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’s an old saying in politics: Think globally, act locally. But when it comes to the major issues facing our environment, that idea has been largely honored in the breach. The rise of large and well intentioned lobbying groups such as the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council led a lot of rank-and-file voters to assume that someone was off in Washington, D.C., or maybe...
The fate of the Keystone XL pipeline — the project that’s become the face of fossil-fuel exploitation in the United States — remains very much up in the air. It’s still not 100 percent clear which way the Obama administration will go on the project, while some Republican candidates like former Texas Gov. Rick Perry say that — in the case the issue is still unresolved...
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...
President Obama’s State of the Union address — and the Republican response — certainly shed a fair amount of light on the state of the environment in 2015. The president, for his part, made a passionate plea for putting climate change at the very top of the nation’s political agenda, although I would have like to have heard more specifics about how the Obama administration...
With America about to make a big decision on the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline, let’s revisit yet another recent major oil transportation fiasco, this time in my home state of Louisiana. As I mentioned here recently, Sunoco — the oil giant that is betting heavily on building new pipelines to accommodate America’s surge in oil and natural gas production — had to own up...
I’ve said here repeatedly that the American people are slowly but steadily catching on to the risks of fracking, and they are making their voices heard. Increasingly, citizens are looking at the supposed benefits of gas drilling in their communities — royalty checks for some, perhaps cheaper has prices — and then looking at life with tainted air and dirty tap water, and...
The Big Oil folks who’ve been trying to cram a vast network of pipelines down the throats of the American people — including the massive Keystone XL project that would transport copious amounts of dirty tar sands oil from western Canada across the U.S. heartland to Gulf refineries, where a lot of it would be shipped abroad — have been preaching a gospel of safety. That sounds...
There’s been a lot of talk recently on environmental websites and in the news media about which is a riskier way to transport oil and natural gas to market: Through pipelines or in rail tanker cars. Of course, that’s something of a trick question because the real answer is: Neither. On the pipeline front, there are many reasons to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar...
I’m not going to write a long post on this because it was just two days ago that pointed out some of the reasons why the massive Keystone XL pipeline — which would take heavy tar sands oil from Canada and ship it across environmentally sensitive American prairie on its way to the Gulf Coast and then to foreign markets — is such a bad idea. The exploitation of the tar sands oil...
