The world not long ago marked the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima reactor meltdown in Japan — an ongoing nuclear crisis that may not be cleaned up for decades, and even that may be optimistic. Lingering high radiation levels mean that swaths of northern Japan remain uninhabitable — unsafe to eat local food, breathe the air, or drink the water. To many, the 2011 Fukushima tragedy...
The big oil companies love to portray the rise of fracking as a great American success story — using 21st Century technology and know-how to locate and extract pockets of cheap energy that were thought to be unreachable, reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil and lowering your energy cost. But Big Oil doesn’t want you to know the sausage-making, as it were, that goes into...
When I started practicing environmental law out of New Orleans in the late 1980s, the Deep South was still scarred by the last big oil rush. The Arab oil embargo and spike in prices during the 1970s had sparked a big boom in the Gulf Coast oil patch, but a decade later the price had plummeted and many of the wells were sealed off. What the oil giants left behind would keep me busy as a lawyer for...
