If you're a landowner being courted for your mineral rights,
you may hear a lot of things but miss hearing others. You'll hear that fracking, with its noise,
pounding, dust, lights, fumes, and trucks, lasts but a few short weeks. Surely such distress could be tolerated for a
few weeks. What you don't hear is the
words "per frack". Since one site can
contain twenty wells or more and each well can be fracked and fracked
again, some landowners begin to feel that they may have been had.
You'll hear that there are no proven cases of groundwater
contamination from fracking, and you'll see pictures of people igniting their
faucets. The problem, Goldstein says, is
in the focus. Drillers focus at the
point of fracture, a mile or more beneath us, a point so removed it could not
possibly foul groundwater. (That is
debatable elsewhere.) When casings fail,
when hoses break, when liquids splatter, that isn't fracking; those are
accidents. Or incidents. Whatever they are, they are part of the
process of hydrofracturing, and some of these incidents most assuredly have
contaminated ground- or surface waters.
Anyone making the assertion
that fracking cannot contaminate water, is, to put it kindly, equivocating.
You'll hear industry profess that benzene is only one
percent of fracking fluid. Doesn't sound
like much. Let's see--One percent of five
million gallons of water equals fifty thousand gallons. Per frack.
That's quite a quaff of benzene. The
legal limit of benzene in drinking water is five parts per billion and there's
a reason for that (the reason being that, back in the good old days, people in the
EPA actually did feel a duty to protect the public health, and corporations
complied if grudgingly; how times have changed).
You'll hear that chemicals going into the ground will be disclosed
so that communities can get baseline measures of that which must be
monitored. That was planned for public
land, as the Bureau
of Land Management snarled its intent to impose strict new rules for
fracking. Then, without warning, BLM untoothed
itself by removing that requirement. As
to pulling teeth, its own, it was not done yet.
Rather than requiring drillers to test the integrity of cement casings
in every well, BLM will consider it done when a driller samples one. Surely one sampling suffices.
Put that into your public trust and stoke it.
Will states step in to protect public health? In Pennsylvania, drillers must disclose to
any health professional who inquires the identity and amount of any chemicals
they use. But in return, such health
professionals must sign confidentiality
agreements that prevent them from revealing that information to anyone else--particularly
patients. It's only fair, isn't it? It's
the law
in certain states and, if the industry
has its way, gag orders will become ubiquitous.
In Pennsylvania that provision was not in the original version of the
legislation; it was added later, and many never even knew. That's what happens when lobbyists write
legislation and ride legislators like chattel.
At the national
level, following the oil-and-gas industry's exemption from the EPA's Toxics
Release Inventory (informing communities about what companies are inserting in
their air, soil, or water), as well as from EPA regulation under the Safe
Drinking Water Act, EPA has asked drillers pretty please to release more
information about the chemicals they use.
Which they're happy to provide.
Except, of course, for trade secrets.
That's what happens when corporations own Congress.
Goldstein has one five-letter recommendation for anyone
courted by would-be frackers:
stall. Techniques are improving; practices
and safety are getting better; we have solid oceans of shale beneath us; so be
patient; be coy, but be available. And
then, when the time is right, go for it.
That's his advice.
Despite the record of previous speakers in this series, I
thought an environmental toxicologist would be a little more circumspect about
the effects of fossil fuels not only on public but on planetary health.
Maybe there's a reason that this man and the other invited speakers
in this "neutral" exploration struck me as being so industry-friendly--because they
are. After all, a sponsor of this event
is AirWaterGas.org. The emphasis is on
Gas and the joke's on me. The moderator
of these talks, Patty Limerick, is the project's outreach leader. She has
written books on water in the west, but somewhere along the line her water was flavored--or
was it fracked--with Kool-Aid.
There is of course another possibility. Maybe all these people who, despite what is happening in front of us--freak-weather calamities, melting glaciers, overfished and poisoned oceans, slashed, burned, clear-cut, beetle-killed trees, dying amphibians and bees, mass animal extinction, acidification and ozone holes, desertification and floods, resource wars just starting, human overuse and overpopulation and corporatization and overconsumption going full tilt--have I left anything out?--those who despite all that now would unearth and exploit yet another now-abundant fossil fuel, pushing Peak Oil further out, warming the air that much more, sealing our fate and the fate of most life on this plundered planet--Maybe those people are right, and those of us who consider that continued and enhanced dependence on fossil fuels is unmitigated aggregate insanity, a cataclysmic and grievous error, the shameless unnecessary end of life as we know it, maybe it is we who are hopelessly benighted. You know where you stand.
For this final talk on whether living near
hydrofracturing activity would put our health at risk, well, who's to say. But I'll wager that Bernie Goldstein--and every
other speaker in this series--lives no where near hydrofracturing activities.
***
This article emerged
from the last of nine planned lectures held by the Center of the American West,
CU Continuing Education, Boulder County, and the AirWaterGas Research Network
(of the National Science Foundation/Sustainability Research Network) on various
aspects of hydraulic fracturing.
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