Tagpipeline safety

How Big Oil is working to take away your 1st Amendment rights

H

Pretty soon, you won’t be able to walk down the street in my native Louisiana without tripping across an oil or natural gas pipeline. OK, so that’s a slight exaggeration, but after a decade of unending petrochemical growth fueled largely by the surge in fracking across the country, it seems that as soon as one pipeline is finished, a new one is announced. Last week, the energy company Tellurian...

On pipeline day, Canada spill shows danger

O

Pipelines were the big national news story today. In Washington, President Trump — fulfilling his campaign promises on the fourth full day of his administration — signed two executive orders intended to re-start two major, stalled projects: The Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline. Both projects had been stopped during the presidency of Barack Obama, and with good...

‘Putting a wrench into the gears of the pipeline machine’

&

The movement against dangerous oil and natural gas pipelines is spreading. And what’s truly remarkable is that the epicenter of the movement is developing along the Gulf Coast, a region that historically has not been known for a strong environmental community. Clearly, the catalyst for that movement has been the historic protests — led by the Native American community — against...

Louisiana citizens wise up to pipeline dangers

L

For most of the last eight decades or so that Big Oil’s had its way with the state of Louisiana, it was rare — unheard of, really — for local residents to oppose an energy-related project. For most folks, environmentalism — opposing new drilling or unsightly pipelines in your backyard — was something that maybe “the Yankees” did, but not Louisianans. And...

How Dakota pipeline firm also threatens Louisiana

H

There was some very good news this week on the environmental front, for a change. At a moment when things looked darkest for the stirring protest movement against the Dakota Access pipeline — with a brutal winter bearing down on the rural North Dakota protest site and authorities threatening to clear out their encampment — there was a dramatic reversal of fortune. Army officials...

The Dakota pipeline and the assault on Native Americans

T

Thanksgiving is a day for spending time with family and friends, but also a time to remember some of the simple moral values that make America the nation that it is — or at least that it can be. The elegant origin story of the holiday is a tale of unity and overcoming differences, when the first European settlers in America and Native Americans combined the bounty of their harvests to...

The drip, drip, drip of Big Oil on La.’s fragile environment

T

More than six years ago, this blog was created largely in response to one gigantic and catastrophic event: The massive BP oil spill in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That tragedy has had dozens of story lines — from the toxic dispersant that made so many clean-up workers ill, to the deaths of sea creatures from dolphins to endangered turtles, to the destruction of...

Giant gasoline leak in South more proof of pipeline vulnerability

G

Transporting fossil fuels across North America has become the hot-button environmental issue of the 2010s, and understandably so. Big Oil’s technologies for sucking oil from locations that were once unreachable — like the Bakken oil field in North Dakota or the Canadian tar sands — may be environmentally flawed, but they still remain light years ahead of our mid-20th Century...

Protest at the Dakota Pipeline project is starting to pay off

P

People often wonder whether political protest is effective. Certainly, we live an era where our politicians seem to listen mainly to their big donors and to the large corporations, while the average citizen struggles to be heard. Still, even in an era when most people seem to spend most of their time glued to their smartphones, taking matters to the streets can actually work. Protestors have to...

It’s time to call off the dogs in North Dakota

I

Earlier this decade, it was the Keystone XL pipeline project that became the moral epicenter of the environmental movement in this country. And for good reason: the notion that the United States might allow a project to ship some of the dirtiest fuel — oil from the Canadian tar sands — across the American heartland, to meet the lucrative energy needs of overseas markets raised a...

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