Babies Are Dying in this Utah Town — When A Midwife Pointed At Fracking She Was Threatened With Death

Photo by danibabii08.

By Paul Solotaroff
Every night, Donna Young goes to bed with her pistol, a .45 Taurus Judge with laser attachment. Last fall, she says, someone stole onto her ranch to poison her livestock, or tried to; happily, her son found the d-CON wrapper and dumped all the feed from the troughs. Strangers phoned the house to wish her dead or run out of town on a rail. Local nurses and doctors went them one better, she says, warning pregnant women that Young's incompetence had killed babies and would surely kill theirs too, if given the chance.

"Before they started spreading their cheer about me, I usually had 18 to 25 clients a year, and a spotless reputation in the state," says Young, the primary midwife to service Vernal, Utah, a boom-and-bust town of 10,000 people in the heart of the fracked-gas gold rush of the Uintah Basin. A hundred and fifty miles of sparse blacktop east of Salt Lake City, Vernal has the feel of a slapdash suburb dropped randomly from outer space. Half of it is new and garishly built, the paint barely dry after a decade-long run of fresh-drilled wells and full employment. "Now, I'm down to four or five ladies, and don't know how I'll be able to feed my animals if things don't turn around quick."

Young, a fiftysomething, heart-faced woman with a story-time lilt of a voice, cuts a curious figure for a pariah. She's the mother of six, a grandmother of 14 and an object of reverence among the women she's helped, many of whom she's guided through three and four home births with blissfully short labors and zero pain meds. And the sin for which she's been punished with death threats and attacks on her reputation? Two years ago, she stumbled onto the truth that an alarming number of babies were dying in Vernal — at least 10 in 2013 alone, what seemed to her a shockingly high infant mortality rate for such a small town. That summer, she raised her hand and put the obvious question to Joe Shaffer, director of the TriCounty Health Department: Why are so many of our babies dying?

In most places, detecting a grave risk to children would inspire people to name a street for you. But in Vernal, a town literally built by oil, raising questions about the safety of fracking will brand you a traitor and a target. "Me and my kids are still cautious: If someone kicked in my front door tonight, it'd take an hour for the sheriff to get here," says Young, whose house on 60 acres is well out of town and a quarter-mile clear of her closest neighbor. "The first person they'd meet is me on the staircase, pointing that .45 dead at 'em. And I know how to use these things — I can nail a coyote in the pasture from 100 yards."

Prodded by Young and the concerns she pushed along, which made their way through channels to state officials, TriCounty Health announced a study in 2014 to assess Young's concerns over the infant mortality rate. But Young, backed up by experts in Salt Lake City, believed the study was designed to fail. She says that any serious inquiry would have started with Suspect One: the extraordinary levels of wintertime pollution plaguing the Basin since the vast new undertaking to frack the region's shale filled the air with toxins. The county merely counted up infant deaths and brushed aside the facts about Vernal air pollution: ozone readings that rivaled the worst days of summer in New York, Los Angeles or Salt Lake City; particulate matter as bad as Mexico City; and ground air fraught with carcinogenic gases like benzene, rogue emissions from oil and gas drilling. Indeed, pollution was so bad in this rural bowl that it broke new ground in climate science. For decades, experts believed that life-threatening smog occurred only in or near big cities. But the Basin, which is bound on all four sides by mountains, is a perfectly formed bowl for winter inversions, in which 20-below weather clamps down on the valley and is sealed there by warmer air above it. During those spells, when the haze is visible and the air in one's lungs is a cold chisel, the sun's rays reflect off the snow on the ground and cook the volatile gases into ozone. The worst such period in the Basin's recent history was the winter of 2012-13, when nearly all the Uintah mothers whose babies died were pregnant.

Other key information was available to TriCounty, including multiple recent studies that link mothers' exposure to toxic air with fetal disasters of all kinds, including stillbirths, birth defects and developmental syndromes. But four months after he announced the study, Shaffer retired as TriCounty's chief; six months later, the department's findings were released. The deaths were deemed "not statistically insignificant," Sam LeFevre, an epidemiologist with the Utah State Health Department who conducted the study for TriCounty, told an assembly of concerned Vernal citizens. When pressed on possible causes for the deaths, he suggested the health problems of mothers, citing smoking, diabetes and prenatal neglect among the Basin's residents. LeFevre made it clear he was sympathetic to the crowd's concerns. "I know what it's like to lose a pregnancy," he announced. "My wife's had eight, and only four live births."

Which raises a question you might ask in a state whose legislature is so rabid for oil and gas money that it set aside millions to sue the federal government for the right to drill near Moab and Desolation Canyon, some of the state's most sacrosanct places: How many dead infants does it take before you'll accept that there's a problem?

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Increased Infant Mortality in Pennsylvania Linked to Fracking in Alarming New Study

Pennsylvania has issued more than 10,000 drilling permits over the past decade. Infants and children may be paying a heavy price.

(Click Here to See Full Size)
The placement of fracking exhaust pipes right next to homes demonstrates how the fracking industry has a demonic approach to public health. (Illustration adapted from Salvatore Gerace and Earthworks)

By Reynard Loki
A new study has linked fracking to a higher incidence in infant mortality, perinatal mortality, low-weight births, premature births and cancer in infants and children.

