, towards the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, locals tended to view these...

Don’t let Jindal do to America what he’s done for Louisiana and its environment

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You might have missed it — there are, in all seriousness, close to 20 announced or expected Republican candidates for president in 2016 — but the outgoing governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, threw his hat into the ring earlier today. The Ivy League technocrat who once promised to reform government in a state with a rich history of corruption is a dim memory after seven years in Baton...

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