Taxpayers on Hook for Fracking

Posted on January 17, 2012 by

This article is cross posted from our sister site lunacanus.com. It was written by my son Brian.

Taxpayers Fracking Expense

Last November the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection released a company from delivering clean water to the residents of Dimock Penn. The company, Cabot Oil and Gas Corp., was accused of contaminating the towns drinking water with methane and other hazardous chemicals resulting from fracking wells that Cabot drilled in the area. Of course Cabot denies the claims and says that the water in the town meets Federal standards.

Now the EPA has requested a new look at the water in Dimock. That investigation will be overseen by The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. In the meantime with some residents in Dimock running out of available drinking water it appears that the EPA will take over the responsibility of making regular deliveries of water to the town. You can read more about the expense to taxpayers dealing with this fracking mess at: ABC News .

Big companies have a long and disgraceful history of sacrificing the environment, people’s health and their very souls in pursuit of unbridled greed. Early shipping companies would ship slaves for profit and were tolerated because they were vital for trade. The railroad barons played no small part in the massacre of Native Americans and were tolerated because of the need for railroads for both commerce and transportation. Coal mining and machine shops risked the lives of workers and children every day. People tolerate these things because of need. Corporations claim no responsibility because of that tolerance and their lust for profit.

Now when fracking is performed in an area it is followed by water pollution, sick people, earthquakes and the need for environmental clean up. Add to that the need to ship water to these areas. When you add the cost of clean up, repairs, health care and clean water how cheap is this natural gas for the American people?  What do we do when half or three quarters of the water in our nation is contaminated? I for one have no idea what we do then but I can see one thing very clearly……The energy companies are being tolerated and making their profit while we will pay the price.

UPDATE: The EPA has backed out of their promise to deliver clean drinking water to the residents of Dimock. The residents will be forced to rely on the ongoing shipments from anti Fracking and anti oil groups. Though these deliveries are not as consistent as scheduled shipments they are better than no water at all. With winter taking a strong hold on the area I send my thoughts to the people who live in Dimock and hope they are not forced to choose between thirst or the drinking of contaminated water for survival. No matter how they get their water shipped in it will be at the expense of the American people and not at the expense of the company accused of “salting the well” to begin with.

Hmmm, That doesn’t look right.

Posted in Chemicals, Fracking, Fresh Waters, Toxins | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Should We Move Endangered Species?
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Posted on January 16, 2012 by

Climate Change is bringing on an Exodus of creatures all over the world. Some creatures are going higher to get into cooler temperatures, some are making lateral moves to escape flooded lands and some are stuck where they are because they have no where they can move to escape the fate of extinction. It is the latter group we are speaking about here.

Would it be all right to move these animals and plants to safer climes where they at least have a chance of survival? Ecologists have been considering s radical departure from the past. They call it assisted migration. The question is, would this be the right thing to do?

From Mother Jones;

Transplanting an ecosystem can be risky, as history shows. In the late 1800s, the USDA famously encouraged farmers to use kudzu, a vine imported from Japan, to control soil erosion. Farmers and gardeners have cursed the prolific weed ever since.

Hellmann doesn’t believe that relocating species threatened by climate change is a panacea. “It’s just not realistic to think you’re going to be able to move all the creepy-crawlies that no one cares about,” she says. But for even a few plants or animals, “it could be huge.”

The trick, then, is figuring out which species are worth the effort. Last July, a team of Australian researchers published a paper in Nature outlining a set of criteria. For example: How well will a species withstand the relocation process? Will the habitat remain suitable long enough? Could the species disrupt its new habitat?

Answering these questions will require years of experiments. With the Karners, Hellmann and her colleagues are up for the challenge. “What I do like about assisted migration is that it’s outside the box,” Hellmann says. “This climate change problem is an order of magnitude larger than what conservation biologists are used to dealing with. We need big ideas.”

So what say you? I am torn about this. I want to see the species survive and I realize we are too far advanced with Climate Change to bring ourselves back to the way things were before we got so docile and greedy with the planet’s treasures. However, I also am mindful of the sad stories of the Burmese Python in the Everglades, the Brown Tree Snake in Guam and The Zebra Mussel in the Great Lakes region as well as the coqui frog on Maui.

It does seem every time humans become involved we do nothing more than mess up the natural order of things. But can we sit by and do nothing as species go extinct with us knowing we could at least have given them a fighting chance? I need more input than I have now to make an unemotional, rational decision about what I think we should do.

Thanks for any help anyone can give me in thinking this through.

Brown tree snake photo from Wikimedia Commons and is Public Domain.

Common Coquí Frog photo from Wikimedia Commons and is Public Domain.

Zebra mussel infestation Ormond Lock on Arkansas River. Photo from Wikimedia Commons Public Domain.

 

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Good News for Grand Canyon
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Posted on January 7, 2012 by

A view from near Mojave Point on the West Rim Drive, Grand Canyon National Park. Photo by NPS Public Domain Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).

Anyone who has seen the Grand Canyon either in person or in pictures has to know its majestic beauty needs to be preserved.  That our country at this time in our history would even consider allowing more uranium mines in this scenic and iconic National Park, makes me wonder about the sanity of our culture.

Many people signed petitions, wrote directly and contacted the Department of the Interior to plead that the canyon be left alone without the intrusion of any more mining around it. Those pleas were answered with temporary bans. That meant only a short respite before the whole petition writing and pleading began again.

During the George W. Bush Administration, many inroads were made toward abolishing the EPA regulations for clean water and air. Inroads were also made into mining and drilling restrictions set by the Department of the Interior to keep our public lands and National Parks as pristine as possible. In fact, it seemed as though no natural wonder, unique habitat, environmental fragility or animal species would stop the greed that permeated the highest levels of our decision makers. In other words, nothing was sacred and the best we could do was a standoff.

Our environment and its wonders are still suffering under the mantle of the greedy. Due to lifetime appointments and cronyism, many people who care more for corporations than nature remain in agencies that oversee these things.

However, we finally are getting good news on the environmental front. The dirty Tar Sands Oil Pipeline is on hold, at the very least. It probably will not be built through our Mid-Western prairies or pose the threat of pollution to our aquifers. Clean Air Standards have been upheld and actually strengthened.

Now with this headline comes extremely good news for the Grand Canyon.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will announce a 20 year extension of the Grand Canyon Uranium Mining Ban

What a great holiday gift to the people of the United States and in fact, the world.

I’ll leave you with what the great environmentalist President Teddy Roosevelt had to say about The Grand Canyon in a speech given May 6, 1903. He really sums it up.

Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American if he can travel at all should see.

We have gotten past the stage, my fellow-citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation, whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery. Whatever it is, handle it so that your children’s children will get the benefit of it.”


 

Posted in Mining, National Parks & Wilderness Areas, Streams | Leave a comment