Funded by the Pittsburgh Foundation and written by Joe Mangano, co-founder and president of the Radiation and Public Health Project, a nonprofit educational and scientific organization that studies the relationship between low-level, nuclear radiation and public health, the study used data from state agencies to examine eight heavily fracked counties in Pennsylvania — four in the northeast and four in the southwest region of the state, counties that account for the majority of the state's natural gas drill wells and gas production. In all categories but child cancer, increases were greater in the northeast counties than they were in the four southwest counties.

"The information presented in this report supports the hypothesis of a link between exposure to toxic chemicals released in fracking and increased risk of disease and death," writes Mangano, who also manages the citizen-based radiation monitoring programs near the nuclear plants at Indian Point, New York, and Oyster Creek, New Jersey. "While it is virtually impossible to estimate a 'dose' to a community from chemicals generated by fracking, it is clear that residents of the eight most-fracked counties received far greater exposures than those in the rest of Pennsylvania."


Analyzing publicly available data from the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mangano found that, since the early 2000s and compared to the rest of the state, the heavily-fracked counties have seen a rise in infant mortality (13.9 percent), perinatal mortality (23.6 percent), low-weight births (3.4 percent), premature births/gestation less than 32 weeks (12.4 percent) and cancer incidence in age 0-4 (35.1 percent).

Mangano asserts that the advent of large-scale fracking "has added considerable amounts of toxic chemicals into the environment, including various greenhouse gases and radiation. While potential health consequences of fracking has been become a national issue, very little research on health trends among affected populations has been conducted."

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Fracking Chemicals Detected in Pennsylvania Drinking Water

Photo by Daniel Lobo.

By Nicholas St. Fleur
An analysis of drinking water sampled from three homes in Bradford County, Pa., revealed traces of a compound commonly found in Marcellus Shale drilling fluids, according to a study published on Monday.

The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addresses a longstanding question about potential risks to underground drinking water from the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The authors suggested a chain of events by which the drilling chemical ended up in a homeowner’s water supply.

“This is the first case published with a complete story showing organic compounds attributed to shale gas development found in a homeowner’s well,” said Susan Brantley, one of the study’s authors and a geoscientist from Pennsylvania State University.

The industry has long maintained that because fracking occurs thousands of feet below drinking-water aquifers, the drilling chemicals that are injected to break up rocks and release the gas trapped there pose no risk. In this study, the researchers note that the contamination may have stemmed from a lack of integrity in the drill wells and not from the actual fracking process far below. The industry criticized the new study, saying that it provided no proof that the chemical came from a nearby well.

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ABC's 'Middle Ground' on Climate Change: Who Knows? — Plays Stupid While California Suffers Historic Draught and Southern States Flood

By Peter Hart
Yesterday ABC's This Week (10/26/14) profiled George P. Bush, a Texas land commissioner candidate who is a grandson and nephew of the more famous George Bushes. It was part of This Week's "Closer Look" series, which seems to be intended as a place for upbeat profiles of political heavyweights. But a brief exchange about climate change showed the limits of this kind of journalism.

Given its impact on land issues, correspondent Jonathan Karl had good reason to ask Bush about climate change.

KARL: As land commissioner, he'll oversee millions of acres of oil and natural gas reserves. But he also talks about the need for renewable energy and he attempts to stake out a middle ground on climate change. Well, sort of.

How big a threat is climate change to the Texas coastline?

BUSH: The Texas coastline is impacted by rising sea levels. And again, the question is whether or not that's man-made, and I'll leave that to the scientists. But, at least in Texas, the facts showed that on average, about 17 feet of wet beach is lost due to coastal erosion and so….

KARL: Which is a huge problem for Texas.

BUSH: It's a huge problem.

KARL: But you don't doubt that human activity contributes to climate change?

BUSH: Well, we'll see in terms of the science, there's a wide range that has been discussed. And, again, I'm not a scientist by any stretch. But everywhere from, you know, no impact at all to 100 percent.

So Bush's position is that coastal erosion is a problem linked to rising sea levels, but he's not sure that's linked to human activity. I suspect Karl's "sort of" quip is intended as a signal to viewers, but some clarity would be helpful. The position that Bush is taking–maybe humans are causing climate change, maybe they aren't–is not a "middle ground" in any sense. It's certainly a good position to take if you don't want there to be any action to stop climate change.

Are scientists right in saying human activity is causing ocean levels to
rise? "I dunno" is not a neutral position. (cc photo: Van Sutherland)

This isn't the first time Karl has been able to get a Republican politician on the record on climate change. In May of this year (FAIR Blog, 5/12/14), Karl interviewed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who gave him a nonsensical answer to a direct question about the scientific consensus on climate change. Rubio said that "natural disasters have always existed" and that scientists were taking "a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend." What was Karl's response to that?

It's talk like that that Rubio hopes will appeal to the conservatives he would need to win the Republican nomination.

In Karl's worldview, it would seem, Rubio's position is one that will appeal to the conservative base. And Bush, with his more rhetorically evasive version of scientific denial, is somewhere near the "middle." Both positions, of course, are outside the overwhelming scientific consensus–which should be the most important benchmark for journalists who are describing where a politician stands on the issue.

Climate change is rarely discussed on the Sunday talk shows. It'd be nice if when they did discuss it, the conversation was less about political positioning and more reality-based.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Fracking Linked To Increase In Earthquakes — Again: New Study — Evidence Linking Fracking to Earthquakes Continues to Pile Up

This map shows the intensity of shaking in the area of a magnitude-3.9 earthquake that struck near Youngstown, Ohio, on Dec. 31, 2011. Research has linked this earthquake to the underground injection of wastewater from fracking. (Map credit:
U.S. Geological Survey)

By Anastasia Pantsios
A study by seven researchers from California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and the UK, The Environmental Costs and Benefits of Fracking, said “Unconventional oil and natural gas extraction enabled by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing [fracking] is driving an economic boom with consequences described from ‘revolutionary’ to ‘disastrous.’ The reality lies somewhere in between.”

