One fact has remained pretty constant since the fracking boom in America began back in the 2000s: Almost any environmental problem has turned out to be worse than the oil-and-gas industry and government regulators want the public to know. When it comes to polluting the wells of people who live near fracking rigs, the industry clings to its story line that fracking can’t possibly pollute the...
Things are stirring again with the Dakota Access pipeline. It was late last year, near the end of his term, when then-President Barack Obama handed a victory to activists seeking to block the opening of the $3.8 billion project. This is the pipeline which aims to ship fracked oil from the Bakken field in North Dakota across the U.S. Heartland to refineries and ports on the Gulf Coast — and...
Pipelines were the big national news story today. In Washington, President Trump — fulfilling his campaign promises on the fourth full day of his administration — signed two executive orders intended to re-start two major, stalled projects: The Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline. Both projects had been stopped during the presidency of Barack Obama, and with good...
There was some very good news this week on the environmental front, for a change. At a moment when things looked darkest for the stirring protest movement against the Dakota Access pipeline — with a brutal winter bearing down on the rural North Dakota protest site and authorities threatening to clear out their encampment — there was a dramatic reversal of fortune. Army officials...
Thanksgiving is a day for spending time with family and friends, but also a time to remember some of the simple moral values that make America the nation that it is — or at least that it can be. The elegant origin story of the holiday is a tale of unity and overcoming differences, when the first European settlers in America and Native Americans combined the bounty of their harvests to...
From time to time, I’ve written here about Donald Trump’s disastrous environmental policies. That’s because the intersection between American politics and the ecology is a critical one. Indeed, the election of the Republican presidential nominee would be a game changer for the planet. Trump has spoken repeatedly on the campaign trail about his passion for bringing back the U.S...
People often wonder whether political protest is effective. Certainly, we live an era where our politicians seem to listen mainly to their big donors and to the large corporations, while the average citizen struggles to be heard. Still, even in an era when most people seem to spend most of their time glued to their smartphones, taking matters to the streets can actually work. Protestors have to...
Earlier this decade, it was the Keystone XL pipeline project that became the moral epicenter of the environmental movement in this country. And for good reason: the notion that the United States might allow a project to ship some of the dirtiest fuel — oil from the Canadian tar sands — across the American heartland, to meet the lucrative energy needs of overseas markets raised a...
When is the government ever going to get it right on regulating those mile-long oil trains that are criss-crossing America these days, thanks to the fracking boom? You know the ones — the trains that activists call “oil bombs” because so many of them have exploded in the last two years, causing mass fatalities in Quebec and scaring the bejesus out of citizens from North Dakota...
I’m not sure what the Apocalypse would look like and I sure as hell hope I never find out, but you have to think it would look a little like some of the pictures that I saw this past week coming out of West Virginia. A massive CSX train laden with crude-oil tank cars tried to plow its way through the latest winter storm to devastate the northeastern United States this season. That turned...
