Get in touch
For sensitive tips, I use Signal. You can also send encrypted email using my PGP public key. For everything else, email me at alexlubben@gmail.com or alex.lubben@theadvocate.com.
Selected work
Sinking into the Gulf
For The Times-Picayune, I built an original dataset to find that more than 3,600 oil wells drilled on land along Louisiana's coast have sunk into the Gulf of Mexico as the land around them disappeared. Many are leaking. Hundreds may fall to taxpayers to clean up. The state doesn't track them.
Harm's Way
As a fellow with Columbia Journalism Investigations, I co-authored an investigation into the failures of climate relocation programs across the United States.
Will the nation's first climate relocation unravel?
In 2016, a Louisiana tribal community became the focus of the first federally funded climate relocation in the United States. Nearly a decade later, I visited the residents in their new homes and found that property taxes, insurance costs, and utility bills are threatening to unravel the program. One resident is selling his truck to pay his tax bill. A Nebraska company has already bought a lien on his house.
Budget cuts scale back New Orleans levee safety inspections
Federal budget cuts were quietly set to halt the Army Corps of Engineers' annual inspections of New Orleans' levees, the drive-along safety checks established after Katrina's catastrophic failures flooded 80% of the city. The story revealed that the inspections had already been scaled back: what once involved multiple engineers and a lengthy report had become a two-person job with a two-page writeup. Within a week of publication, the Corps secured funding to restore them.
Scientists thought they'd wiped out an invasive fish. It's back.
Tilapia escaped from a Freeport-McMoRan corporate fishing pond in Plaquemines Parish, likely during Hurricane Katrina. The company, which never had a permit for the fish, paid up to $1 million to poison the waterways and kill them all in 2009. It appeared to work, until a UNO biologist dropped a cast net into a canal and pulled up five on his first throw.
Inside the "White Gold" Rush to Mine American Lithium
I went to Nevada to meet the modern-day prospectors on the hunt for lithium in the American West. There's a rush underway and private companies are making money speculating on the high concentrations of lithium on public lands — but no new mines are being built. It's a lithium rush without any lithium.
Federal reports describe dire conditions at psychiatric hospital in Mandeville
Federal inspection reports I obtained revealed dire conditions inside Northlake Behavioral Health, a psychiatric hospital in Mandeville that was repeatedly cited for placing patients' lives in "immediate jeopardy." The state later put the hospital on a provisional license.
Need Food Stamps in New York? Come Back in a Few Months
Data showed that counties across New York force families to wait months for food stamps — a violation of federal law. Anyone who applies for food stamps is owed a response within 30 days but in some parts of the state, more than half of SNAP applications were processed illegally late.
Houston's solution to climate change is to force low-income people to move
I covered a mandatory relocation program in Texas — the first of its kind — that sought to force low-income residents to move as flood risk escalated. Following our reporting, Harris County increased relocation assistance for some undocumented residents from $30,000 to up to $230,000.
More work
Times-Picayune
- New Orleans levee police creating SWAT-style team with semi-automatic rifles. Critics are concerned.
- New Orleans levee board sees rising turmoil after resignations, allegation police chief was punched
- 'Hit me': Tensions boil over at New Orleans flood protection agency over controversial changes
- Louisiana's orphaned oil well count hits record high
- New Orleans artist Hannah Chalew imagines a postapocalyptic Louisiana through reclaimed oil wells
- Hundreds of oil platforms are rusting in Louisiana waters. The state doesn't track them.
- Dozens more cases await after verdict holds oil industry responsible for Louisiana coastal damage
- Supreme Court weighs Chevron case on Louisiana coast
- Louisiana could ban climate lawsuits against oil companies
- The Louisiana lawyer suing Big Oil is no tree hugger
- Another oil major settles in Louisiana's coastal lawsuits
- Louisiana sewage plants discharge to swamps. Should they?
- Northshore homes are leaking raw sewage and polluting Lake Pontchartrain. Will a new law help?
- A mosquito-eating fish faces a bizarre mutation. Is the northshore's sewage to blame?
- State gives troubled Mandeville psychiatric hospital one last chance to stay open
- Army Corps restores funding for New Orleans levee checks
- Survivors of Louisiana I-55 crash recall the terror. — Part of coverage winning 2nd place, deadline reporting, Green Eyeshade Awards
- Extinct? Not extinct? Die-hards refuse to give up on ivory-billed woodpecker.
VICE News
- We're buying into a giant lie about plastic
- Demoralized EPA employees brace for 'wholesale war on the environment'
- Hear Trump's judge pick admit he discriminates against gay people
- The Keystone oil spill no one's talking about will be nearly impossible to clean up
- PG&E's blackouts are making it harder to measure California's wildfire air quality
Freelance
- Climate change could wipe $108 billion from U.S. property market, study finds — NBC News
- The climate won't stop changing in 2100 — The Nation
- Changing the climate — Jewish Currents (review of Naomi Klein's On Fire)
- The founder's dilemma — The Awl
- Consider the shroom — SSENSE