The studies findings were many, including that fracking “generates income and, done well, can reduce air pollution and even water use compared with other fossil fuels.” But it also found it can reduce investment in renewables and when done carelessly, can release toxic chemicals into the environment. It also agreed: fracking causes earthquakes.

In a section headed “Induced Seismicity,” the study said, “The reactivation of faults from hydraulic fracturing, wastewater disposal and other processes such as CO2 sequestration occurs by increasing the pore pressure and therefore reducing the effective stress within a fault zone. The increased pressure allows elastic energy stored in rock to be released more easily, much like removing weight from a box to make it easier to slide along the floor. Injecting fracturing fluids or wastewater underground can intersect a fault zone directly or transmit a pulse in fluid pressure that reduces the effective stress on a fault.”

Although it says there are only a ‘handful” of documented cases of earthquakes caused directly by fracking itself, none with a magnitude of more than 4.0, and that the number is small compared to those induced by mining and dams, many more earthquakes were caused by wastewater injection, an offshoot of fracking. Those earthquakes are not only more numerous but of greater magnitude.

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The Other Kind of Climate Change Denial — Impact of Expanded Oil Drilling On Climate Change Ignored

Writing about expanding oil drilling without talking about its impact on the climate
indicates a deep state of denial. (cc photo illustration: -POD)

By Peter Hart
It's gotten to the point that sensible people can agree that climate change is a real problem in the world. But some people manage to write about energy policy and pretend that that problem doesn't exist–which is perhaps a more dangerous kind of climate change denial.

Take Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson. As we noted recently (FAIR Blog, 8/26/14), Samuelson is no longer really a climate denier. But it's hard to tell how meaningful the shift in his views is when you see what he writes nowadays. His column in today's print edition of the Post (9/28/14) is a full endorsement of increasing US oil drilling.

"One of the economy’s good-news stories is the oil boom, a derivative of the natural gas boom," he writes, explaining that fracking technology has been applied to oil drilling and has "yielded similarly astounding results." Samuelson declares: "By all logic, we should be working to sustain the boom." Alas we are not, and his column goes on to explain why it's disappointing that we aren't drilling more oil and exporting it on tankers.

He doesn't skip the downsides of drilling for more oil–he gives them one entire sentence:

Sure, there are concerns: Rail transport of crude oil involves safety issues; there are continuing environmental worries about fracking. Still, public gains outweigh the costs.

Whew. Back on planet Earth, burning more fossil fuels is going to have at least one consequence: It will continue contributing to the heating of the planet. But Samuelson never mentions climate change, which is too often treated as a non-event in coverage of energy (FAIR Blog, 5/15/12; 9/9/14).

In a way, this is merely a different type of climate change denial, one that wishes away the consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels. Interestingly, the Samuelson column has a "Read more about this topic" link at the bottom, which takes readers to a Post editorial on the same subject, headlined "Commerce Dept. Should Allow Exports of US Crude." This is notable because the Post editorial page has drawn attention for a series they're calling "A Climate for Change," which is supposed to represent the paper's decision to take the climate crisis seriously. Except, apparently, when the same editorial page is making the case for drilling for more oil.

If climate change represents a profound crisis, the only sensible policy is to leave fossil fuels in the ground (Extra!, 5/13). A media system that has begun to understand the scale of the problem while at the same time advocating for policies that will make the problem worse is still in denial.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Fracking Waste Dumping in River Leads to Jail and Fine for Boss Who Gave Order To Dump

A contractor was given 28-month prison sentence and a $25,000 fine by U.S. district judge.

 (Photo:  ProgressOhio)

By Andrea Germanos
The owner of a Youngstown, Ohio-based company was sentenced on Tuesday to over two years in prison for ordering his employees to repeatedly dump toxic fracking waste into a local waterway.

Between Nov. 1, 2012 and Jan. 31, 2013, employees of Hardrock Excavating LLC, which provided services to the oil and gas industry including storing fracking waste, made over 30 discharges of fracking waste into a tributary of the Mahoning River. Sixty-four-year old Benedict W. Lupo, then-owner of Hardrock Excavating, directed his employees to dump the waste, which included benzene and toluene, under the cover of night into the waterway.

According to reporting by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, "employees tried to talk Lupo out of it, but he refused. [The judge] also pointed out a prosecutor's pictures that detailed six weeks of clean-up in an oil-soaked creek."

Ohio Environmental Protection Agency on-scene coordinator Kurt Kollar was among the witnesses. In his testimony he said, “There was no sign of aquatic life, whatsoever,” in tributary right after the fracking waste discharges, the Youngstown Vindicator reports.

According to previous reporting by The Vindicator, Lupo's lawyers said he ordered his employees to carry out the illegal dumping in order to keep them working because the company's wastewater wells had been shut over connections to earthquakes.

In addition to a 28-month prison sentence, U.S. District Judge Donald Nugent fined Lupo $25,000. The maximum sentence would have been three years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Lupo had pleaded guilty in March to violating the Clean Water Act. Weeks later, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources permanently revoked operating permits for Hardrock Excavating. Two employees also previously admitted to a Clean Water Act violation. They were given three years probation.

