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Climate change is attacking the Great Barrier Reef

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One of the more fantastic experiences that I’ve enjoyed in my lifetime was an opportunity, several years ago, to scuba dive along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. This is truly one of the world’s great natural splendors; it is the largest living thing on Planet Earth, stretching some 900 miles, and it is also much larger than anything that humans have ever constructed. Chock full...

New Orleans memo: You can still have great music without noise pollution

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Sometimes a name can tell you a lot. In the past, I’ve told you about my enthusiastic support for a New Orleans group, active on Facebook and the Internet, that’s called “Hear the Music, Stop the Noise.” The title makes a powerful point: That it’s possible for a great American city like my hometown to continue having a spectacular and vibrant music scene without...

The sinkhole keeps getting bigger, and so do the lies of Texas Brine Co.

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The crisis involving the Bayou Corne sinkhole in Louisiana just doesn’t stop. In what’s becoming an almost daily headline, the sinkhole grew again, swallowing up more trees and even part of an access road: A 1,500 square-foot section caved in from the edge of a sinkhole in Assumption Parish Tuesday night and pulled down several trees and part of an access road, parish officials said...

Torn on the bayou: Sinkhole keeps getting bigger, more dangerous

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A lot has happened over the last few weeks. In the political world, the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney sees a new kerfuffle every few hours. Down here in Louisiana, we’ve been whacked by Hurricane Isaac, and on the environmental front we’re still trying to get BP to pay its fair share for all the havoc it’s wreaked in the Gulf. But there’s one thing...

A temporary reprieve from Shell’s risky and reckless Arctic drilling scheme

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For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been consumed with the never-ending fallout from BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. Some 29 months after the explosion that killed 11 people and spewed 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, we’ve seen a hurricane toss BP’s oil onto our once pristine beaches all over again. And we’ve also been fighting it out in the legal...

Louisiana DEQ bungles a toxic nightmare from Hurricane Isaac

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In recent months, I’ve joined with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and others in calling for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, to be stripped of its powers and for the federal Environmental Protection Administration, or EPA, to take over. This is not an idea that I toss around lightly. Time and time again, Louisiana’s DEQ has shown that it’s simply...

Now, BP claims it wants to clean up Gulf — but not until it spends more on PR

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You’ve got to say this about British Petroleum — they have some nerve. For more than two years, we’ve been reporting about all the lingering fallout from the Deepwater Horizon disaster — the sick and deformed seafood, the dead zones and the depleted oyster beds, the oiled marshlands and the dying dolphins, and the clean-up workers with crippling health issues. But now...

We object: Why BP’s $8.7 billion deal is “a failed settlement”

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The last couple of weeks have brought a lot of news – both good and bad – down here to the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Isaac was a double whammy; the storm itself destroyed homes and upended people’s lives, but it also stirred up a ton of BP’s oil. There’s believed to be as much as 1 million barrels of oil still polluting our waters, some 29 months after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. That is...

Louisiana unloads and blows giant hole in BP settlement

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For the last 29 months, I’ve been chronicling the widespread and still-very-much-ongoing fallout from BP’s gross negligence — “a corporate culture of recklessness,” as U.S. government lawyers called it — that killed 11 people and spewed an astronomical 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Currently, BP, arm in arm with the class action lawyers...

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