The FDA is that govt. agency charged with testing to determine the viability of the drug vs. the consequences. It is their job to administer a regulatory and compliance process to insure public safety by evaluating effects, defining causes and understanding events in order to develop a scientifically sound basis for decisions that reduce risks associated with FDA-regulated products.
Protecting the population in this way then, is an acknowledged need. We understand and expect it is working for us at all times. We rely on it to be vigilant and monitor its jurisdictions in an ongoing way.
We need the same kind of regulation and protection from harm for the environment... OUR environment, which we take so readily for granted that we do not tend to understand how integral it is to our every day survival. We NEED breathable air. We NEED drinkable water. We NEED life sustaining land. All life needs these things. All life is interdependent.
At present, the air, water and land, as well as the life it sustains... WE ...are all guinea pigs of the oil and gas industries' unregulated procedures of extracting fossil fuels from the earth.
"High Volume Horizontal Slickwater Hydraulic Fracturing" ("hydro-fracking") is essentially an untested technology. It involves approximately three million gallons of water per "frack". Blended with this are about 10,000 gallons of toxic chemicals, sand-blasted deep beneath the ground under very high pressure for each frack. Fracking may occur up to 12 times over the life of a well (up to 40 years). That water must be trucked there in 10,000 gallon tanker trucks. At three million gallons water/frack, that's 300 incoming truckloads. 12 fracks brings the total to 3,600 incoming truckloads. If the industry achieves its goal of 100,000 Marcellus shale wells, that equals 360,000,000 truck trips from somewhere to a well site. That water must also be trucked away to an as yet unknown place when it has become irremdiable toxic waste.
(Thanks to Infoshop News, June 10, 2009 for portions of the above paragraph.)
Drillers have developed a method that works to release the gas trapped deep in the earth, in the tight gas shale layer, however, they have not sufficiently studied the consequences of this method of extraction, nor have they concerned themselves with the effects the consequences have on ... well, just about anything other than profits. The evidence is everywhere the drillers are, and the evidence is mounting daily.
Unlike the drug industry, and to our supreme disadvantage, our state and federal regulatory agencies appear to be either disempowered or cooperating with industry. Regulations have been rescinded in the name of this policy, while water is becoming forever fouled... rendered unrecoverable.
Toxic wastewater is being sunk deep into the ground in hopes that will solve the problem these wastes present. But what are hopes? Hopes are what you have for the future when you don't have present solutions.
At present, there is more that we don't know about the effects of hydro-fracking than what we do know, which is that gas will come up the hole.
We don't know enough for example about the migration of the fracking fluids and the gas itself underground, or the differing behavior of these within the various shale formations. Nor can we predict the pressure behind the flowback or who will die in the accidents... whether it be this nurse, that driller, or that herd of pregnant cattle or these little crayfish, or that man's calf, or the pronghorn, elk and mule deer herds, or that farmer's hogs, or stillborn livestock in many locations where drilling is going on, along with reproductive changes in horses, cows and goats. And who knows about the wild creatures we can't monitor, or the accumulating adverse effects on our own health?
Most folks who signed on to drilling were not given a clear picture of the road ahead. Now that they are learning more, they're learning too that there is little they can do. As they look for the same kind of protection from our government agencies as the FDA provides, for example, they are not finding the level of protection they want and need and that should be there.
And now, yet another new side effect is surfacing in Texas that is cause for alarm ...
EARTHQUAKES
Not long ago the first earthquake near gas drilling sites was thought, by some, to be an anomaly.Now, 17 earthquakes later, in the space of only a few months, we cannot claim pure coincidence,
nor can we ignore the dangers these earthquakes present to gas pipelines and so, to safety.
Nor should we ignore the potential for the earth to cave in on itself as a result of these drilling induced earthquakes.
Click HERE to read a comprehensive account of the Barnett Shale Earthquakes on Bluedaze.
WHAT ELSE DON'T WE KNOW YET ABOUT UNCONVENTIONAL GAS DRILLING? WHY IS IT OK TO PROCEED WITH THIS DRILLING WHEN WE HAVE NO IDEA OF THE CONSEQUENCES, AND SO, NO IDEA IF WE WILL BE ABLE TO REMEDY THEM? DO WE WANT TO LET OURSELVES BE GUINEA PIGS TO DISASTER?
WHY THE HUSTLE? WE'VE GOT A TRADE AGREEMENT WITH QATAR TO BUY THEIR LNG FOR THE NEXT 25 YEARS! (This is the largest announced LNG import project to date for supplying natural gas to the United States, and makes Qatar Petroleum and ExxonMobil leaders in supplying the important U.S. natural gas market. Delivery of LNG to the United States is projected to begin in 2008/2009.) AT 2 BILLION CUBIC FEET PER DAY, THIS AMOUNTS TO MORE NATURAL GAS IN A LITTLE OVER A DAY THAN CAN BE EXTRACTED FROM A DOMESTIC UNCONVENTIONAL SHALE GAS WELL DURING ITS ENTIRE PRODUCTIVE LIFE.
Meanwhile, the Marcellus Shale underlies a huge portion of a highly developed area of our country: high population density with highly developed social patterns, high commerce and traffic areas; it lies beneath some of the purest unfiltered public drinking water supply in the country, and beneath among the oldest and most built up areas of our country. This is an area that is unprepared and ill equipped to immediately absorb the onslaught of an industry that has bought up rights to trammel the surface of the land to grab what's underneath, in what has been compared to the gold rush of 1849.
Yesterday, when both houses of Congress introduced some measure of public and environmental protection, the gas and oil industry lobbyists and propagandists increased their operations, seeking to increase their sphere of influence, to defeat any regulation of their reckless disregard for our communal and most vital resources: air, which they pollute through all the diesel powered equipment necessary to their operations; water, which they pollute through the infiltration of toxic fracking fluid and methane into the ground water and aquifers; and land, which gets polluted by the fluids dumped or deliberately spread on or otherwise leaked onto or into the earth, killing plants, and underground creatures in the vicinity, creating dead zones where nothing will grow, endangering land and airborne creatures as well.
And now too, we are learning, drilling is distressing the earth's internal structure and stability, so that it quakes as it subsides, causing unknowable potential damage according to where and when these events take place.
IT IS LONG PAST TIME TO DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY!IT IS TIME TO DEMAND ACTION AND RESULTS!
SPEAK UP PEOPLE. TALK TO YOUR GOVERNMENT
AND TELL THEM TO STOP SITTING ON THE FENCE
OF INFLUENCE PEDDLING AND
TELL THEM TO DUST OFF THEIR BUTTS AND
FIX IT!
SPEAK UP PEOPLE. TALK TO YOUR GOVERNMENT
AND TELL THEM TO STOP SITTING ON THE FENCE
OF INFLUENCE PEDDLING AND
TELL THEM TO DUST OFF THEIR BUTTS AND
FIX IT!
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