Tagtar sands

A President Trump would undo years of environmental progress

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It took a long time, but President Obama finally has many — not all, but many — aspects of U.S. environmental and energy policy moving in the right direction. Even with a U.S. Congress that is led by deniers of climate change, the Obama administration has been able to promulgate new rules to restrict greenhouse-gas pollution from U.S. coal-fired power plants, and recently signed onto...

The day climate change came to haunt tar sands country

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The scenes that have been coming from Alberta, Canada, over the past week are truly tragic, and horrifying. Massive wildfires, whipped by high winds, have turned the area around Fort McMurray — heavily populated with energy workers in recent years — into a hellscape of towering flames and smoke. Some 245,000 acres of land have been burned, and firefighters aren’t anywhere close...

Keystone spill is more proof that pipelines are unsafe at any speed

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It happened again. Another oil spill, and another claim by a Big Energy company that the environmental impact is minimal. Then, a day or two later, or maybe even longer, the world learns somehow that the spill is much larger than was originally announced, and that the ecological damage is a lot more severe. The most extreme example of this Big Oil dishonesty, of course was what happened in home...

Hillary Clinton’s new stance on the Keystone XL is a win for the planet

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It didn’t get all the attention that it deserved — maybe because for some odd reason this happened at almost the precise instant that Pope Francis touched down for his tour of the United States. But Hillary Clinton — who despite a number of challenges remains the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination and the most likely to become president — took another...

Protesters pick up slack for government inaction on fossil fuels

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It’s beginning to look like 2015 will be a banner year for political activism around efforts to block the growth of fossil fuels — both here in the United States and around the world. Indeed, this year we’ve even seen the invention of a new word — “kayaktivists” — to describe the protesters in Seattle who bravely tried to block the movement northward of...

A cruel summer for oil spills

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There hasn’t been as much talk lately about the Keystone XL project, the massive proposed pipeline that would take some of the dirtiest fuel known to mankind — extracted from the tar sands of western Canada — and ship it across the American heartland to the Gulf Coast, where most it will be shipped to overseas markets. My hunch is that the Obama administration — which...

Obama’s Keystone veto: First step in a long journey

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It doesn’t happen every day, but environmentalists got a rare dollop of good news this week. For months, supporters had been urging the president to veto any bill from the Republican-led Congress that would seek to mandate the Keystone XL pipeline, the project that would carry millions of barrels of dirty Canadian tar sands oil across the American heartland to facilities on the Gulf Coast...

Why build a new pipeline when we can’t stop the old ones from blowing up?

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The irony is almost too much to bear. This week, Senate Republicans voted to approve a bill to President Obama’s desk that would mandate the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline — the project that would transport the thick, dirty oil harvested from the tar sands of western Canada across the American prairie to ports and refineries on the Gulf Coast. Opponents are hoping that the...

Montana pipeline crisis should be nail in coffin of Keystone XL

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President Obama’s State of the Union address — and the Republican response — certainly shed a fair amount of light on the state of the environment in 2015. The president, for his part, made a passionate plea for putting climate change at the very top of the nation’s political agenda, although I would have like to have heard more specifics about how the Obama administration...

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