“Ben Lupo put his own interests ahead of everyone else’s, and he deserved to face a severe penalty for his actions,” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said in a statement. “The recent water crisis in Toledo is a grave reminder of how important it is to protect our waterways. Those who commit crimes against the environment jeopardize the health and safety of Ohioans, and our natural resources and wildlife. They must be held accountable.”"

“Intentionally breaking environmental laws is not the cost of doing business, it's going to cost business owners their freedom,” added Steven M. Dettelbach, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.

California Halts Injection of Fracking Waste, Warning it May Be Contaminating Water

Activists rally against fracking outside California
EPA office.

State’s drought has forced farmers to rely on groundwater, even as California aquifers have been intentionally polluted due to exemptions for oil industry.

By Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica
California officials have ordered an emergency shut-down of 11 oil and gas waste injection sites and a review more than 100 others in the state's drought-wracked Central Valley out of fear that companies may have been pumping fracking fluids and other toxic waste into drinking water aquifers there.

The state's Division of Oil and Gas and Geothermal Resources on July 7 issued cease and desist orders to seven energy companies warning that they may be injecting their waste into aquifers that could be a source of drinking water, and stating that their waste disposal "poses danger to life, health, property, and natural resources." The orders were first reported by the Bakersfield Californian, and the state has confirmed with ProPublica that its investigation is expanding to look at additional wells.

The action comes as California's agriculture industry copes with a drought crisis that has emptied reservoirs and cost the state $2.2 billion this year alone. The lack of water has forced farmers across the state to supplement their water supply from underground aquifers, according to a study released this week by the University of California Davis.

The problem is that at least 100 of the state's aquifers were presumed to be useless for drinking and farming because the water was either of poor quality, or too deep underground to easily access. Years ago, the state exempted them from environmental protection and allowed the oil and gas industry to intentionally pollute them. But not all aquifers are exempted, and the system amounts to a patchwork of protected and unprotected water resources deep underground. Now, according to the cease and desist orders issued by the state, it appears that at least seven injection wells are likely pumping waste into fresh water aquifers protected by the law, and not other aquifers sacrificed by the state long ago.

"The aquifers in question with respect to the orders that have been issued are not exempt," said Ed Wilson, a spokesperson for the California Department of Conservation in an email.

A 2012 ProPublica investigation of more than 700,000 injection wells across the country found that wells were often poorly regulated and experienced high rates of failure, outcomes that were likely polluting underground water supplies that are supposed to be protected by federal law. That investigation also disclosed a little-known program overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that exempted more than 1,000 other drinking water aquifers from any sort of pollution protection at all, many of them in California.

Those are the aquifers at issue today. The exempted aquifers, according to documents the state filed with the U.S. EPA in 1981 and obtained by ProPublica, were poorly defined and ambiguously outlined. They were often identified by hand-drawn lines on a map, making it difficult to know today exactly which bodies of water were supposed to be protected, and by which aspects of the governing laws. Those exemptions and documents were signed by California Gov. Jerry Brown, who also was governor in 1981.

State officials emphasized to ProPublica that they will now order water testing and monitoring at the injection well sites in question. To date, they said, they have not yet found any of the more regulated aquifers to have been contaminated.

"We do not have any direct evidence any drinking water has been affected," wrote Steve Bohlen, the state oil and gas supervisor, in a statement to ProPublica.

Bohlen said his office was acting "out of an abundance of caution," and a spokesperson said that the state became aware of the problems through a review of facilities it was conducting according to California's fracking law passed late last year, which required the state to study fracking impacts and adopt regulations to address its risks, presumably including underground disposal.

California officials have long been under fire for their injection well practices, a waste disposal program that the state runs according to federal law and under a sort of license 2014 called "primacy" 2014 given to it by the EPA.

For one, experts say that aquifers the states and the EPA once thought would never be needed may soon become important sources of water as the climate changes and technology reduces the cost of pumping it from deep underground and treating it for consumption. Indeed, towns in Wyoming and Texas 2014 two states also suffering long-term droughts 2014 are pumping, treating, then delivering drinking water to taps from aquifers which would be considered unusable under California state regulations governing the oil and gas industry.

In June 2011, the EPA conducted a review of other aspects of California's injection well program and found enforcement, testing and oversight problems so significant that the agency demanded California improve its regulations and warned that the state's authority could be revoked.

Among the issues, California and the federal government disagree about what type of water is worth protecting in the first place, with California law only protecting a fraction of the waters that the federal Safe Drinking Water Act requires.

The EPA's report, commissioned from outside consultants, also said that California regulators routinely failed to adequately examine the geology around an injection well to ensure that fluids pumped into it would not leak underground and contaminate drinking water aquifers. The report found that state inspectors often allowed injection at pressures that exceeded the capabilities of the wells and thus risked cracking the surrounding rock and spreading contaminants. Several accidents in recent years in California involved injected waste or injected steam leaking back out of abandoned wells, or blowing out of the ground and creating sinkholes, including one 2011 incident that killed an oil worker.

The exemptions and other failings, said Damon Nagami, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in an email, are "especially disturbing" in a state that has been keenly aware of severe water constraints for more than a century and is now suffering from a crippling drought. "Our drinking water sources must be protected and preserved for the precious resources they are, not sacrificed as a garbage dump for the oil and gas industry."

