President Obama has made another huge concession to developers and drillers this week. He has abandoned a pledge to restore eligibility for federal wilderness protection to millions of acres of undeveloped land in the West. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who was himself viewed as a decidedly anti-environmental Senator before being picked by Obama, announced that millions of acres will no longer be designated as “wild lands.”
As with civil libertarians, environmentalists have long been dismissed by the White House as having no where to go in the next election. Accordingly, Obama continues to rollback on environmental protections such as his radical expansion of coal permits as well as his opening up of pristine areas of the East Coast to oil exploration.
The effort to protect the lands was blocked by Congress but environmentalists wanted the Administration to fight on this ground. Various business groups and conservative members of Congress heralded the President’s move. At risk are some of the most pristine untouched lands left in the country.
Source: Yahoo
Arkansas has banned fracking until further notice until earthquake storms near fracking sites can be studied further.
http://theintelhub.com/2011/01/07/fracking-the-life-out-of-arkansas-and-beyond/
Research was conducted by four scientists at Duke University who found levels of flammable methane gas in drinking water wells were at dangerous levels when those water supplies were close to natural gas wells. The gas detected at high levels in the water was the same type of gas that energy companies were extracting from thousands of feet underground, strongly implying that the gas is seeping through faults and fractures.
“Our results show evidence for methane contamination of shallow drinking water systems in at least three areas of the region and suggest important environmental risks accompanying shale gas exploration worldwide,”
Fracking exacerbates natural faults and fractures, allowing higher levels of methane to get into underground water supplies. The implications are enormous, especially for aquifers that supply major cities which range from New York to Los Angeles.
http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/nick-pro/hydrofracking/Jackson%20et%20al.%20Fracking%20Whitepaper%202011%20Final.pdf/view?searchterm=None
Several other recent reports warn of the dangers of natural gas fracking. A study released in March 2011 by scientists at Cornell University estimated the greenhouse gas emissions associated with fracked gas are 20% to 50% higher than emissions from coal. A January 2011 research study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showed that methane released as a result of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas were 9,000 times greater than reported previously.
http://www.sustainablefuture.cornell.edu/news/attachments/Howarth-EtAl-2011.pdf
Josh Fox has made a documentary that makes some pretty alarming claims about gas drilling across the US. But as is often the case when these claims are examined they do not stand up to scrutiny.
Fox’ documentary Gasland, claims that fracking, a way of drilling for natural gas, has polluted water and endangered lives. One of the most alarming scenes is when he lights water that residents claim has been polluted by fracking. It is dramatic and at first glance seems like a slam dunk. I mean they can light their water – it is polluted and there is gas drilling nearby. It must be responsible.
But then a little digging reveals a few inconvenient facts. A 1976 study by the Colorado Division of Water found that this area was plagued with gas in the water problems back then. And it was naturally occurring.
As the report stated there was “troublesome amounts of methane” in the water decades before fracking began. It seems that in geographical areas gas has always been in the water.
But Josh Fox knew this and chose not to put it in Gasland.
I asked him about this omission at a recent screening at Northwestern University in Chicago.
He said he had not included these facts that questioned his alarmism because “they were not relevant.” He also dropped the bombshell that I had not been aware of that there were media reports of people lighting their water as far back as 1936. Again this was not included in Gasland because it was not relevant.
Perhaps Josh you should include all the evidence and let people figure out what is relevant and what is not.
http://www.noteviljustwrong.com/General/gasland-director-hides-full-facts.html
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton urged cities and the World Bank to work on curbing methane emissions from landfills and charcoal, saying those steps first would buy time in the fight against global warming.
Methane has 25 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide, also known as CO2.
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/06/01/bill-clinton-methane-capture-could-be-goldmine-in-global-warming-fight/
and my all time favorite
“Door to Hell” in Turkmenistan.
Gasland director hides full facts
Filmmaker and journalist Phelim McAleer asks Josh Fox, the director of Gasland, some inconvenient questions about the accuracy of his Oscar-nominated documentary.
“There were media reports of people lighting their water as far back as 1936”
Distinction Between In-Situ Biogenic Gas and Migrated Thermogenic Gas in Ground Water, Denver Basin, Colorado: ABSTRACT
Dudley D. Rice, Lewis R. Ladwig
AAPG Bulletin
Volume 67 (1983)
Methane-rich gas commonly occurs in ground water in the Denver basin, southern Weld County, Colorado. The gas generally is in solution in the ground water of the aquifer. However, exsolution resulting from reduction to hydrostatic pressure during water production may create free gas, which can accumulate in wells and buildings and pose an explosion and fire hazard.
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” got a clean bill of health this week in the first scientific look at the safety of the oil and production practice.
