In the U.S. media this week, I read more happy talk about “the comeback” of the Gulf Coast, at least in the casino-drenched city of Biloxi. I had to turn to the Canadian media to read about the ongoing mystery of the dead dolphins. Typical, huh? Of course, the “comeback” of Biloxi — battered first by Hurricane Katrina and then by the BP oil spill — is dripping...
Imagine, if you will, an oil spill that in all too many ways is very much like BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe off the Gulf Coast. A major global oil giant, partnering on a deepwater oil rig in environmentally sensitive waters, suffers a series of accidents and then compounds the damage by trying to cover up the incident for days. Meanwhile, the size of the oil slick spreads across...
Unfortunately, every day seems to bring new reminders that the environmental nightmare unleashed by BP into the Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 2010 is not over. Sometimes, these things practically hit you in the face…or wash up on your beach. In the more than two years since millions of barrels of oil spewed forth into the Gulf from BP’s Macondo mishap, I’ve joined with other...
I saw on the news today that a new tropical storm is forming in the Gulf of Mexico. When you’re from New Orleans, that always grabs your attention. It looks like the Crescent City will be spared — models show the storm more likely drifting east toward Florida — but on the other hand it seems certain that one of these days another hurricane will bear down on Louisiana. And when...
There was a report the other day that officials at my alma mater, Louisiana State University, are taking a good chunk of the money they received from the BP legal settlement and spending it on mental health services. It said that LSU is planning to spend some $14.4 million — out of a $36 million settlement — to hire psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and other mental health...
There have been some stories recently that really confirm some of our worst fears about the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon — about what kind of havoc would be wreaked upon the beautiful and fragile eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico by this black tide of nearly 5 million barrels of oil let loose by BP’s recklessness. By now, we’ve all seen the pictures and read some of the gut...
“Louisiana has had its fair share of oil troubles…” Those are the opening words of an editorial that ran in the Wall Street Journal recently, and its hard to disagree with that. While oil exploration and drilling has been a source of jobs and revenue for my home state, it’s also been the source of a lot of unnecessary environmental woe. The Deepwater Horizon spill and the...
If there’s been one common thread in the 26 months since BP and its reckless behavior decimated the Gulf of Mexico, it has been people from Big Oil or the government trying to insist that the situation is over, resolved, done with. Heck, we began hearing that within hours of the April 20, 2010, disaster, when BP maintained — falsely, of course — to the public that the situation...
When government fails to work on your behalf, the consequences are all too real. And for many years, the main governmental agency tasked with protecting the fragile environment here in the Bayou State — the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ — has been the epitome of government failure. The other day, I told you about DEQ’s inadequate or in some cases non...
Memorial Day is considered the official start of summer — even down here on the Gulf where the mercury’s been rising for some time now. It’s a great holiday for hitting the beach, going camping, and throwing great barbecue on the grill — maybe a choice steak, or maybe seafood. But so far 2012 hasn’t been the greatest year for what the Aussies call “shrimp on...
