Environmentalists have been fighting the expanding use of fracking operations in the United States as a harmful practice, particularly for water contamination. The practice involves injecting millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand deep underground to crack shale formations to extract oil and gas. Not only does it use a huge amount of water in areas of water shortage but the chemicals contaminate both surface and underground water resources. Now a study in the journal Endocrinology has found a linkage to chemicals that have been linked to infertility, birth defects and cancer as well as elevated levels of the hormone-disrupting chemicals in the Colorado River.
The danger to people in these areas has been routinely denied by the oil and gas lobby as well as members of Congress and state legislators who have advanced the interests of the fracking industry. Worse yet, some current laws exempt fracking from protections for safe drinking water and energy companies do not have to disclose the chemicals they use if they consider that information a trade secret.
The team in the study tested for endocrine-disrupting chemicals and found that, out of 39 water samples collected at five drilling sites, 89% showed estrogenic properties, 41% were anti-estrogenic, 12% were androgenic and 46% were anti-androgenic. The chemical found in the sample can interfere with human sex hormones.
The response from the industry was predictable. Katie Brown, a spokeswoman with the industry advocacy group Energy In Depth, dismissed the study as “inflammatory.” With a study showing a danger to people and birth defects, the industry and its lobbyists respond with a shrug and a dismissive comment. Politicians are also conspicuously silent. These same politicians celebrate “family values” but it appears that birth defects in families does not fall within the scope of such concerns.
There may be counter-arguments to be made to these concerns but what concerns me is the success of this lobby in cutting off this debate. I would like to see a substantive response to this report, but I fear that we are not going to have a full public debate on the risks of this expanding form of extraction.
Source: LA Times
I have to agree with NS and Tlimey. I think that in some places fracking is good and has few deleterious effects. Where I am in south Texas, there is damn little population to impact if the fracking is sloppy. You also have to understand that the producers LOSE money if they waste precious water and chemicals. They first and foremost have a BIG economic incentive to NOT screw things up.
This is a scientific question that should be judged on a scientific basis as to the hazards of fracking. I am quite tired of the alarmists crying wolf all the time about everything. The problem in Texas is that there is NO agency that can make a decent judgment on this since the Railroad Commission is totally controlled and run for the oil industry. That is why I am in favor of the EPA or the Energy Dept making the call on what and where and how this should be done. I also have to admit that my own property may be adversely affected since I do not own the mineral rights under my land and I sit on prime oil territory. I am not opposed to this as long as it is done safely and observes MY rights as well. Of course if left to the state of Texas and the GOP that means I will be screwed. So in Texas, I may well be screwed, but I am old, and if I have to take my own measures to defend myself and my rights, I will do it myself with what I need to do. As Malcolm X said, by any means necessary.
“Nationwide, fracking is driving an oil and natural gas boom. Energy companies are using the procedure to extract previously unreachable fossil fuels locked within deep rock. The industry is touting the potential of fracking in California to tap the largest oil shale formation in the continental United States, containing 64% of the nation’s deep-rock oil deposits.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me … 1157.story
I have seen a news report out of Iowa where once verdant fields and farms have been destroyed by those that want the sand for fracking. Also, noticing that the source of this article was the LA Times I clicked on it because fracking in CA has become a hot button issue. CA has over 54,000 fracked wells with 56 regulators and 29,000 deep injection wells as of 2011, the latest figures. In southern CA they are fracking for oil and in northern CA for gas. All of this is before the oil and gas industries mounted their campaign to extract from the Monterey Shale that runs, roughly, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. They are fracking on and drilling deep injection wells right on top of major and minor faults and are backing a plan to “save the Delta” by building two 40′ diameter tunnels to give southern CA more water.
This was in Rolling Stone Mag. in 2010:
http://abcalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Affirming-GASLAND.pdf
This is what happens when you have a spineless president… who was born without a set of balls on him!
It isn’t just chemicals associated with “fracking” that folks in the US (and elsewhere) should concern themselves with as on average there are over 75,000 untested and non-disclosed chemicals used as ingredients found in household cleaners, industrial solvents, pesticides, etc.
http://www.reduce.org/toxics
traveling limey 1, December 18, 2013 at 2:41 pm
… Fracking is saving our economy …
======================
Pray tell who “our” is other than the Terrarists?
No bias in this study surely.
Don’t be a loonie, Darren Smith. Fracking is saving our economy in spite of QE (printing money not based on production) & other suppressive economic practices lauded by our politicians. But yes, care must be taken & fracking cannot be done everywhere & will have to be prevented or banned in some areas.
Elaine, I’m presently visiting my sister in a neighboring county to Trempealeau county. The frac sand mines have not been a boon to the counties here and folks are getting increasingly upset over the mining and all that it brings. During summertime we were on an Amish farm, buying produce when we heard several explosions coming from nearby sand mines, it was enough to rattle the windows and disturb the farm animals. The dust is heavy over the mines, the trucks use the roads day and night past frams, with loads of sand. The huge lights shine over the mines at night in what would normally be pristine farm land and forested areas.
The time is now to end this practice.
The specific psychological impairment at work:
(Convergence – Fear of Death Syndrome, quoting Monbiot). The greatest danger fraking presents is, like the Tar Sands and any other fossil fuel, the use of it after it is extracted.
Burning it is deadly.
