I love you Texas, but you're dirty

So an environmental lobbyist group I used to canvass for is (alongside the Sierra Club) suing ExxonMobil for dumping out of its Baytown refinery over a million pounds of toxic air pollutants per year since 2005. Apparently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been bugging the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to tighten up its regulations on air quality and enforcement of current laws, but where government agencies drag their feet, hippy activists usually tend to bang their drums and whine a lot. "Hey, look at us! We're disgruntled! Grrr." This does not seem to be the case for Environment Texas and the Sierra club, however. The lawsuit is set to be filed in federal district court later this summer, and by the looks of the evidence that's been aired against ExxonMobile, BP is hardly alone in the department of negligence. According to the TCEQ, 85% of incidents at the three Baytown facilities were categorized as avoidable or preventable. Classy.

Check out this article for more info, if you aren't too busy picking oil blobs off your toes at the beach, or hacking up a lung in Baytown.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2215/