It’s been going on for decades — poor towns in the Deep South, often with a predominantly black population — getting dumped on, whether it’s by Big Oil or by chemical plants or by toxic-waste disposal firms. Many of my earliest cases as an environmental lawyer were in these off-the-beaten track places such as Brookhaven, Mississippi or Martha, Kentucky, where oil companies...
Outside of the Gulf region, there hasn’t been a ton of publicity about Shell’s pipeline leak and oil spill off the coast of Louisiana that was revealed late last week. Maybe that’s the Deepwater Horizon Effect, since just six years after more than 4 million barrels of crude spewed into the Gulf, 88,000 gallons may sound like the proverbial drop in the bucket. The reality is very...
It happened again. Another oil spill, and another claim by a Big Energy company that the environmental impact is minimal. Then, a day or two later, or maybe even longer, the world learns somehow that the spill is much larger than was originally announced, and that the ecological damage is a lot more severe. The most extreme example of this Big Oil dishonesty, of course was what happened in home...
There hasn’t been as much talk lately about the Keystone XL project, the massive proposed pipeline that would take some of the dirtiest fuel known to mankind — extracted from the tar sands of western Canada — and ship it across the American heartland to the Gulf Coast, where most it will be shipped to overseas markets. My hunch is that the Obama administration — which...
The irony is almost too much to bear. This week, Senate Republicans voted to approve a bill to President Obama’s desk that would mandate the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline — the project that would transport the thick, dirty oil harvested from the tar sands of western Canada across the American prairie to ports and refineries on the Gulf Coast. Opponents are hoping that the...
I’ve written here in the past that there are several very good — and very important — reasons for President Obama to oppose the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. That’s the project that would take dirty tar sands oil from once-pristine corners of western Canada, ship it by pipeline across major U.S. aquifers and rivers, and then transport this carbon-intensive fuel to burn in...
How much oil can we dump atop the Gulf ecosystem before it simply collapses? At what point does the northern quadrant of the Gulf of Mexico – once the source of 40 percent of all seafood caught in the continental United States – become, for all practical purposes, a dead zone? Well, we may be faced with that tragic outcome much sooner than many of us would care to believe. The oil...
