I live in a quiet corner of New York State. My wife and I chose to raise our children here because we want our children to grow up in its peaceful, pastoral landscape. But the calm that drew us here is about to be shattered by a gold rush in natural gas drilling.
Most people think drilling happens out on the lonely Western plains or on distant rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. But in the past few years, a natural-gas gold rush has spread across Pennsylvania, is poised to burst into New York State and could spread across the watershed that supplies drinking water to more than 15 million people in New York City, Philadelphia and other locations.
Like people in the Gulf, local communities are learning that when something goes wrong, neither the energy companies nor the government regulators offer much help.
Companies aren't even legally obliged to tell us the names or formulas of the nearly 590 chemicals that have been identified by experts as being used in their wells. I don't know when America got to the point where someone can pour 590 chemicals into the ground with impunity -- where we have to argue for our right to know what's in our water and to protect our families.
But as I watch this natural-gas gold rush get closer to my home, I realize America has a choice to make: We can either keep going down this road of dirty energy's boom and bust or we can pursue something more sustainable. I think America can make the shift to renewable power, but in the meantime, the drill pads keep coming.
I live on the Delaware River -- which the organization American Rivers just named the number one endangered river in the nation because of gas drilling. About a month ago, I got a call from my friend who lives on the Pennsylvania side of the river.
He said, "They're here to drill next door. My one-lane country road has turned into a 30-foot highway. Huge trucks keep coming. They've started doing sonar pounding to see where the gas is and they're going to start test wells just a mile away from the river."
My friend and I wouldn't be so panicked about the arrival of those wells if we knew they could pump gas without endangering the water or the people nearby. That isn't the case.
These wells use a technology called hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking. To get to the gas -- which is buried in tiny pockets deep within a formation called the Marcellus Shale -- companies have to fracture the rock. They drill down and inject fracking fluid -- a mixture of water and some of those 590 chemicals -- into the well at high pressure to blast the rock apart and release the gas.
A loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act exempts fracking from regulation. States can step in with their own regulations, but most haven't. Two thirds of the states where fracking takes place have done nothing at all to regulate the practice. And Pennsylvania hasn't done nearly enough. It's basically been a free-for-all for companies. So energy representatives go into struggling farming communities and offer to pay royalty for sinking wells on people's land. It sounds good at first, then reality sinks in.
Right now, New York State's legislature is considering two separate bills that would impose a temporary moratorium or suspension on new drilling in the Marcellus Shale. This is the chance for New York to become the first state to put a halt to any new drilling on the grounds that the risks -- and how to manage them -- are not yet adequately understood.
New Yorkers should act now and click here to tell their elected officials step up and make sure its people and places are protected first.
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http://www.endocrinedisruption.com/home.php
Also, to the person who theorizes that this shale is so deep that fracking it will not affect acquifers above the shale...this is just playing with fire. Fracking requires creating a kind of mini earthquake below the surface, and liquid (like fracking liquid) likes to travel in all directions, even upwards. Not to mention, when you use immensely powerful machines to disrupt the layers of the earth, you are not going to be able to predict the harm it will or won't do. Why not depend on the evidence already available that fracking poisons wells, creeks, other water sources, the air, the soil, etc.?? Is the money that these corporations are going to make, and keep for themselves, really worth ruining water supplies and the air we breath? Prefer to spend more money on bottled water and on medical bills??
I own Property - I Paid for it - YOU DID NOT!
Fracking is Safe - Been done for over 100 years, no problems yet.
If you stop my RIGHT to mine the minerals and gas oon my property WITHOUT COMPENSATION, you have stolen my property.
Your "Calm" living conditions DO NOT MATTER TO ME AT ALL!
If you want my proeprty rights PAY FOR THEM!
Profit at all cost. Corporate America proves that everyday. If I have to prove that with links then you either don't read or watch the news or you don't work for big corporate America.
We are serfs and we should be thankful that we get to live another day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6G6Ap-mF0k
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80597429/
Chief Seattle
When you've reached the point where you're contaminating aquifers for natural gas, blowing the tops off mountains for coal and drilling under a mile of water (and another two miles of rock) for oil, it's time to declare the fossil fuel age over and start to move on. Aggressively. Like our very lives depended on it, because they do.
If we can't see the writing on the wall by this time, then we need to consider the possibility that our civilization is suicidally insane.
Consider for a moment that we're occupying a thin membrane of habitable space on the surface of an infinitesimal speck of dust adrift in an infinite lifeless void. If we render this place inhospitable to our species, where exactly do people imagine we will go? What justification can there possibly be for killing literally the only place we can survive in the entire known universe?
Beyond that, yes, there are leakage and disposal issues that can lead to water contamination. In another new documentary (ALL FRACKED UP), two little girls talk about how their dirt road has become too slippery to ride their bicycles because the gas company trucks have been driving back and forth spraying water that leaves the roads "greasy and foamy." That's what the gas companies consider a "method of disposal."
I was born and raised in the southern tier of upstate NY (Mohawk valley) and believe you me, I remember the winters all too well. I know they can get really cold, but there are alternatives to NG. Although kind of pricey to install, a ground-source heat pump would probably pay for itself pretty quickly...might be worth checking on.
What good is an energy source if it endangers the lives of the people in the surrounding communities?
I commend you for your actions on this. Most people are either ignorant of this issue, or buy into the "Picken's Plan" to energy independence. Natural gas is not viable source of energy. The scientific evidence supports your position, keep it up your strife.
(Good luck with Avengers, I've loved you in everything you've been in so I know you'll be great.)