I’ve long said that no likely BP settlement would ever be enough for the damage that its 2010 oil spill caused to the Gulf region. Mostly, that’s a moral argument: The purpose of punitive damages is that a company must be shown that the cost of doing bad is more than doing good — but that’s hard to do when an oil company’s typically reckless drilling and production...
Most of us are very familiar with the famed quote from the 20th Century philosopher George Santayana, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For me, I think of those words when I think about oil production and radioactive waste — an environmental problem that America did not fix in our very recent past, and one that we are now repeating in our new...
You have to say this: Big Oil has nerve. That is, it certainly takes nerve to ship, store and handle massive quantities of oil and gas in a region of Louisiana that is prone to hurricanes and tropical storms, to almost Biblical levels of flooding and which has already been battered by oil spills and other forms of pollution. The region in question is Plaquemines Parish, the incredibly precious...
