Although it is a long shot, the City of Denton, Texas is seeking a ban on fracking inside city limits. The quality of life issues that affect people who live right next to these operations are so serious that a town like Denton, located right in the heart of oil country, has said that enough is enough.
Grassroots groups have formed in opposition to any more fracking and they successfully persuaded the city council to pass a moratorium in 2012.
“We’ve spent years trying to make fracking compatible with our city,” Adam Briggle, a member of Denton Drilling Awareness Group, the group organizing the ban, told Al Jazeera. “But we’ve realized that you can have fracking, or you can have a healthy city — but you can’t have both.”
Denton, a city northwest of Dallas and with just over 100,000 residents, is home to hundreds of gas wells and hundreds of miles of pipelines. Fracking critics say the drilling — shooting pressurized water, chemicals, and sand underground to release oil and gas trapped there — impacts public health and safety.
The city has done so despite the threat of a lawsuit by one of the main oil companies, Eagle Ridge Energy:
“The basic principle of this country and the Constitution is freedom and the unalienable right to enjoy the use of personal and real property," reads a passage from the website. "Certainly not at the expense or detriment to others, but the right still remains.”
“To ban fracking or gas well drilling would clearly be considered a taking (stealing their mineral rights) under the 14th Amendment, which would enable any company or person that suffers such a taking to make a claim against the Party that causes such a taking.”
The peer reviewed journal
Human and Ecological Risk Assessment (PDF) found in 2010 that there were literally hundreds of chemicals involved in the operation of fracking. Nearly all of the 353 chemicals surveyed have some sort of public health risks. 75% of them could affect the skin, eyes, and other organs; around 40-50% could affect the brain or nervous system, immune, and cardiovascular systems, and 25% could cause cancer and mutations. The study recommends full disclosure of the contents of all products, extensive air and water monitoring, further environmental studies, and regulation of fracking under the US Safe Drinking Water Act.
The study notes that the reason that these operations are growing is due to the government's stated policy of energy independence, endorsed by both Presidents Bush and Obama. President Bush was a lifelong oil man while Obama talked during the 2012 campaign about opening more fields for drilling than ever before. They did this by waiving federal environmental laws that had been passed by administrations and legislatures of both parties seeking to protect the quality of life. The end result, as the study notes, is a "void" in federal regulation.
There has been a heavy emphasis in Republican circles from the Supreme Court on down on state sovereignty. However, this emphasis is backfiring in certain areas. For instance, our local commissioners two years ago used the notion of local sovereignty to kill a potential CAFO that was proposed for the area by passing a health ordinance.
The problem in Texas is that state confers two sets of rights -- property rights and mineral rights for the area below the property. In other words, the oil company can come on to your property at any time in order to operate their fracking operation that is operating beneath the surface. This policy sets up a natural conflict between the state, which wants to get its hands on the tax revenues from an estimated $35 billion worth of gas beneath Denton, and the city, which wants to use zoning to improve the quality of life for its citizens.
The National Institutes of Health and the Energy Information Administration estimate that the rush in fracking that occurred in the early and middle parts of last decade can supply our gas needs for "more than 30 years." But that shows that fracking and drilling is not a viable long-term solution to our problems. We can't just think about ourselves; we have to think about our children and grandchildren and what kind of a world we want to leave them. It will only be a matter of time before we are back to the drawing board unless we harness cleaner forms of energy that are infinite resources and which are much less of a pollution hazard.