Still, three years after the EPA's report, California has not yet completed its review of its underground injection program, according to state officials. The scrutiny of the wells surrounding Bakersfield may be the start.

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

Major Fracking Victory: New York Towns Can Prohibit Fracking, State’s Top Court Rules

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons.

By Kate Taylor and Thomas Kaplan
In a decision with far-reaching implications for the future of natural gas drilling in New York State, its highest court ruled on Monday that towns can use zoning ordinances to ban hydraulic fracturing, the controversial extraction method known as fracking.

Since the issue arose about six years ago, there has been a statewide moratorium on fracking, and the State Health Department is currently studying its potential health effects. But in recent years some towns, worried that the state would eventually allow the practice, have taken matters into their own hands by banning fracking within their borders. Among them, two towns — Dryden, in Tompkins County, and Middlefield, in Otsego County — amended their zoning laws in 2011 to prohibit fracking, on the basis that it would threaten the health, environment and character of the communities.

Subsequently, an energy company that had acquired oil and gas leases in Dryden before the 2011 zoning amendment, and a dairy farm in Middlefield that had leased land to a gas drilling company, filed legal complaints, arguing that state oil and gas law pre-empted the town ordinances.

On Monday, in a 5-to-2 decision, the State Court of Appeals affirmed a lower-court ruling rejecting that argument, and found that the towns did indeed have the authority to ban fracking through land use regulations.

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Fracking Causes Water Contamination — Conclusive Proof Provided in Texas Via Water Samples

Parker County homeowner Steve Lipsky demonstrated for local TV news outlet WFAA how water coming from his underground well can be ignited. (Credit: WFAA)

Scientists say water samples from Texas man's well show identical chemical signatures from nearby gas drilling operations.

By Jon Queally
Independent scientists who have reviewed a water analysis conducted by state authorities of a Texas resident's drinking well say the chemical signatures found in the water may provide "the nation's first conclusive link" between fracking operations and aquifer contamination.

Though a state investigation—conducted by the Texas Railroad Commission in response to an official complaint filed by landowner and Parker County resident Steve Lipsky—said it found the chemical analysis of the water inconclusive, experts shown the results say the commission was simply wrong. "And not just by a little," reports local ABC-affiliate WFAA News who shared the results with several scientists, "but by a lot."

Lipsky said he has long believed that nearby hydraulic fracturing by the Range Resources company was to blame for the increasing amounts of methane and other chemicals in his drinking water. Since 2010, he says, growing amounts of methane have been seeping into the groundwater beneath his land - enough of it so that he can literally light the water coming out of his well on fire.

Range Resources says there is no connection between the methane in Lipsky's well and their drilling, but scientists shown the results from the water analysis—specifically one called an isotopic analysis—say the chemical composition shows they are an exact match to the gas being fracked at two nearby drilling sites—called Butler and the Teal—within the Barnett Shale deposit.

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The Fracking 'Will Save America' Myth Dealt Death Blow: Size of 'Super, Duper' Monterey Shale Formation Downgraded by 96%

Photo by greensefa.

By Dylan and Jo Murphy
The myth of American energy independence from fracking has been dealt a huge blow by the downgrade of recoverable oil from the Monterey shale formation. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has slashed its estimate of oil reserves from the Monterey shale formation by a massive 96%.

In 2011 the EIA released a report that reviewed US shale oil and gas reserves. It stated that the largest shale oil formation in America was the Monterey play in Southern California. The report estimated that the Monterey shale formation held 15.5 billion barrels of oil or 64% of total U.S. shale oil reserves.

California's vast shale deposits were labelled ''black gold'' due to this forecast. On the basis of this rosy review the University of California produced a report forecasting millions of new jobs and billions in extra tax revenues.

Such academic reports have played a part in encouraging the media frenzy that has tried desperately to promote fracking to the American people as a clean, safe industry that will create jobs, foster a renaissance in manufacturing industry, increase tax revenues and help America be independent of supplies from its geopolitical enemies.

On top of this, American imperialism is using these inflated claims for its energy reserves to advance its geopolitical interests. The Obama administration are using the crisis in Ukraine to put pressure on their puppet allies in the EU to wean themselves off Russian gas and buy American fracking gas in the future...

Reality Check

If we put industry propaganda to one side, the reality is that this downgrade represents a huge blow to the fracking industry. Not only them, but also to the capitalist politicians in Congress, who put such great hopes on oil and gas from fracking. 

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Texas Family Wins $2.9 Million Fracking Lawsuit: Family Was Sickened by Pollution From Fracking Site — Stage Set for More Lawsuits

#116361100 / gettyimages.com

By Tom Boggioni
A north Texas family won a $2.9 million lawsuit against a Plano-based oil company after convincing a jury that emissions from the company’s fracking operations were making them sick.

According to Inside Climate News, the Parr family of Wise County, Texas, filed 13 complaints with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), between February 2010 and July 2011, claiming that air pollution from gas and oil operations near their ranch were responsible for breathing difficulties, nausea, nosebleeds, ringing ears, and rashes.

The Parrs’ were not the only ones filing complaints, with the TCEQ receiving 77 complaints from Wise County, in the heart of the Barnett Shale drilling area.

Despite being warned by their attorney that lawsuits against oil and gas industry rarely succeed, the Parrs’ sued Aruba Petroleum and last month a Dallas County jury awarded them $2.9 million in damages after finding the company “intentionally created a private nuisance” affecting the family’s health.

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Anti-Fracking Video Created by Rapper, Singer, Songwriter Kellee Maize

Screen capture from YouTube video.

