SHADOW PLAY
Wherein a recent walk over a bridge spanning a now dry wash offered a chance at a dimensional portrait.
You can see the effect of the now historic drought along the central coast. We need rain.
IS ANYONE REALLY SURPRISED?
In reviewing data from four states, the Associated Press has learned you can't trust what the oil and gas industry says about ground water contamination.
Records from Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia find many more problems with well water contamination than what industry sources say, that such problems are rare.
There are serious problems and they are spreading as gas and oil drilling and fracking spread. Too bad there isn't a law to crack down on lying corporations and public relations officials. Too bad too that Dick Cheney got away with his criminal conspiracy to allow the lying corporations to skirt clean air and water standards. And while we are lamenting, too bad the justice department hasn't gone after crooked Dick for any number of his corrupt practices, many of which are now documented by authors, historians and the Inspector General's office.
Cheney has lived long enough to see the truth made public about how even George W banned him from the oval office and close contact. I hope he lives long enough to see criminal charges brought against him. He can totter off into the sunset assured that historians will rip his heart out-that would be his original heart, mechanical heart and the one he got when others, more critical and more in the target profile, continued to wait. Too bad no one has investigated how the old buzzard got that new heart.
See you down the trail.
So Tom, tell us how you really think.
ReplyDeleteIn my home state of ND, ground water problems are beginning as production in the Bakken continues to grow. Ina few small towns you can light your tap water on fire. Drilling water is being dumped, the rules are being ignored and a state government with fewer lawyers than one floor of Mobil Exxon's legal offices is headed for trouble.
ReplyDeleteThis is certainly one of your more passionate posts but I can't disagree with anything you've written. In my opinion Dick Cheney is a war criminal and if it were up to me I'd turn him over to the World Court at the Hague.
ReplyDeleteTom, you and I are of a common mind. Someday, over a glass of wine, when it is just the two of us, I'll share a Cheney related story. You might recall that I retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. I'll share with you why that is so.
ReplyDeleteYou, Tom, will be hearing from Buzzards United, LLC, over your disgusting and uncalled-for defamation of character. Let me add that, when you are out-of-doors, you better keep moving,
ReplyDeleteand you best watch those swooping shadows from the skies. Also, I have contacted the mole, gopher, and slug uniones, so be forewarned! Watch out from below! Dick Cheney, indeed! THERE IS SIMPLY NO COMPARISON! (WELL, MAYBE CALIGULA.)
From the Washington Times April 29, 2013 - This is just one example of legitimate counterclaims about the brouhaha over fracking:
ReplyDeleteAfter a 16-month investigation, state regulators Monday said that natural gas fracking, contrary to highly publicized claims, isn’t to blame for high methane levels in three families’ drinking water in a northern Pennsylvania town.
"For fracking proponents, it was another piece of good news. The oil and gas industry still was unwrapping the federal government’s acknowledgment that fracking isn’t nearly as harmful to the environment as it previously claimed. By dramatically lowering its methane emissions estimates from natural gas drilling sites, the Environmental Protection Agency has made it much more difficult to argue that the fracking boom is accelerating climate change.
"The developments Monday in Franklin Forks, Pa., also will make it much more difficult to argue that the wildly successful drilling method is harmful to drinking water.
"The state’s Department of Environmental Protection now says there is no evidence to connect natural gas drilling with high levels of methane in private water wells in the small town, which sits within the Marcellus Shale region, one of the largest known natural gas deposits in the world and exhibit A of how fracking is transforming the American energy landscape.
"The agency specifically says the gas is coming from elsewhere.
“The testing determined that the water samples taken from the private water wells contained gas of similar isotopic makeup to the gas in water samples taken from Salt Springs State Park,” which contains high levels of naturally occurring methane, the DEP said in a statement.
Read more:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/29/pa-environment-agency-debunks-fracking-water-claim/?page=all
According to Wikipedia, fracking has been around since 1947. To my knowledge there has been no validated basis for banning this industry practice. But there was the incident involving the "Gasland Hoax" where Colorado frackers were falsely accused of contaminating Colorado drinking water. While there have been many other claims of pollution, there is no valid evidence and that is why fracking is still allowed at both the state and federal levels, aside from some recent bans by cities and towns. Note that naturally occurring methane gas is evident at ground water levels and time after time, valid finding of gas has been attributed to this naturally occurring gas.
Because of the contribution of this industry practice, the United States can look forward to being independent from Middle Eastern fossil fuel resources. I would love to address the environmental issues of the Keystone pipeline but will wait until another day.
Here in Minnesota, there are huge deposits of the silica sand required for fracking, and the public conrtroversy is over the mining of that sand.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I understand, groundwater contamination is a huge problem with frack mining. Why the heck to we keep imagining that fossil fuels are the future?