Just as clean, renewable energy is lifting off and the impacts of climate disruption become ever more visible, fossil energy production is becoming dramatically more extreme. But extreme fossil energy production is exactly what we don’t need. In just the last two years, I have seen the Louisiana coast’s oil-slicked marshes after the Deepwater Horizon…

As I write this, ships are being prepared to steam northward from several ports to begin poking holes in the floor of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in search of oil. Thanks to legal action by Earthjustice over the last few years, and thanks also to a one-year time-out called in the wake of the…

On backing down, backing away, and backing into a corner . . . President Obama’s statement, “I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago,” was one the more awkward sentences in his State of the Union speech,…

Reforms haven’t been made to prevent another disastrous oil spill

Apparently, Shell Oil and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) live in a land of make believe. Thankfully, Earthjustice makes its abode in a place called reality. Earlier this month, BOEMRE approved Royal Dutch Shell’s plan to drill for oil next summer in the Alaskan Arctic’s Beaufort Sea. Putting the sled…

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was one of the worst environmental disasters in history—and the impacts are still being felt. One could plausibly expect that in the wake of such a catastrophe, the government would do a painstaking job of ensuring that future oil activities in the region are done safely.…

Conservation groups: Address lessons of last Gulf oil spill before allowing new deep water drilling