The Killer Frackers: There's a Sudden and Extreme Spike Dying Newborns in Eastern Utah — Where There's A Drilling/Fracking Frenzy

Photo by J.K. Califf.

By Dr Brian Moench
Donna Young is a midwife in Vernal, Utah, with 20 years experience managing home births in Idaho and Utah. She lives in the Uinta Basin, the heart of the fossil fuel drilling/fracking frenzy in Eastern Utah. On May 8, 2013, she had her first stillbirth. At the funeral service a few days later, she noted what seemed like an extraordinary number of infant graves with recent dates at the cemetery. She decided to investigate.

She didn't get any help from local authorities, but eventually information gleaned from obituaries and mortuaries revealed 12 cases of neonatal mortality (most of them stillborn, or death shortly after birth), in 2013. Looking back to 2010 revealed a modest upward trend, but then a huge spike in 2013. This is sparsely populated rural Utah. Vernal is a town of fewer than 10,000 people. But per capita, this is a neonatal mortality six times the national average. It is actually worse than it appears. National infant mortality rates have been dropping slowly and steadily for almost 50 years, including about a 10 to 15 percent drop in the last decade. Furthermore, most of Utah is about 50 percent Mormon, so the rate of drinking and smoking is less than the national average throughout the state. The minority population in rural Utah, like Vernal, is very low, and the percentage of Mormons is even higher, both of which should lower the infant mortality rates, all other things being equal

What is going on in Utah's Uinta Basin to explain newborn babies dying? An abrupt surge in teenage mothers, drug, alcohol use? No evidence of that. Is there a genetic explanation? Genes don't change that quickly. Is there a sudden onset of medical incompetence by the area's health-care providers? No reason to think so. That leaves one other possibility. Is there something happening in the environment? As a matter of fact, yes.

Major cities with pollution problems have either high ozone, like Los Angeles, or high particulate pollution, like Salt Lake City, depending on the time of year. But the Uinta Basin has both simultaneously, making it unique and the most polluted part of the state. Studies suggest that the two may act synergistically to impair human health. Add to that high levels of the by-products of every phase of the oil and gas fracking extraction process - diesel emissions and hazardous compounds like benzene, toluene and naphthene, and you have a uniquely toxic air pollution brew in Vernal.

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Stronger ‘Frackquakes’ Are On The Way, Scientists Warn: An Inevitable Result of Widespread Hydrolic Fracking

A Frack-Quake Future? - King Library, San José, CA -
San José Earthquake, 2007 (Photo by San José Lib)

By Emily Atkin
The man-made earthquakes that have been shaking up the southern United States only stand to get stronger and more dangerous as the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, increases, scientists warned at a Thursday conference.

According to multiple reports, scientists attending the Seismological Society of America annual meeting agreed that fracking can change the state of stress on existing faults to the point of failure, causing earthquakes. That stress is generally not caused by fuel extraction itself, but by a process called “wastewater injection,” where companies take the leftover water used to frack wells and inject it deep into the ground.

Though it was previously believed that the man-made earthquakes could not exceed a 5.0 magnitude, many now say that larger quakes could become the norm as more and more water is stored underground.

“I think ultimately, as fluids propagate and cover a larger space, the likelihood that it could find a larger fault and generate larger seismic events goes up,” Western University earth sciences professor Gail Atkinson reportedly said at the meeting.

Because of this and other warnings, the U.S. government also announced on Thursday that it would begin to track the risks that these so-called “frackquakes” pose, and start including them on official maps that help influence building codes.

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$3 Million Must Be Paid To Family Sickened by Fracking - Jury Rules

A fracking operation in Texas. (Photo from AireIndustrial)

By Emily Atkin
A Texas family claiming they were sickened because of pollution from hydraulic fracturing operations near their home should be awarded $2.95 million for their troubles, a jury ruled on Tuesday.

The Parr family had sued Aruba Petroleum Inc. in 2011, alleging the oil and gas producer exposed them to hazardous gases, chemicals and industrial waste that seeped into the air from 22 wells drilled near the family’s 40-acre plot of land, which sits atop the Barnett Shale.

The jury returned a 5-1 verdict saying Aruba “intentionally created a private nuisance,” awarding $275,000 for losses on property value, $2 million for past physical pain and suffering, $250,000 for future physical pain and suffering, and $400,000 for mental anguish.

“They’re vindicated,” David Matthews, one of the Parr’s attorneys, wrote on his firm’s blog Tuesday. “I’m really proud of the family that went through what they went through … It’s not easy to go through a lawsuit and have your personal life uncovered and exposed to the extent this family went through.”

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Fracking Definitively Linked to Earthquakes for the First Time By Ohio Geologists

Illustration by Jayso Shenk.

By Julie Carr Smyth
Geologists in Ohio have for the first time linked earthquakes in a geologic formation deep under the Appalachians to hydraulic fracturing, leading the state to issue new permit conditions Friday in certain areas that are among the nation's strictest.

A state investigation of five small tremors last month in the Youngstown area, in the Appalachian foothills, found the injection of sand and water that accompanies hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the Utica Shale may have increased pressure on a small, unknown fault, said State Oil & Gas Chief Rick Simmers. He called the link "probable."

While earlier studies had linked earthquakes in the same region to deep-injection wells used for disposal of fracking wastewater, this marks the first time tremors in the region have been tied directly to fracking, Simmers said. The five seismic events in March couldn't be easily felt by people.

