Message From the Editor

When Julie Dermansky stood on the banks of the Mississippi River downstream from New Orleans, she could see scores of small, translucent nuggets of plastic — known as nurdles — covering the shores. They had spilled into the river during an accident at the port a week earlier, but served as a reminder of the costs of plastic production, which involves melting down nurdles into molds to create everyday consumer products, and how hard it is to find accountability to clean up plastic pollution once it’s out in the world.

Check out Julie’s photos of the plastics spill.

In British Columbia, Canada, confrontations between the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and a variety of Indigenous and environmental groups are heating up as the new tar sands oil pipeline moves forward with construction after years of legal battles. Nick Cunningham has the story.

Another battle is mounting in New England, where an environmental law group is suing major oil companies over claims that their oil storage facilities in Connecticut and Massachusetts aren’t prepared for the rising threat of climate impacts. Read the story from Dana Drugmand.
Have a story tip or feedback? Get in touch: [email protected].

Thanks,
Brendan DeMelle
Executive Director
P.S. Have you seen Justin Hamel’s powerful photos of the oil bust currently happening in the Permian oil fields of Texas and New Mexico? Laid-off workers are hanging up their boots on mile after mile of fencepost.

A Plastics Spill on the Mississippi River But No Accountability in Sight

— By Julie Dermansky (7 min. read) —

When I arrived on Sunday, August 9, scores of tiny plastic pellets lined the sandy bank of the Mississippi River downstream from New Orleans, Louisiana, where they glistened in the sun, not far from a War of 1812 battlefield. These precursors of everyday plastic products, also known as nurdles, spilled from a shipping container that fell off a cargo ship at a port in New Orleans the previous Sunday, August 2.

After seeing photographs by New Orleans artist Michael Pajon published on NOLA.com, I went to see if a cleanup of the spilled plastic was underway. A week after the spill, I saw no signs of a cleanup when I arrived in the early afternoon, but I did watch a group of tourists disembark from a riverboat that docked along the plastic-covered riverbank. By most accounts, the translucent plastic pellets are considered pollution, but government bureaucracy and regulatory technicalities are making accountability for removing these bits of plastic from the river’s banks and waters surprisingly challenging.

Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline Inches Forward, But Opposition Intensifies

— By Nick Cunningham (12 min. read) —

Late one night this past April, four people on off-road vehicles drove into a small, Indigenous village near the town of Blue River in British Columbia, Canada. It was dark and the vehicles drove through deep snow, smashing through wooden signs and barriers that guarded the village of tiny houses, erected in the path of a long-distance oil pipeline that runs from Alberta to the Pacific Coast.

The attackers punched and kicked a man, shouting profanity and racial slurs. One of them stole a truck and used it to mow down a display of red dresses, hung as a memorial to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, who are disproportionally affected by violence. The driver then crashed the truck into one of the houses.

Big Oil Faces Mounting Legal Battles Over Climate Threats to its New England Oil Terminals

— By Dana Drugmand (5 min. read) —

A New England-based environmental law group is taking major oil companies to court, claiming the firms have failed to adapt some of their petroleum storage terminals to withstand increasingly severe storm and flooding events worsened by the climate crisis.

The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) is currently suing both ExxonMobil and Shell in two separate lawsuits brought under federal laws regulating water pollution and hazardous waste, including the Clean Water Act. The cases center around coastal oil terminals and their vulnerability to climate change impacts like sea level rise and heightened storm surge. Exxon operates an oil terminal in Everett, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, that sits along the Mystic River. Shell's terminal is located in Providence, Rhode Island, along the Providence River.

The Bakken Boom Goes Bust With No Money to Clean up the Mess

— By Justin Mikulka (12 min. read) —

More than a decade ago, fracking took off in the Bakken shale of North Dakota and Montana, but the oil rush that followed has resulted in major environmental damage, risky oil transportation without regulation, pipeline permitting issues, and failure to produce profits.

Now, after all of that, the Bakken oil field appears moving toward terminal decline, with the public poised to cover the bill to clean up the mess caused by its ill-fated boom.

SoCalGas, Nation’s Largest Gas Utility, Sues California Over Climate Policy for not 'Maximizing the Benefits' of Gas

— By Dana Drugmand (5 min. read) —

As California works to shift away from fossil fuels to meet its climate goals, one of the state's largest suppliers of fossil energy is fighting tooth-and-nail against this energy transition, even to the point of taking California to court over its energy policy.

Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) recently filed a lawsuit against the California Energy Commission, a state energy policy and planning agency, for allegedly aiming to “substantially eliminate” gas use in the state and violating a California natural gas law.

Campaigners Demand Court Shuts Down Ecuador’s Oil Pipelines After Spill

— By Phoebe Cooke (4 min. read) —

Communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon are calling for an end to “violence against Indigenous peoples and nature” as a trial into a devastating oil spill resumes today.

The Kichwa and Shuar tribes launched a lawsuit against the government and state-owned oil company Petroecuador in April after two pipelines ruptured. Around 27,000 Indigenous people already isolated by COVID-19 were left with little or no access to freshwater and fishing after more than 15,000 barrels of crude oil gushed into the Rivers Coca and Napa and downriver to Peru.

How the UK's Climate Science Deniers Turned Their Attention to COVID-19

— By Zak Derler (16 min. read) —

On December 31, 2019 many of us were reflecting on the past year and thinking about what opportunities lay ahead. Few were paying close attention to early reports of unexplained cases of pneumonia thousands of miles away in Wuhan, the large capital city of China’s Hubei Province.

But less than three months later, on March 23, Boris Johnson was ordering a national lockdown to try and stop that virus, by then known worldwide as COVID-19, from raging across the UK. This came 52 days after the chief medical officer of England had confirmed the nation’s first two cases.

From the Climate Disinformation Database: Malcolm Roberts

Malcolm Roberts is a former Australian Senator for the far-right fringe political party One Nation. Roberts, based in Brisbane, Queensland, is a former coal miner and mining industry consultant. He worked as the volunteer project manager for the Australia-based climate science denial organization The Galileo Movement. In July, Roberts made a moral case for fossil fuels, saying, “If anyone complains about coal, then I'm going to say to them, they're going to starve without coal and they're going to live a miserable life in the dark.”

Read the full profile and browse other individuals and organizations in our Climate Disinformation Database or our new Koch Network Database.