Tag: oil

As the current oil boom attests. West Texas’ oil deposits come with high social and environmental costs.

What it was like living in one of America’s most patriarchal societies.

Imagine being the only woman living with 200 roughnecks — risking your personal safety every day — just to make a buck.

David Hanson, writing for the Bitter Southerner, helps residents of Standard Heights, Baton Rouge, tell their story of a town next to an Exxon plant — explosions, sinkholes, toxic sludge, and a everyday life that has to go on, regardless.

In 1953 the United States was still new to Iran. Many Iranians thought of Americans as friends, supporters of the fragile democracy they had spent half a century trying to build. It was Britain, not the United States, that they demonized as the colonialist oppressor that exploited them. Since the early years of the twentieth […]

Oil production in the Bakken region of North Dakota has topped 1 million barrels a day. The seven-year boom has flooded the area with new residents seeking their fortunes, and many journalists have also joined the labor force, sending dispatches from the new Wild West.

On “being a woman in a place where women could be in demand as much as the oil”

A trip to an oil boomtown transformed by thousands of young men arriving to find work:  I’d heard Williston was a magical place. A small town where the recession didn’t exist, where you could make six figures driving a truck, and where oil bubbles straight up from the Earth’s Bakken layer like water from an […]

First in a series on John Bolenbaugh, an oil cleanup worker who said he was fired for refusing to cover up oil from a spill that put millions of gallons of tar sands crude into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Complicating matters is his personality and his own criminal record: Armed with a digital camera and a […]

The long road to reform the government’s Minerals Management Service, three years after its “sex, drugs and oil” scandal: One thing that the agency hasn’t done is put to rest the skepticism of its whistleblowers. They claim that schemes similar to the royalty-avoidance techniques at issue in the False Claim Act lawsuits are still being […]