On April 15, 2014, with the fourth anniversary of the massive Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just days away, British Petroleum – the rig’s operator — issued a press release that caught many people off-guard. BP announced that its “active cleanup” of oil pollution in the Gulf had officially ended. The statement by the British energy giant did not say that...
Some days it seems like our politicians are living in a dream world. A couple of days ago, I told you about Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal and his craven approval of badly written legislation that will a) do the bidding of his Big Oil and Gas campaign donors and kill a lawsuit that would require 97 large companies to spend billions to restore the coastal wetlands they destroyed and b) was...
This weekend, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal had a clear choice. He could follow the advice of the state’s attorney general — his fellow Republican Buddy Caldwell — and many other legal scholars. That would mean vetoing a poorly drafted, ill-thought-out measure that came about from Big Oil’s desperation to block legal action that would force it to pay millions to restore the...
Every day, there’s more evidence that the healthy winds of change are blowing through Louisiana. That’s especially true in the southern part of the state which has been battered by events that have been both epic in scale — the BP oil spill and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina — and more prosaic, like the Bayou Corne sinkhole and the day-in, day-out toxins pumped into the...
In the last week, there’s been a lot of discussion about the 4th anniversary of the BP oil spill — and how Louisiana’s critical wetlands had been pummeled and degraded by an onslaught of crude. These marshes aren’t only places of great natural beauty and biological diversity, but they’re also a critical buffer — the buffer, actually — between a major...
Over this Easter weekend, I had a chance to absorb quite a bit of coverage of what’s happened in the Gulf of Mexico in the four years since BP’s massive Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. I had a couple of thoughts. One was that with the passage of time, the news coverage of the BP anniversary has actually seemed to increase over last year. It’s good that the news media —...
The next two years will be more critical for Louisiana and its beautiful yet fragile environment than any time in the state’s history. On one hand, the surge in oil and gas production across the United States is placing new pressures on my home state in the terms of more rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, more pipelines crisscrossing the state, more barges coming down our waterways and more tanker...
For years, the powerful oil and gas industry in Louisiana has dominated life in this state — its economy and especially its politics. But after a remarkable turn of events over the last year, Big Oil and Gas here in my home state has become more like a cornered, wounded beast of prey — and so now the industry is thrashing out wildly, clawing in every direction. And it’s kind of...
Sometimes you have to wonder whether the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. That’s definitely the case with BP and its horrific environmental track record here in the Gulf. On one hand, environmental officials continue to tally the damage from the massive BP oil spill that took place more than three and a half years ago, and today even officials who once downplayed the effects of...
The other day, I mentioned, with some enthusiasm, the growing involvement of Gen. Russel Honore in environmental issues across our home state of Louisiana. Honore is a well-known, and enormously respected, figure not just down here in bayou country but across the nation. That is due to his steady hand of leadership in the greatest crisis in modern Louisiana history, the aftermath of Hurricane...
