I received this mail:
We just won a major victory against fracking in California, and I wanted you to be the first to know.
In response to a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity and allies, a federal judge ruled today that the Obama administration violated the law when it issued oil leases in Monterey County without considering all the risks that fracking poses to water, air and wildlife.
It’s a watershed moment in our fracking campaign — the first court ruling invalidating a federal lease sale for failing to address the monumental dangers of fracking.
The court decision, at last, recognizes that fracking poses new, unique risks to California’s environment and can no longer be ignored.
These companies are increasingly vying for Monterey Shale, a massive geological formation holding some 15 million barrels of oil. Extracting that oil will almost certainly require fracking, a controversial practice that uses huge volumes of water mixed with sand and unregulated toxic chemicals to blast open rock formations and extract oil and gas.
Fracking’s bad news for animals and people that rely on clean air, water and land.
Today’s decision was the result of a lawsuit we brought in late 2011 challenging the federal Bureau of Land Management’s decision to auction off 2,500 acres in Monterey County to oil companies.
I am a sensible person. I generally support oil and gas drilling on land and even in water where wells already exist. However, this latest fracking scheme seems like a gigantic mess. Vast amounts of water are injected into the ground combined with a witch’s brew of chemicals, many of them toxic. This mess is intended to break up shale rock formations that hold oil or natural gas, which is then pumped from the Earth.
There are very serious problems with this process. In many parts of the US, fracking has resulted in serious pollution of ground water. The water coming out of your tap smells terrible and seems toxic. In some cases, you can light a match over a glass of water and catch it on fire. Your tap smells like gas fumes. Many people in the area start getting strange illnesses, apparently from drinking the water. In many cases, so much water is sucked out of the ground that personal wells go dry. Now you don’t have any more water for your home. There seems to be evidence that it is killing people too, as death and cancer rates rise in fracking areas.
There is even evidence that fracking is causing earthquakes by breaking up underground rock formations.
Fracking makes people sick.
Fracking kills people via diseases.
Fracking dries up local ground water supplies.
Fracking pollutes local ground water, making your tap water toxic.
Fracking causes earthquakes.
It seems to me that this technology is stupid and toxic, and it makes no sense to utilize it. We probably shouldn’t even be doing it altogether.
All over this ultra-corrupt land, oil and gas companies have bought off local, state and national officials to fast track fracking over residents’ objections. The “liberal” Obama Administration has been strongly in favor of fracking and has often tried to force it through without any environmental reviews, saying that is won’t have any environmental effects.
In California, “liberal” Jerry Brown (who has reinvented himself as another Barack Obama as he has become much more conservative over the years) has similarly shoved through fracking proposals for all of California. Brown’s commission quickly issued a ruling that fracking would have no environmental effects and was fast-tracked for all of California. Brown is wrong, but this is just one more example of his endless treks into conservatism.
With “liberal” friends like Jerry Brown and Barack Obama, who needs conservative enemies?
