It’s been going on for decades — poor towns in the Deep South, often with a predominantly black population — getting dumped on, whether it’s by Big Oil or by chemical plants or by toxic-waste disposal firms. Many of my earliest cases as an environmental lawyer were in these off-the-beaten track places such as Brookhaven, Mississippi or Martha, Kentucky, where oil companies...
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...
As I’ve noted several times recently, the tide has changed when it comes to public perceptions of the Gulf of Mexico, more than three years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For a while, the mega-millions that BP had spent on slick marketing, and bland pronouncements from public officials, had lulled not only the public but even journalists to sleep. But now, good science and some old...