GASLAND Trailer 2010
Scott Walker’s Sand Grab: Wisconsin Wants a Piece of the Fracking Boom, No Matter Who Gets Hurt
BY MOLLY REDDEN
8/21/13
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114320/frac-sand-mining-wisconsin-rides-fracking-boom
Excerpt:
On the night that he was elected governor of Wisconsin in 2010, a beaming Scott Walker told the hundreds of supporters sandwiched into Waukesha’s little Country Springs Hotel ballroom that his state was “open for business.” It was shorthand for his promise to slash taxes and lay waste to state regulations, all to create a quarter of a million new jobs by the end of his fourth year in office. But halfway through Walker’s term, Wisconsin had added only a quarter of the promised jobs, it ranked 44th in private-sector job creation, and private-sector wages were falling at twice the average rate nationally. A non-partisan audit of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., a job-creation agency Walker started, found it repeatedly broke state laws in its first year. Still, among the detritus of the Republican governor’s job creation efforts, one sector of Wisconsin’s economy has been roaring: the sand-mining industry…
But public health advocates aren’t so sure about that, worrying instead that the frac sand boom will have broad, lasting environmental consequences for Wisconsin. There is accumulating evidence that mine emissions, when poorly regulated, can be toxic to those who live and work nearby. Frac sand facilities have the potential to ruin groundwater reserves. And local leaders have limited options for regulating the new facilities that are popping up like mushrooms—often because there’s always a town nearby looking to make a buck.
Yet the way things stand, with new facilities opening at breakneck speed, any new regulations await conclusive research on the health and environmental effects. And state environmental regulators have neither the time nor resources to ensure compliance with existing law. “It’s certainly hard to wrap your head around the effects,” said Deb Dix, a spokesperson for the frac sand regulation division of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR). “The industry, it’s just so large, so quickly. We’re trying to get all the answers, but it’s just not happening quickly enough.” When those answers finally arrive, will they be too late?
The hilly, wooded area of southwestern Wisconsin where frac sand mining has exploded goes by the romantic name of the Driftless Area, so called because it was bypassed by the glaciers that ironed flat the rest of the Midwest during the last Ice Age. “It is the most beautiful part of the state,” said Kevin Lien, the director of the Trempealeau County Department of Land Management. It is also, thanks to its unique geology, the best source in the nation for diamond-strong kernels of silica sand: smooth, round grains of almost pure quartz that can be found in lower Wisconsin’s sandstone bluffs.
The rapid industrialization of this corner of rural Wisconsin has sparked inevitable NIMBY clashes between miners and the farmers, retirees, and nth-generation locals who fret about unsightly dig sites and truck traffic. In Trempealeau County, home to a quarter of all new frac sand sites in the state, residents overwhelmed state Senator Kathleen Vinehout’s inbox with exactly those complaints. “It was clanging railroad cars at night, underground blasting that put cracks in the walls of peoples’ kitchens,” she said. “I had emails that said, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing, but there’s sand all over the inside of my house.’”
nick spinelli 1, December 18, 2013 at 10:57 am
Dredd, I know this is an emotional point for you and I respect that. And, I really respect the fact that you admit sand isn’t the problem.
…
nick spinelli 1, December 18, 2013 at 11:00 am
Dredd, I know it’s not a game. I’m just stating how I see these battles played out. Do you disagree oil has more resources to win these battles?
=========================
It is a battle to save civilization, which includes those you love, and their descendants, from a horrid future.
A future where the Jabba The Hutts of Oil-Qaeda can remain free running psychopaths, torturing the planet until death of civilization as we know it takes place.
There is nothing to be won by their mass murder, their is only loss in this.
It is a psychological problem, not a business problem, not a problem of sand.
It is a problem of psychopaths having taken over.
You do not seem to be able to face that reality.
Generally that denial is based on the fear of death we all have:
(John Kerry returns to the Mekong Delta, this time as U.S. Secretary of State). We are all being swift-boated by Oil-Qaeda now.
Apparently the Chinese people are not rebelling even though the smoke is so thick in major Chinese cities that the air is opaque, planes cannot land and people have been wearing breathing filters for decades. Perhaps it will get that bad in the US and people will continue to burn fossil fuel. Where are the dead canaries when we need them?
Scary stuff and what Justice Holmes said. The corporations need to prove it is safe instead of the other way around.
SWM, If you were to ask me to bet, and I am a betting man, on who is more honest on issues; environmental groups or Big Oil, I would bet much more on environmental groups.
Dredd, I know it’s not a game. I’m just stating how I see these battles played out. Do you disagree oil has more resources to win these battles?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/14/fracking-hell-live-next-shale-gas-well-texas-us nick, I think the environmentalists as a whole have a much better track record than the oil and gas industry. Granted there are some extremists but thinking that the oil and gas industry folks care about the quality of the air you breathe or your drinking water, and, therefore, will self regulate is a libertarian fantasy.
Opponents of fracking shouldn’t have to prove it is dangerous to humans. Supporters should have to prove it is safe. There are plenty of studies that show that fracking contaminated the water table; depletes water for human consumption and generally pollutes the air. What is a little genetic damage to humans if it means oil companies can make more $$$$$$$$$! The suggestion by oil companies that a little poison is good for you is ludicrous but then they seem to be learning from the Chinese government on that or is it that the Chinese government learned that from the tobacco industry and the asbestos industries. Corporations have been lying about the hazards of their products and manufacturing procedures for years. That is why reformers wanted the EPA and FDA and other agencies established to protect humans from corporate lies. Unfortunately now the corporations run the agencies.