Abrahm Lustgarten is a former staff writer and contributor for Fortune, and has written for Salon, Esquire, the Washington Post and the New York Times since receiving his master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2003. He is the author of the book China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, a project that was funded in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Articles
April 21, 2:33 p.m.
The natural gas industry must develop regulations that scale up drilling safely and learn from the mistakes made in the United States.
April 12, 1:39 p.m.
Evidence continues to mount saying that natural gas is not be as clean as we like to think.
April 11, 12:01 a.m.
Pennsylvania’s governor has asked C. Alan Walker to promote job growth by helping companies get the permits that they need. But Walker’s personal business history raises a crucial question: How might an anti-regulation coal mogul affect the state’s environmental regulations for the Marcellus Shale?
March 30, 6:46 p.m.
A leaked memo says oil and gas inspectors can no longer issue violations to drilling companies in the Marcellus Shale without first getting the approval of top officials.
March 18, 8:30 p.m.
The long-term health and environmental impacts of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis should be largely contained to the area around the plant and a limited population.
March 9, 11:50 p.m.
Pennsylvania’s governor has appointed an energy industry executive to oversee the state’s job creation effort and wants to give him unusual authority to streamline state permits, including for gas drilling.
March 9, 1:21 p.m.
Benjamin Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the Environmental Protection Agency in the George W. Bush administration, ponders criticism leveled at a 2004 study on hydraulic fracturing and suggests that it’s now time for Congress and the EPA to take another look at the practice.
March 8, 8:06 p.m.
Governor’s proposed budget would cut environmental protections and streamline regulatory processes to encourage job creation.
Feb. 25, 7 a.m.
When the well water on Louis Meeks’ ranch turned brown and oily, he suspected that the thousands of natural gas wells dotting the once-empty Wyoming landscape were somehow to blame. The hard part was proving it. Meeks’ struggle to get the energy companies to take responsibility, meticulously documented through three years of investigative reporting by ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten, coincides with a national uproar over the oil and gas drilling process called hydraulic fracturing. The technology, which is explored in the Oscar-nominated film “Gasland,” promises to open large new energy supplies, perhaps at the expense of the nation’s water.
Feb. 2, 7:14 p.m.
After three members of Congress found that drilling companies used more than 32 million gallons of diesel fuel to hydraulically fracture oil and gas wells between 2005 and 2009, the industry is fighting back, not by denying the accusation, but by arguing that the EPA never fully regulated the potentially environmentally dangerous practice in the first place.
Jan. 31, 7:52 p.m.
ProPublica responds to a pro-drilling industry group that questioned the veracity of its story on greenhouse gas emissions from gas fields
Jan. 25, 9:34 a.m.
New emissions estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency cast doubt on the assumption that gas offers a quick and easy solution to climate change.
Jan. 14, 3:46 p.m.
The Interior Department wades into controversy as it mulls whether to require drilling companies to disclose the chemicals they use to frack wells drilled on public lands.
Jan. 7, 2:09 p.m.
Last May, President Obama established the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling to unravel the circumstances that led to the April 20, 2010 disaster in the Gulf. A sneak-peek chapter made public on Wednesday didn’t actually conclude anything new.
Nov. 9, 2010, 1:13 p.m.
Testing has shown that methane gas in water wells across the country matches the methane being drilled for natural gas supplies. But a woman quoted in a New York Times report hinted that in Pennsylvania—despite state official’s conclusions to the contrary—that may not be the case.
Nov. 5, 2010, 5:08 p.m.
Following up on our earlier reporting, we explain what it means that 148 of BP’s pipelines in Alaska have been ranked for “failure” by BP inspectors, according to documents we received from BP workers.
Oct. 29, 2010, 9:39 a.m.
Full disclosure on the questions put to BP and how the company responded.
Oct. 26, 2010, 11:32 a.m.
An EPA attorney tried for 12 years to make oil giant BP operate safely. Now, recently retired, she says BP should be banned from doing business with the U.S. government. A ProPublica and PBS FRONTLINE investigation.
Oct. 26, 2010, 11:30 a.m.
