Environment & Energy

Founded in 1977, GAP has its roots in raising significant concerns about the environment, human health and safety to promote and protect the public interest. Our first cases involved providing much-needed legal support to employees in the nuclear power industry who put public safety before their own careers to expose the truth. Some of these early clients provided an invaluable public service by sounding alarms that prevented catastrophic disaster. Whistleblowers took great risks in the late 1970s and 1980s, some suffered serious repercussions, as there were no laws or regulations protecting them from retaliation, inside and outside the workplace. GAP has worked steadily over the years to help bring about public policies that provide a host of whistleblower protections for employees in both the public and private sectors. Forty years later, GAP is still providing legal support for courageous truth-tellers who come forward to expose serious government and corporate failings that threaten public health, safety, and the environment, and to right egregious wrongdoings.

Providing the energy that fuels our economy can be a dirty, dangerous business. The extraction, processing, transport and combustion of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) poses safety hazards; results in the release of hazardous wastes and toxic substances into the environment, often degrading land and water bodies; and causes emissions of air pollutants, including carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial method used to extract oil and gas, ruins landscapes by loading them with toxics and has now been shown to cause earthquakes. Offshore oil drilling poses the risk of blowouts like we saw with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the summer of 2010 (See GAP’s ongoing investigation into this unprecedented disaster here). Nuclear power is fraught with problems as well: though the safety record is better now than it was several decades ago, there are still risks as our fleet of power plants ages, and we still don’t have a safe method for disposing of highly radioactive waste. The rapidly escalating threat of climate change and associated impacts demands that we transition to a clean, renewable energy economy. Whistleblowers who bring the truth to light regarding the hazards and problems of continuing to rely on hazardous, largely antiquated energy systems and fuel sources have done much to help engender key public policy reforms in the form of new laws and regulations, greater public awareness, and sometimes even significant actions such as the shutdown of a facility. 

Read more here: 

Climate Change & Nuclear Power

Extraction & Transport of Fossil Fuels

GAP Know Your Rights Campaigns & Public Interest Investigations