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Fracking By Force: Company Wants to Force Landowners to Let Them Drill For Gas

"No Shale Gas" (openclipart)

By Alex Kane
An oil company is trying to use a state law in Pennsylvania to force residents to allow drilling on their land. Hilcorp wants to drill for gas even if landowners don’t want to let them.

So in response, the company is trying to use a 1961 state law that allows them to drill under property without explicit permission. The law is based on a concept known as “forced pooling,” meaning that the company can bundle lease-owners with non-lease owners, and then force landowners without leases to allow drilling.

The landowners could win thousands of dollars if they yield to the company. But at least four property owners are holding out. One homeowner named Suzanne Matteo called the potential for forced drilling “un-American.” Matteo told the Associated Press she is worried about pollution and drilling’s impact on property values.

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America's Russian 'Double Whammy': Will Try To Disrupt Russia's Oil & Gas Exports While Boosting Foreign Markets for US Natural Gas

Gas Wells - Mainesburg, Pennsylvania (Photo by Gerry Dincher)

The U.S., now number one in oil and gas, is preparing to destroy Russia’s economy. “Washington will move to crush, or at least seriously disrupt, Russia under its ‘sanctions as war by other means’ machine, by targeting its energy exports, while simultaneously boosting the foreign markets for U.S. natural gas.”

By Glenn Ford
“Washington’s strategy is to permanently ratchet up tensions to ‘new cold war’ levels to justify sanctions against Russian energy exports.”

The massive – and desperate – American offensive against world order is entering a new phase, as the U.S. prepares to resume its historical status as global energy superpower. The Obama administration’s brazen implantation of a rabidly anti-Russian, fascist-led regime in Ukraine places U.S. proxies astride pipelines that carry much of Siberia’s gas to Europe and beyond. Seventy-six percent of Russia’s natural gas exports are bound for Europe, the bulk of it to Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom. Russia’s weight in the world is largely derived, not from its economically burdensome nuclear arsenal, but as an energy giant. The U.S.-engineered coup in Kiev sets the stage for a protracted assault on Russia’s energy trade, which accounts for more than half of Moscow’s federal expenditures. Without its huge oil and gas exports, Russia deflates like a leaky dirigible.

Even the Americans were not so stupid as to believe that their neo-Nazi friends in Kiev could somehow pry Russia from its naval base in Crimea. Such was never the plan. Rather, Moscow’s response to the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government was predictable, as was that of the Russian-speaking Crimean majority. Washington’s strategy is to permanently ratchet up tensions to “new cold war” levels to justify sanctions against Russian energy exports while exploiting America’s own natural gas “surplus” as an enhanced weapon of global hegemony.

“The U.S.-engineered coup in Kiev sets the stage for a protracted assault on Russia’s energy trade.”

Thanks to shale fracking, the United States recently surpassed Russia as the world’s number one exporter of natural gas, and will next year become the top oil producer. As the New York Times reported on March 5, “The administration’s strategy is to move aggressively to deploy the advantages of its new resources to undercut Russian natural gas sales to Ukraine and Europe.”
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Drilling for Certainty: The Latest in Fracking Health Studies

By Naveena Sadasivam
For years, environmentalists and the gas drilling industry have been in a pitched battle over the possible health implications of hydro fracking. But to a great extent, the debate 2014 as well as the emerging lawsuits and the various proposed regulations in numerous states 2014 has been hampered by a shortage of science.

In 2011, when ProPublica first reported on the different health problems afflicting people living near gas drilling operations, only a handful of health studies had been published. Three years later, the science is far from settled, but there is a growing body of research to consider.

Below, ProPublica offers a survey of some of that work. The studies included are by no means a comprehensive review of the scientific literature. There are several others that characterize the chemicals in fracking fluids, air emissions and waste discharges. Some present results of community level surveys.

Yet, a long-term systematic study of the adverse effects of gas drilling on communities has yet to be undertaken. Researchers have pointed to the scarcity of funding available for large-scale studies as a major obstacle in tackling the issue.

A review of health-related studies published last month in Environmental Science & Technology concluded that the current scientific literature puts forward "both substantial concerns and major uncertainties to address."

Still, for some, waiting for additional science to clarify those uncertainties before adopting more serious safeguards is misguided and dangerous. As a result, a number of researchers and local activists have been pushing for more aggressive oversight immediately.

The industry, by and large, has regarded the studies done to date 2014 a number of which claim to have found higher rates of illness among residents living close to drilling wells 2014 as largely anecdotal and less than convincing.

"The public health sector has been absent from this debate," said Nadia Steinzor, a researcher on the Oil and Gas Accountability Project at the environmental nonprofit, Earthworks.

Departments of health have only become involved in states such as New York and Maryland where regulators responded to the public's insistence on public health and environmental reviews before signing off on fracking operations. The states currently have a moratorium on fracking.

New York State Health Commissioner Nirav Shah is in fact conducting a review of health studies to present to Governor Andrew Cuomo before he makes a decision on whether to allow fracking in the state. It is unclear when the results of the review will be publicly available.

Other states such as Pennsylvania and Texas, however, have been much more supportive of the gas industry. For instance, Texas has been granting permits for fracking in ever increasing numbers while at the same time the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the agency that monitors air quality, has had its budget cut substantially.

1. An Exploratory Study of Air Quality near Natural Gas Operations. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, 2012.

