class="wwscontentsmaller">by public domain / NOAA
by Walter Brasch
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a special Earth Day edition of my weekly social issues column, Wanderings . The information is from my latest book, Fracking Pennsylvania , an overall look at the nature and consequences of high-pressure horizontal hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking. Even if you are not a Pennsylvanian or living in the recent boom in the Marcellus Shale, fracking is destroying the health of people, livestock, pets, and wild animals; it is impacting the environment and ecological diversity. It is going on across the country, and is about to expand into the urban and agricultural areas of central California. If you don't want your wine, lettuce, or hundreds of other fruits and vegetables to be methane-tinged or to hold traces of radioactive and toxic waste, you might wish to oppose the development of fracking in California.
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The history of energy exploration, mining, and
delivery is best understood in a range from benevolent exploitation to worker
and public oppression. A company comes into an area, leases or buys land in
rural and agricultural areas for mineral rights, increases employment, usually during
a depressed economy, strips the land of its resources, creates health problems
for its workers and those in the immediate area, and then leaves.
It makes no difference if it's timber, oil, coal,
nuclear, or natural gas. All energy sources are developed to move mankind into
a new era; all energy sources are developed to bring as much profit to cor porations as quickly as possible, often by
exploiting the workers.
Before the settlement of Pennsylvania in the 1680s,
more than 20 million acres of forests covered almost all of the land. During
the latter half of the nineteenth century, the lumber industry had clear-cut
several million acres, leading Pennsylvania into an era that rivaled even the
Gold Rush in California. By World War I, the companies had stripped the land,
taken their profit, and then moved on, leaving devastation in their wake. Only
when the people finally realized that destroying the forests led to widespread
erosion and flooding did they begin to reforest the state. Almost a century
after the lumber companies denuded the forests, the natural gas industry, with
encouragement from the state, have leased more than 150,000 acres of forests
for wells, pipelines, and roads.
Between 1859, when an economical method to drill for
oil was developed near Titusville, Pa., and 1933, the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal," Pennsylvania,
under almost continual Republican administration, was among the nation's
most corrupt states. The robber barons of the timber, oil, coal, steel, and
transportation industries, enjoying and contributing to the Industrial Age of
the 19th century, essentially bought their
right to be unregulated. In addition to widespread bribery, the energy
industries, especially coal, assured the election of preferred candidates by
giving pre-marked ballots to workers, many of whom were immigrants and couldn't
read English.
When the coal companies determined underground mining
was no longer profitable, they began strip mining, shearing the tops of hills
and mountains to expose coal, causing environmental damage that could never be
repaired even by the most aggressive
reforestation program. Pennsylvania is the only state producing
anthracite coal, and is fifth in the nation in production of all coal, behind
Wyoming, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Texas.
John Wilmer, an attorney who formerly worked in the
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), in a letter to the
editor of The New York Times in March
2011, explained that "Pennsylvania's shameful legacy of corruption and
mismanagement caused 2,500 miles of streams to be totally dead from acid mine drainage; left many miles of scarred
landscape; enriched the coal barons; and impoverished the local citizens." His
words are a warning about what is happening in the natural gas fields.
Every method of extracting energy
from the earth yields death and injury to
the workers and residents. More than 100,000 coal miners were killed, often
from structural failures within the mines, gas poisonings, explosions, and roof
collapse. Long-term catastrophic effects from
mining also include pneumoconiosis, also known as Black Lung Disease,
the result of the inhalation of coal dust within the mines. Worker and resident
protection often don't occur until decades
after a new energy source is mined. For coal mining, although there were
several protections brought about by the United Mine Workers, it wasn't until
1969 when the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act became law that health
and environmental protection advanced. Congress improved the Act in 1977 and
2006.
The nation's first commercial nuclear power plant to
develop peaceful uses of energy was the Shippingport Atomic Power Station,
along the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pa., about 35 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. The plant went online in Decem ber 1957 and stayed in production through October
1982. During the last four decades of the twentieth century, the nation
built 132 nuclear plants, with politicians and Industry claiming nuclear energy
was clean, safe, efficient, and would lessen the nation's ties to oil. Chernobyl,
Three Mile Island, Fukushima Daiichi, and thousands of violations issued by the
Nuclear Regulatory Agency, have shown that even with strict operating
guidelines, nuclear energy isn't as clean, safe, and as efficient as claimed.
Like all other energy industries, nuclear power isn't infinite. Most plants
have a 40--50 year life cycle. After that, the plant becomes so radioactive that
it must be sealed. Pennsylvania is second in the nation, behind Illinois, in
production of electricity from nuclear reactors.
In the early 21st century, the natural gas industry
follows the model of the other energy corporations, and uses the same rhetoric.
The Heartland Institute, a think tank which says it exists to " promote free-market
solutions to social and economic problems, claims,
" Shale
extraction has proven remarkably safe for the environment and the newfound
abundance of domestic natural gas reserves promises unprecedented energy
prosperity and security."
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