Tagmethane

Will the 2017 State of the Union speech even mention climate change?

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As I sit down to write this, President Obama is preparing to deliver his final State of the Union address to the American people. Over the last seven years, the speech has been something of a mixed bag when it comes to the all-important issue of climate change. On a few occasions, the president has been practically poetic when it comes to the need for Americans to take seriously the science of...

The Deepwater Horizon of the sky

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They swore it would never happen again. For 87 days, the oil from the damaged Deepwater Horizon rig spewed into the environmentally sensitive Gulf of Mexico — and neither BP nor the federal government seemed to have any power to shut it off. There were times in the spring and summer of 2010 when it seemed like the damage to waters off Louisiana and to the coastline would never stop. When...

It’s a gas! Why fracking doesn’t help climate change

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Everybody needs to vent sometimes, right? That’s certainly true for someone like me, a veteran environmental attorney who’s had more than my share of frustrations in dealing with Big Oil, their high-priced lawyers, and the politicians who receive huge wads of campaign cash. It helps to have a blog to get things off my chest. But I’ll tell you one thing that doesn’t need to...

Another count in the indictment against fracking: It doesn’t stop climate change

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In the field of environmental science, it’s always important to evaluate risk. In other words, do we tolerate a certain level of risk if the alternative is a wider ecological catastrophe? Over the last decade or two, for example, scientists have debated whether nuclear power plants — despite the danger of a major accident and release of radiation, as happened in Japan in 2011 —...

The most damning evidence against fracking yet!

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It’s hard to imagine how the news about fracking could get any worse. On any given day, my news feed is filled with reports from all across America, and sometimes from outside our borders, about the unintended environmental consequences of this extreme method of extracting natural gas from the shale formations under the earth. Just today, there was yet another report of an earthquake in...

America’s dangerous renewed romance with fossil fuels

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This week, climate change has spent an all-too-brief moment on top of the public’s agenda, as world leaders and diplomats discussed the simmering issue at the United Nations and look for some kind of breakthrough that will lead to meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Many cynics say that serious action is impossible, because even if the United States — the world leader...

How much more evidence do we need that fracking is harmful?

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They held a Democratic primary election in New York State this Tuesday, and an upstart candidate for governor with the unlikely name of Zephyr Teachout — who was outspent about 50-to-1 by the incumbent Andrew Cuomo — did surprisingly well given the obstacles. She got about 34 percent of the vote overall, but she actually defeated the powerful, well-known Cuomo in about 20 counties in...

Bayou Corne, natural gas, and the law of unintended consequences

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If there’s been one common theme in both my life’s work as an environmental lawyer and my writing here on this blog, it is that mankind’s ever-growing thirst for fossil fuels has many unintended consequences — and too often these consequences are not good. Over the years, I’ve seen first-hand how drilling and production of oil and natural gas fields across the Deep...

Fracking doesn’t reduce global warming — it makes it worse

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So the original take on fracking for natural gas was that it was good for the environment, for one simple reason — natural gas is a cleaner fuel than what it normally replaces, particularly coal which is rich in carbon emissions. In other words, they told us that more fracking meant fewer greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere. Even with a flood of disturbing reports that...

Stopping fracking: The air war

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As recently as five years ago, few Americans had even heard of fracking. The controversial process for freeing pockets of trapped natural gas or oil from deep shale deposits — which was not economically viable using conventional drilling — was only well known to industry insiders, who pushed special protection for fracking through Congress back in 2006. When the landmen and the first...

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