The study, performed in Garfield County, Colo., between July 2010 and October 2011, was done by researchers at The Endocrine Disruption Exchange, a non-profit organization that examines the impact of low-level exposure to chemicals on the environment and human health.

In the study, researchers set up a sampling station close to a well and collected air samples every week for 11 months, from when the gas wells were drilled to after it began production. The samples produced evidence of 57 different chemicals, 45 of which they believe have some potential for affecting human health.

In almost 75 percent of all samples collected, researchers discovered methylene chloride, a toxic solvent that the industry had not previously disclosed as present in drilling operations. The researchers noted that the greatest number of chemicals were detected during the initial drilling phase.

While this study did catalogue the different chemicals found in air emissions from gas drilling operations, it did not address exposure levels and their potential effects. The levels found did not exceed current safety standards, but there has been much debate about whether the current standards adequately address potential health threats to women, children and the elderly.

The researchers admitted their work was compromised by their lack of full access to the drilling site. The air samples were collected from a station close to what is known as the well pad, but not the pad itself.

The gas drilling industry has sought to limit the disclosure of information about its operations to researchers. They have refused to publicly disclose the chemicals that are used in fracking, won gag orders in legal cases and restricted the ability of scientists to get close to their work sites. In a highly publicized case last year, a lifelong gag order was imposed on two children who were parties to a legal case that accused one gas company of unsafe fracking operations that caused them to fall sick.

In 2009, the Independent Petroleum Association of America started Energy In Depth, a blog that confronts activists who are fighting to ban fracking and challenges research that in any way depicts fracking as unsafe.

Energy In Depth responded to this Garfield County study and criticized its lack of proper methodology. The blog post also questioned the objectivity of the researchers, asserting that their "minds were already made up."

The industry has also been performing its own array of studies.

Last year, for instance, an industry-funded study on the methane emissions from fracking wells was published in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It concluded that only very modest amounts of methane 2014 a known contributor to climate change 2014 was being emitted into the air during fracking operations.

The study came under heavy criticism from Cornell researcher Robert Howarth, who two years prior had published work that claimed methane emissions from shale gas operations were far more significant.

"This study is based only on evaluation of sites and times chosen by industry," he said.

2. Birth Outcomes and Natural Gas Development. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2014.

The study examined babies born from 1996 to 2009 in rural Colorado locations 2014 the state has been a center of fracking for more than a decade. It was done by the Colorado School of Public Health and Brown University.

The study asserted that women who lived close to gas wells were more likely to have children born with a variety of defects, from oral clefts to heart issues. For instance, it claimed that babies born to mothers who lived in areas dense with gas wells were 30 percent more likely to have congenital heart defects.

The researchers, however, were unable to include data on maternal health, prenatal care, genetics and a host of other factors that have been shown to increase the risk of birth defects because that information was not publicly available. A common criticism of many scientific studies is that they do not fully analyze the possibility of other contributing factors.

The study has thus come under attack from both the industry and state public health officials. In a statement, Dr. Larry Wolk, the state's Chief Medical Officer, said "people should not rush to judgment" as "many factors known to contribute to birth defects were ignored" in the study.

But Lisa McKenzie, one of the lead authors of the study, said there was value to the work.

"What I think this is telling us is that we need to do more research to tease out what is happening and to see if these early studies hold up when we do more rigorous research," she said.

In Pennsylvania, Elaine Hill, a graduate student at Cornell University, obtained data on gas wells and births between 2003 and 2010. She then compared birth weights of babies born in areas of Pennsylvania where a well had been permitted but never drilled and areas where wells had been drilled. Hill found that the babies born to mothers within 2.5 kilometers (a little over 1.5 miles) of drilled gas sites were 25 percent more likely to have low birth weight compared to those in non-drilled areas. Babies are considered as having low birth weight if they are under 2500 grams (5.5 pounds).

Hill's work is currently under review by a formal scientific journal, a process that could take three or four years.

3. Health Risks and Unconventional Natural Gas Resources. Science of the Total Environment, 2012.

Between January 2008 and November 2010, researchers at the Colorado School of Public Health collected air samples in Garfield County, Colo., which has been experiencing intensive drilling operations. Researchers found the presence of a number of hydrocarbons including benzene, trimethylbenzene and xylene, all of which have been shown to pose health dangers at certain levels.

Researchers maintained that those who lived less than half a mile from a gas well had a higher risk of health issues. The study also found a small increase in cancer risk and alleged that exposure to benzene was a major contributor to the risk.

"From the data we had, it looked like the well completion phase was the strongest contributor to these emissions," said Lisa McKenzie, the lead author of the study.

During the completion phase of drilling, a mixture of water, sand and chemicals is forced down the well at high pressure, and is then brought back up. The returning mixture, which contains radioactive materials and some of the natural gas from the geological formation, is supposed to be captured. But at times the mixture comes back up at pressures higher than the system can handle and the excess gas is directly vented into the air.

"I think we ought to be focused on the whole thing from soup to nuts because a lot of the potential hazards aren't around the hydraulic fracturing step itself," said John Adgate, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Colorado School of Public Health and co-author on the study.

Energy In Depth, the industry blog, responded at length to this study and cited several "bad inputs" which had affected the results of the study. The researchers' assumptions and data were criticized. For instance, the researchers had assumed that Garfield residents would remain in the county until the age of 70 in order to estimate the time period over which they would be exposed to the emissions.

"Unless the 2018town' is actually a prison, this is a fundamentally flawed assumption about the length and extent of exposure," Energy In Depth said.

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica