TagPresident Barack Obama

Hitting the Dakota Access pipeline where it hurts

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Things are stirring again with the Dakota Access pipeline. It was late last year, near the end of his term, when then-President Barack Obama handed a victory to activists seeking to block the opening of the $3.8 billion project. This is the pipeline which aims to ship fracked oil from the Bakken field in North Dakota across the U.S. Heartland to refineries and ports on the Gulf Coast — and...

Fire is a jarring reminder of Gulf drilling risks

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The news broke in the middle of the night: Another major fire at an offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana. Each time this happens, the news brings back painful memories of April 20, 2010, and the shocking explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig. The catastrophic effect of that tragic explosion and fire has been well documented (including a recent...

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...

The Dakota pipeline and the assault on Native Americans

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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...

Trump’s crazy climate policy is even worse than you think

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More than a week into the transition into Donald Trump’s presidential administration, we don’t know which of his campaign promises he will actually keep, and which ones will be tossed out the window. On the environment, we know that he’s getting his advice from some dangerous people, including the climate-change denier Myron Ebell, who’s been tapped to help fill top jobs...

The real costs of expanding offshore drilling

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Environmentalists certainly won a big battle when the Obama administration reversed course earlier this year and nixed a proposal to allow offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic Ocean. That flawed plan that would have risked tourism, fishing and other vital activities up and down the Eastern Seaboard. But it wasn’t the same thing as winning the war on fossil fuels. For all the progress that...

Can our legal system stop global warming, for the sake of the children?

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As an environmental attorney, I’ve seen time and time again how the American legal system can bring justice to people — blue-collar workers, private property owners — who had no other real venue for airing their grievances. We’ve seen time and time again that large, profit-minded corporations can’t be trusted to do the right thing, and that too many of our so-called...

Supreme Court blow to climate change shows why election so important

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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...

Will the 2017 State of the Union speech even mention climate change?

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As I sit down to write this, President Obama is preparing to deliver his final State of the Union address to the American people. Over the last seven years, the speech has been something of a mixed bag when it comes to the all-important issue of climate change. On a few occasions, the president has been practically poetic when it comes to the need for Americans to take seriously the science of...

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