TagNew York State

Alarming leak at U.S. nuke plant

A

We’re coming up in a few short weeks on the 4th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. It was certainly a series of unfortunate — if completely foreseeable — events that essentially caused a meltdown at the four-unit reactor…a massive earthquake, followed by a tsunami which knocked out an atomic plant that had been poorly sited along the Pacific coastline...

How is fracking ‘safe’ when we don’t know what’s in fracking fluids?

H

I’ve long predicted that California will be the place where the rubber hits the road for the fracking boom in America. The rewards in a resource-rich state are too great for Big Oil and Gas to ignore, but the risks — of wasting millions upon millions of gallons of water in a drought-stricken state, of causing earthquakes in a region criss-crossed by fault lines, of polluting the...

The most damning indictment of fracking yet

T

There has been a wave of scientific research lately on fracking and its environmental risks. Some of that work has emerged from the governmental agencies that regulate unconventional drilling for oil and gas, including the recent, highly publicized report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the effects of fracking on drinking-water safety. The problem, of course, with government...

Score 1 for Planet Earth: NY bans fracking

S

I’ve noted several times over the last year that the tide is turning against fracking for oil and natural gas. The general public has increasingly decided that the often overhyped claims from Big Oil and Gas about job creation aren’t worth the costs to the environment in terms of foul air and polluted water — not to mention an increased risk of earthquakes. This November, even...

How much more evidence do we need that fracking is harmful?

H

They held a Democratic primary election in New York State this Tuesday, and an upstart candidate for governor with the unlikely name of Zephyr Teachout — who was outspent about 50-to-1 by the incumbent Andrew Cuomo — did surprisingly well given the obstacles. She got about 34 percent of the vote overall, but she actually defeated the powerful, well-known Cuomo in about 20 counties in...

Ex-Mobil VP reveals the truth about fracking

E

If you’ve followed the entire debate on fracking, you probably know the drill (no pun intended) by now. Industry experts insist that their methods for hydraulically fracturing the shale beds below the earth and extracting natural gas is technologically sound and completely safe — and that the naysayers are granola-eating Luddites who oppose anything new and would prefer to live in a...

The world is figuring out the truth about fracking

T

Nobody likes being a guinea pig. But apparently that’s what happened in Pennsylvania and some of the other places where the boom in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, first hit in the late 2000s. Thousands of acres were leased — often by farmers and other property owners in economically depressed areas — and then rigs began to dot the rolling hillsides, But all of this happened...

The earth moved: Link between fracking and earthquakes is established

T

Over recent months, we’ve talked on this blog about numerous reasons for taking a much more cautious approach on the natural gas drilling process known as fracking. There is a growing body of evidence that fracking has been linked to contamination of drinking water wells — so much so that in some cases methane gas has created smelly tap water that can be set on fire with a match. Air...

NY’s Cuomo demands answers about fracking — and so does the rest of America

N

These days, when it comes to the debate about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas, you hear far too many stories like this one about a woman named Lorrie Squibb out of Flower Mound, Tex. Squibb was a longtime resident of the Lone Star State who moved to Michigan two years ago, but started feeling very ill right after she relocated. “I am a stay at home Mom so there is no...

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