The Big Oil folks who’ve been trying to cram a vast network of pipelines down the throats of the American people — including the massive Keystone XL project that would transport copious amounts of dirty tar sands oil from western Canada across the U.S. heartland to Gulf refineries, where a lot of it would be shipped abroad — have been preaching a gospel of safety. That sounds...
I’ve written a lot lately about the growing movement for environmental justice in my home state of Louisiana — about Gen. Russel Honore and his “Green Army” and how everyday citizens of the state, from Mandeville to Bayou Corne, are saying no to Big Oil and Gas running roughshod over their drinking water and the natural splendor of Bayou Country. It’s more noteworthy...
If this blog could be said to have a theme this summer, it would be this: The Gulf of Mexico, under stress. The tragedy, of course, is how much of that stress has been caused by BP’s recklessness — the millions of barrels of oil that gushed forth from its destroyed Deepwater Horizon rig in 2010 that continues to pollute white sandy beaches with tar balls (many of them larded with...
Note: As promised, Part II of my in-depth report on the state of the Gulf. more than four years after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe: When the full extent of the Deepwater Horizon spill became clear in the spring of 2010, experts predicted the impact on the Gulf’s diverse ecosystem would last at least for a generation, if not longer. Unfortunately, they were working off a known template: The...
Here’s a horror story involving birds that even Alfred Hitchcock never could have dreamed up. If you followed BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe beginning some four years ago, then I’m sure you remember the heart-wrenching photographs of wildlife-rescue workers plucking oiled birds off our Gulf Coast beaches. While these photos sparked national outrage over BP’s...
A constant theme since I started this blog nearly four years ago has been the impact of the BP oil spill on the marine life in Gulf of Mexico. One reason for that is that it seemed like the federal authorities were happy to do the bidding of BP and tell the public that everything was nearly back to normal in a matter of weeks; even President Obama made a big show of coming to the Gulf Coast and...
Are Americans becoming numb to oil spills? You have to wonder sometimes. Over the last couple of years, as domestic fossil fuel production has surged, so have the number of accidents — along pipelines and railroads, on offshore drilling platforms and in barge collisions. And sure, these mishaps and misadventures have received some media coverage — but not all that much. Maybe the...
A stunning scientific study, released earlier this year with little fanfare, found that undersea currents pushed oil from BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe as far as Florida’s Tampa Bay and is linked to diseased fish populations off that state’s lower Gulf waters. The report, published by researchers from the University of South Florida, shows that BP’s toxic oil...
History keep repeating, and not in a good way. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez accident and massive spill in Alaska, which for years was the standard by which all oil spills were judged…until BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster came along. Ironically, the four-year anniversary of that accident — which killed 11 people and spewed 5 million barrels of oil into the...
It won’t be long before the world marks the 4th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf, and the worst oil spill in American history. The story has never really left the news, and understandably so. That’s in part because the effort to make BP fully accountable for its sins — both in the civil and the criminal courts — has been a long and arduous...
