Twenty Years Ago Today

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Twenty years after Exxon Valdez and we’re still shipping it, pumping it, burning it.
Twenty years since James Hansen published a prophetic paper foreseeing what we’re now experiencing. A commenter from my earlier Exxon Valdez post lives on a 30,000 acre XOM oil lease in South Texas and made this film, which I like. This is what he/she had to say:

They dump all the time and don’t care. It’s horrible. Our ground water is full of BTEX and lots of clusters of leukemia around their old leases. The Railroad Commission turns a blind eye. I made a webpage: http://www.RanchoLosMalulos.com. I go around the lease and post stuff so you can all enjoy the soap opera of watching XOM dump. We sample stuff and put the lab results, have professional ground water monitoring wells done, it’s so filthy. Exxon Mobil seems to get away with a lot in this world. Their commercials make me cringe.

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GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

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