For some mysterious reason, as I prepared to listen to
Thom Hartmann today, a segment of a David Bender show where he had t boone pickens on as his guest, started playing. I was horrified to hear David Bender singing the praises of t boone pickens. Wow!
Not one important question was asked of him. Not a single mention of hydraulic fracture drilling or the mystery chemicals used in the barbaric practice or how the big natural gas boys are planning more drilling all over the country and they don’t think it’s any of our damn business what chemicals they are using.
He says t boone has a new clean energy plan for America. No more of that “nasty foreign oil.” This man is using barbaric techniques to extract our natural gas from the earth to profit enormously selling it back to us. And he can't seem to buy up enough water in Texas. He is being adulated as our great new innovator-in-chief as the extracting of natural gas is poisoning our precious drinking water.
David went on and on about how the t boone man had been sooooo patriotic to spend $58,000,000 of his own money to help America. He couldn’t promote him enough!!! Yikes! Hey t boone…. Stop doing America your favors….
A real hero would be someone who was indeed trying to move us to solar and wind AND most importantly helping us power down, as if our lives depended on it, and preparing us to share the dwindling resources of planet earth, NOT POISONING OUR WATER! I hope our leaders and representatives don’t drink the kool aide, but I fear they will. And the marketing (lobbyists) is the slickest, most bankrolled the world has seen. Wheeee…get out your grandchildren and great….great….great….great.…great….great grandchildren’s credit cards cuz seven generations is being reinvented by some very greedy people.
WAKE UP AMERICA!
Buried Secrets: Is Natural Gas Drilling Endangering U.S. Water Supplies?
by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica - November 13, 2008 1:00 pm EST
In July, a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wyo., and pulled up a load of brown oily
water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed
to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level
safe for people.
The results sent shockwaves through the energy industry and state and federal regulatory agencies.
Sublette County is the home of one of the nation's largest natural gas fields, and many of its 6,000 wells have undergone a process pioneered by Halliburton called hydraulic fracturing [2], which shoots vast amounts of water, sand and chemicals several miles underground to break apart rock and release the gas. The process has been considered safe since a 2004 study [3] (PDF) by the Environmental Protection Agency found that it posed no risk to drinking water. After that study, Congress even exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Today fracturing is used in nine out of 10 natural gas wells in the United States.
Cathy Behr (Credit: Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)
.........In mid-August, the Colorado debate intensified when news broke that Cathy Behr, an emergency room nurse in Durango, Colo., had almost died after treating a wildcatter who had been splashed in a fracking fluid spill at a BP natural gas rig. Behr stripped the man and stuffed his clothes into plastic bags while the hospital sounded alarms and locked down the ER. The worker was released. But a few days later Behr lay in critical condition facing multiple organ failure.
Her doctors searched for details that could save their patient. The substance was a drill stimulation fluid called ZetaFlow, but the only information the rig workers provided was a vague Material Safety Data Sheet, a form required by OSHA. Doctors wanted to know precisely what chemicals make up ZetaFlow and in what concentration. But the MSDS listed that information as proprietary. Behr’s doctor learned, weeks later, after Behr had begun to recuperate, what ZetaFlow was made of, but he was sworn to secrecy by the chemical’s manufacturer and couldn’t even share the information with his patient.
News of Behr’s case spread to New York and Pennsylvania, amplifying the cry for disclosure of drilling fluids. The energy industry braced for a fight.
........Thanks in large part to hydraulic fracturing, natural gas drilling has vastly expanded across the United States. In 2007, there were 449,000 gas wells in 32 states, thirty percent more than in 2000. By 2012 the nation could be drilling 32,000 new wells a year, including some in the watershed that provides drinking water to New York City and Philadelphia [4], some five percent of the nation's population.
The rush to drill comes in part because newly identified gas reserves offer the nation an opportunity to wean itself from oil.
Natural gas, as T. Boone Pickens said recently, is "cleaner, cheaper… abundant, and ours." Burning gas, used primarily to heat homes and make electricity, emits 23 percent less carbon dioxide than burning oil. Gas is the country's second-largest domestic energy resource, after coal.
full article
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