"Louisiana has had its fair share of oil troubles..." Those are the opening words of an editorial that ran in the Wall Street Journal recently, and its hard to disagree with that. While oil exploration and drilling has been a source of jobs and revenue for my home state, it's also been the source of a lot of unnecessary environmental woe. The Deepwater Horizon spill and the reckless behavior of BP -- which the editorial does go on to mention, in passing -- is the best-known example of that; Louisianans will be dealing with the consequences of 5 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico for years and years to come. But what happened in 2010 at the Macondo field was only the tip of the wellhead, if you will; I've made a career for more than two decades of fighting Big Oil in numerous cases where the industry has destroyed people's land and their livelihood with dumping of radioactive or toxic waste or other material. But if you regularly read Rupert Murdoch's one-sided, pro-corporate propaganda sheet, you can probably guess that better environmental protection is not where the Wall Street Journal is headed with this. The smear ...
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