On April 30, 2012, former Pittsburgh Councilman Doug Shields addressed the City Council of Broadview Heights, Ohio, on the decision made by Pittsburgh’s City Council to ban fracking in their city. Watch the video below…
A western Pennsylvania couple was denied a mortgage due to a gas well on their next-door neighbor’s property.
Last week, the world got a preview of America’s new post Citizens United petro plutocracy with the oil lords flexing their political muscles like oil soaked body builders pumped up on a steroid drip of campaign dollars. It was all about fracking. The petro tycoons first orchestrated the forced resignation of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) top frack patch enforcer, then adeptly forced the same cowed agency to stall its release of a damaging scientific study on fracking and finally strong armed the Interior Department to open America’s public lands to gas companies without prior disclosure of their frack chemicals.
A consultant’s work to help negotiate Utica shale oil and gas mineral-rights leases creates a conflict of interest with his duties on a state panel that hears drilling complaints, the Ohio Ethics Commission decided yesterday.
As a result, the ethics commission warned Robert Chase that he should not take part in any Ohio Oil and Gas Commission cases that involve drilling companies or landowners that have paid him for consulting work.
Berlin is opposed to plans to use the controversial fracking process to extract natural gas in Germany, SPIEGEL has learned. Government ministers are “very skeptical” about the technology, which environmentalists claim can pollute groundwater.
The Vermont House of Representatives voted 103-36 today to give final passage to legislation that will make Vermont the first state in the nation to ban the practice of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.
“The Vermont Legislature deserves tremendous praise for having the courage to stand up to all of the lobbying, the full page ads and the legal threats of the oil and gas industry,” said Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. “This is a shot that will be heard, if not around the world then at least around the country.”
Residents of Colleyville, Texas, personally paid for their own air testing because their city and the fracking industry would not fund such a test.
The community-funded test results, which detected twenty-six chemicals, also showed carbon disulfide, a neurotoxin at twice the state level for short-term exposure. Benzene, a known carcinogen, and Naphthalene, a suspected carcinogen, were both over state long-term exposure levels by more than 9 times and more than 7 times, respectively. Carbonyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide and Pyridine were all detected above safe limits for long-term exposure.
Fortunately, the concerned citizens of Colleyville were able to personally fund their own testing because the government is failing to do its job. But what happens to communities who do not have the resources to pay for such teating? Who will protect them?
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Wyoming’s governor persuaded the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to postpone an announcement linking hydraulic fracturing to groundwater contamination, giving state officials — whom the EPA had privately briefed on the study — time to attempt to debunk the finding before it rocked the oil and gas industry more than a month later, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.
During the delay, state officials raised dozens of questions about the finding that the controversial procedure that has become essential to unlocking oil and gas deposits in Wyoming and beyond may have tainted groundwater near the gas patch community of Pavillion.