Published: May 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/05/13/13greenwire-baffled-about-fracking-youre-not-alone-44383.html
Bdaman,
Here’s a link to a Think Progress article published two years after your Think Progess article:
Bringing Fracking to the Surface: More Scrutiny Needed on Natural Gas Development
By Joe Romm on Jun 3, 2011
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/03/235970/bringing-fracking-to-the-surface-more-scrutiny-needed-on-natural-gas-development/
Excerpt:
New studies point to problems
Adding urgency to the important task of answering some of the fundamental questions surrounding natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing are new studies into methane contamination of domestic water wells near drilling operations, as well as conflicting inquiries into whether using natural gas to produce electricity will significantly reduce carbon emissions relative to coal.
A new Duke University study revealed that drinking water wells within 3,000 feet of natural gas drilling operations had 17 times the levels of methane contamination than water wells farther away from gas development. While the study did not have data on baseline methane contamination levels in the drinking supplies prior to the onset of drilling for gas, it lends credence to numerous complaints by landowners that drilling has led to methane intrusion into their water supplies and homes.
Methane contamination of water wells can occur when the cement and steel casing on natural gas wells fails, as it did last year on a Chesapeake Energy well in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. Sixteen domestic water wells were contaminated in that incident, leading to a $1 million fine levied on Chesapeake by Pennsylvania regulators.
Meanwhile, the argument over the true lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of natural gas is intensifying with the recent release of a National Energy Technology Laboratory study that reaches far different conclusions than one by Cornell University researchers released just a few weeks earlier that found natural gas could be just as bad, or worse, than coal.
The NETL study found that when used for electricity, gas is 50 percent cleaner in terms of greenhouse gas pollution over a 20-year time period and 54 percent cleaner over a century.
Otteray,
To some people ignorance is bliss.
Weather is local, climate is global. There is micrometerology, one of my interests, because understanding micrometerology has kept me alive while flying. There is general meterology and there is climatology.
As far as the arguments presented here by bdaman and Roco, they commonly use “begging the question” and “appeal to ignorance” fallacies, examples of which can be found above.
sorry, system glitch
tobacco . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . climate change
Does not cause cancer . . Not happening, it snowed in January
Not that bad . . . . . . . . . Not caused by man
smokers fault. . Its a GOOD THING! it was warmer when dinos ruled!
OK it kills & is highly addictive but companies shouldn’t be held accountable . . . . TBD – those that survive the climate apocalypse
will have some stories to tell
Bdaman shows the typical ‘fallback when exposed’ tactic the corporatists use when they are losing to reality.
Tobacco AGW
Does not cause cancer Not happening, it snowed in January
Not that bad
so all weather is local? Exactly.
Bdaman:
they had grapes in Greenland? Seriously? They don’t anymore, I wonder if that is because of global warming?
If it snows its global warming, if it rains its global warming. It’s really nuanced and only super smart people can figure it out. So when it snowed after the volcanic eruptions in the early 1800’s was that terragenic global warming er cooling er who knows?
Bdaman, apparently you did not wade through the scientific documents. Understandable if you are not trained in atmospheric sciences and quantum physics. That is very turgid reading.
Can you spell R-E-G-I-O-N-A-L? Those studies from Stanford and Columbia make clear the atmospheric and climate data only encompasses the area between the Ural Mountains and Greenland. Data do not exist for the whole planet at that time, so we do not know the causes, nor do we know how extensive that difference in climate might have been. Dr. Marston makes it clear; however, at the present time only greenhouse warming can explain our current drift toward warming on a global scale. That quantum physics model suggests it could not have happened on a global scale, but likely happened regionally in the past. We know, for example, that when things get warmer, ice melting in the Arctic cools the Gulf Stream Current which in turn causes cooling in the area affected by the GSC. That is why we may see unusual weather patterns of cold, drought and storms in areas where those are unusual, or if common, with an intensity and frequency out of the ordinary. One or two years of study will not do it, but over a few years, trends are seen and can be evaluated.
Bdaman,
BTW, I would be thrilled if we could extract natural gas from shale without polluting ground water or causing other environmental problems. Maybe stricter regulations about what types of chemicals companies can use in the fracking process should be enforced.
Bdaman,
I did a lot of research before I wrote up my post about fracking. I included links to approximately twenty-five sources that I read before writing it.
Check these documents out. I originally included a link to them in my post on fracking.
Documents: Natural Gas’s Toxic Waste
The New York Times reviewed more than 3,000 pages of documents obtained through open records requests of state and federal agencies and visited a number of offices that oversee gas drilling in the state of Pennsylvania. The Times said that it made the most significant documents available—along with annotations.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/27/us/natural-gas-documents-1-intro.html