The amount of attention to the problem of contaminated water in over 243 reports from the states’ Department of Environmental Protection since fracking became an overnight explosion there in 2008 has been staggering.
This summer in particular, as pointed out by Eve Andrews in her recent
article for
Grist:
It’s been a bad, bad summer for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. But arguably, it’s been a much worse summer for the actual citizens of Pennsylvania, because they have been repeatedly and consistently screwed over by an unhappy combination of corporate interests, bureaucratic incompetence, and methane. That’s quite a cocktail of misery — when life gives you a Long Island iced tea, if you will.
The Associate Press
found that names of Pennsylvania landowners were redacted on complaints of contaminated drinking water or wells that had gone dry or water rendered undrinkable, so it was impossible to discover the results or any solutions that may have resulted.
Contamination is occurring throughout the state, but most predominantly in the northeastern region and it shows no sign of being reigned in after the auditor general’s
report that detailed how inadequate the DEP is to regulate the problem.
Furthermore, last year Greenpeace executive director Phil Radford wrote an article with actor/activist Mark Ruffalo about water contamination in Pennsylvania that was originally
published on CNN.
It was a scathing indictment of how fossil fuel companies, authorities and many politicians ignore the will of the people reflected in poll after poll, which have supported the idea of curbing carbon emissions even if they have to pay more on their energy bills.
Radford and Ruffalo point out a disastrous “bait and switch” component of touting natural gas as the clean alternative:
“The bait? Burning natural gas is “clean” because it produces less carbon pollution than burning oil and coal. The switch? The catastrophic pollution caused when companies like Exxon fracture the earth — commonly called fracking — to get natural gas out of the ground.”
In addition, Jeremy Nichols writes in his
WildEarth Guardian piece “Saving the Climate, Fighting Fracking”, that it’s the methane that matters.
Nichols points out that methane leaks are common from drilled natural gas wells or power plants and studies show that 7.1 percent of all natural gas produced nationally is leaking.
Methane, Nichols explained, is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas that is estimated to be 86 percent more dangerous for its heat-trapping capability than carbon dioxide.
As natural gas proponents call it a necessary “bridge fuel” to transition from coal to renewables, the ramifications of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in real world meaning to people’s lives in the form of earthquakes, health risks, contaminated soil and water have been increasing at an overwhelming rate.
The US
currently has more than a million fracturing operations that have been performed from one end of the country to the other since 1947, with the majority of fracking development occurring in the past decade.
Photo credit: Les Stone/Greenpeace
***Delilah Jean William is an environmental and political journalist; PrairieDogPress writer and Artistic Director for Keystone Prairie Dog;
keystone-prairie-dogs.com, which is a fundraising website to support environmental groups for extraordinary efforts to protect Great Plains habitat and prairie dogs in the wild. The goal is to use humorous images, social commentary and serious-minded reports to challenge government on numerous levels, including accountability to the people, the environment and Earth’s natural resources.
