Dear Exxon, We’re Sick of Your Spin Machine. With No Love, America.

Is anyone else paying attention to the tweets that Exxon-Mobil have posted following the aftermath of the Mayflower, Arkansas oil spill? Frustratingly—and not surprisingly—Exxon has issued a hollow apology “for the inconvenience” to the town of Mayflower for spilling over 80,000 gallons of oil that cascaded through the streets of this small town last Friday: [...]

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Texas Oil Spill Hits Home for Tar Sands Activists

Does the Tar Sands Blockade (TSB) have a crystal ball we didn’t know about? Yesterday in Tyler County, TX, a pipeline operated by Sunoco Logistics sprung a leak and spilled 20,000 gallons (or 550 barrels) of oil into local East Texas waterways. Deep East Texas is known for its creeks and lakes, freshwater eco-systems and aquifers [...]

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Warrant Issued For Chevron, Global Corporate Criminal, And CEO John Watson

We served an arrest warrant for Chevron CEO John Watson today. Brazilian prosecutors have issued criminal charges against Chevron and several of its employees, including the chief executive of Chevron’s Brazil unit, in response to the company’s November 2011 oil spill off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. It’s refreshing, to say the least, to [...]

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Dignity Incarnate: Emergildo Criollo And The Ecuadoreans Standing Up To Chevron

This morning I accompanied Emergildo Criollo, leader of the Cofan people, from his home in the dusty outskirts of Lago Agrio (the oil camp turned boom town that Texaco founded) to a press conference in Quito regarding a ruling issued late yesterday afternoon by the appellate court in Sucumbios rejecting Chevron’s latest attempt to block [...]

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Looking For A Gift That Will Really Piss Your Loved Ones Off? Greg Palast’s New Book Should Do The Trick.

Greg Palast’s new book, Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores, really pissed me off. I’m sure it could do the same for your friends and family this holiday season. Vultures’ Picnic is basically a non-fiction book written in a hard-bitten detective novel style, which is pretty interesting. The Bukowski [...]

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Chevron’s Brazil Oil Spill Just The Latest Symptom Of Our Addiction To Oil

If the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster taught us anything, it’s that Big Oil has been doing very little over the last few decades to prevent oil spills despite their obscene record profits. Companies like Exxon, Chevron, and BP have all clearly decided that it’s more cost effective to use their profits to rig the system [...]

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Why Environmentalists Should Stand With Accused Whistleblower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning

  if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time… … and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?  … say… a database of half a million events [...]

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Updated: Brazil Sues Chevron And Transocean For $11 Billion Over Oil Spill

Update 12/14/11 06:42PM PST: This is huge: Brazil is suing Chevron and Transocean for $11 billion over their “lack of planning and environmental management.” The suit also seeks to suspend the companies from operating in the country. Brazilian officials obviously meant it when they vowed not to let Chevron get away with its environmental crimes: [...]

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Oil Company Takes Responsibility For Poisoning Poor People In Developing World, No Reports Of Flying Pigs

Yesterday, hell did not freeze over. Pigs (or if you’re Italian, donkeys) were not seen flying through the air on gossamer wings. What did happen yesterday? A major oil company accepted responsibility for terrible oil contamination affecting poor villagers in a remote part of a developing country, promising to pay for remediation of the damage [...]

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Regulatory Capture And Asleep-At-The-Wheel Officials Justify Citizen-Led Action On Tar Sands

Neela Banerjee from the LA Times is out today with an explosive piece that draws from cables revealed by Wikileaks that show the Keystone XL pipeline may be closer to approval than previously known: The cable, obtained by WikiLeaks, describes the State Department’s then-energy envoy, David Goldwyn, as having “alleviated” Canadian officials’ concerns about getting [...]

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