For the world’s largest oil-drilling giant, ExxonMobil has a unique problem. It seems incapable of finding the absolute rock bottom — at least when it comes to its own moral compass. Just recently, I was writing here about the damning new evidence that top company executives knew as early as the late 1970s that fossil fuels would have a destructive impact on the world’s climate...
Think about 1977. If you’re even old enough to remember, that was a long, long time ago. It was 38 years ago, to be exact. I was a teenager working toward my GED in New Orleans — law school and my career as an environmental attorney was still ahead of me. The city’s NBA basketball team was still the Jazz, not the Pelicans. Jimmy Carter had just been elected president the year...
Fracking has caused a lot of Americans to focus on the alarming environmental practices of the U.S. oil and gas industry, and that’s perfectly understandable. For one thing, the term “fracking” is still new and scary sounding to some, and perhaps funny sounding to others. Perhaps more importantly, the boom in unconventional gas drilling has come to a lot of parts of the...
