Pretty soon, you won’t be able to walk down the street in my native Louisiana without tripping across an oil or natural gas pipeline. OK, so that’s a slight exaggeration, but after a decade of unending petrochemical growth fueled largely by the surge in fracking across the country, it seems that as soon as one pipeline is finished, a new one is announced. Last week, the energy company Tellurian...
Friday marked the 86th anniversary of Mr. Martin Luther King’s birth (even though the national holiday will be on Monday). As time marches along, the brilliance of his efforts to bring freedom and civil rights to African-Americans during the 1950s and 1960s grows brighter and brighter. The cornerstone of his campaign to end desegregation in the Deep South was civil disobedience — the...
So far, 2015 has been a mostly gloomy year in the arena of fighting back against fossil fuel. Neither the plunging prices for oil and gas nor the growing realization — even embraced this week in the corridors of the Vatican — that greenhouse gases threaten the health and welfare of entire planet have made much of a dent in our mad rush to drill deep under the sea, in bitter...
The fight over fracking has entered a new and alarming phase. After the initial shock of the boom in unconventional gas drilling, citizens in environmentally ravaged communities have been fighting back and claiming victories. But Big Oil and their colluders — the big money politicians — don’t put up with this sort of thing for very long. I learned this a generation ago, after I...
Everyone knows that drilling offshore for oil in the unforgiving waters of the Arctic is a fool’s errand. Three summers ago, Shell’s initial foray into this extreme quest for crude oil was an unmitigated disaster, ending with the bizarre yet tragically predictable saga of its oil rig the Kulluk breaking loose and slamming into the rocky coastline of Alaska. Now, Shell has been making...
This was not a scene that you pictured when Barack Obama was first elected president in 2008: Tens of thousands of environmentalists marching on Obama’s White House, demanding action but worried that a progressive-minded president won’t do the right thing. Ironically, the rallies this Presidents Day weekend against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have been the largest U.S...
