Driving to work today I heard the full Fresh Air broadcast-guests were Abrahm Lustgarten and Josh Fox. Lustgarten just broke the story from BP whistleblowers of the lax corporate culture towards environment and safety going back well over a decade. Fox has made the documentary Gasland showing how "fracture" drilling for natural gas is poisoning communities all over the US from the NY highlands to the Colorado prairies. Both stressed that the libertarian regulatory culture in DC throughout the GOP congress and Bush administration contributed to make it all WORSE.
Fox's visceral contribution: tap water lit on fire due to seeped natural gas
Podcast is here: http://n.pr/...
Gasland trailer is here: http://bit.ly/...
More below the fold
First, here is the Gasland trailer:
Fox got onto this because a company offered $100K to lease his family's 19 acres of land in northern PA in the Delaware river watershed. He told his dad to wait before he signed on- he wanted to investigate.
What he found he put in Gasland. All across the country, the Bush-Cheney energy plan set into motion massive increases in natural gas drilling. To free up the gas, the companies (like Halliburton!!!) pump water under high pressures to fracture the rocks and free up the gas. The rigs bring massive truck traffic, noise pollution, and ground water pollution to these depressed rural areas. This ain't just the west folks-we are also talking upstate NY and rural PA for example.
Depending upon state law, the companies can effectively seize the land for drilling or force the landowners to lease if a majority of neighbors do. That is not the case in PA, but Fox's family land is surrounded by owners who accepted the bucks.
In CO, Fox found tap water in recently drilled land that you can light on fire. He found a woman who returned from vacation to a gas filled house that has given her chronic illness due to a forced lease. He talked to a woman who was harvesting dead animals from a bubbling creek and freezing them to get autopsies proving the culpability of the drillers.
Under the GOP congress in 05, laws were passed that eviscerated the ability of the EPA to regulate how these fracture drillings are carried out. The only gain extracted from the drillers was a promise to suspend the use of diesel oil in the fracture process, one which was found by Lustgarten to have been ignored in supposedly isolated instances.
The people Fox talked to felt they had no government agencies to talk with, and as in A Civil Action and Erin Brockovich, the burden of proof for the environmental consequences are on them!
Lustgarten got hold of documents from BP via a whistleblower and found lax attitudes towards safety going back before the Bush administration but exacerbated by the suspension of meaningful regulatory oversight during that time. BP in one case intimidated and then fired one of their most effective safety monitors in Alaska for violating environmental rules for stepping over a 3 ft wide creek. He points out that the deep drilling in the gulf used tens of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals essentially unregulated by the EPA thanks to the aforementioned 2005 law.
This lax attitude by the Bush administration fostered a quadrupling of spills over 50 gallons in the last decade compared to the previous three, according to a front page story in USA Today the other day.
After hearing this, I don't just want a moratorium offshore for oil, I want it onshore for gas and oil until a proper regulatory regime is back in place.
Call BP (866-448-5816 ) and let them know you are pissed! And push on the Obama administration and congress to move the legislation needed to get tough oversight back in place.