TV News LIES

A new report issued by Grassroots Environmental Education, a New York-based non-profit organization and authored by a former staff scientist for the National Council on Radiation Protection says that horizontal hydrofracking in the Marcellus Shale region of New York State is likely to produce significantly higher amounts of radioactive waste than previously believed, putting New Yorkers in danger, and that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has not demonstrated the ability to properly analyze the potential impact of radiation exposure or take adequate steps to protect the public.

“Once radioactive material comes up out of the ground along with the gas, the problem is what to do with it,” says Doug Wood, associate director of Grassroots Environmental Education, who edited the report. “The radioactivity lasts for thousands of years, and it is virtually impossible to eliminate or mitigate. Sooner or later, it’s going to end up in our environment and eventually our food chain. It’s a problem with no good solution—and the DEC is unequipped to handle it.”

Climate scientists agree the Earth will be hotter by the end of the century, but their simulations don’t agree on how much. Now a study suggests the gloomier predictions may be closer to the mark.

“Warming is likely to be on the high side of the projections,” said John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., a co-author of the report, which was based on satellite measurements of the atmosphere.

As of 11 p.m. Tuesday, the ban — Ballot Question 300 — was leading 16,798 votes to 11,544 and had widened its margin of victory with every report, according to the Boulder and Weld county clerk's offices. That gave ban supporters about 59 percent of the vote.

“Are you kidding?” screamed ban supporter Teresa Foster as results came in to a watch party held by Our Health, Our Future, Our Longmont. “Awesome! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

While politicians play for votes and ignore the evidence of a rapidly changing climate, Mother Nature has made the consequences heartbreakingly clear.

Four days after 24-year old Jake Vogelman was killed by a hurricane-toppled tree, NYPD detectives came to his house with his personal effects: a black leather wallet still wet from the rain and a watch that was still working

For decades, natural gas (methane) has been touted as a greener energy alternative to coal, when, according to a new Cornell University study, in considering its whole lifecycle, natural gas appears to be worse for climate change than the coal industry and is more toxic to the environment and human health.

The driver of gas' green halo is true: methane burns cleaner than coal, thus contributing less to global warming during combustion. However, the hydraulic fracturing process — the only way industry knows to get the gas that's left — releases significant amounts of methane, unburned, directly into the atmosphere. When methane isn't burned, it's 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Combine that with the 1,000 truck trips, on average, 2 million to 8 million gallons of water, and 10,000 to 40,000 gallons of chemicals used per well.

The United States, as it turns out, has a lot of unburned natural gas trapped as tiny bubbles in our shale bedrock. Until about a decade ago, much of this trapped underground gas was considered unrecoverable. But that all changed with the rollout of a drilling technique (pioneered by Halliburton) called hydrofracturing, or fracking.

Fracking bores horizontally through the bedrock, blasts it with explosives, and forces into the cracks, under enormous pressure, millions of gallons of water laced with a proprietary mix of poisonous chemicals that further fracture the rock. These boreholes provide the channel out of which the gas flows.

Here’s how hydraulic fracturing introduces cancer risks into communities from the start and into perpetuity:

We know the bad news about superstorm Sandy: the Jersey shore was devastated and many towns remain waterlogged. New York suffered a direct hit, with the city's mass transit system flooded and part-paralyzed for days to come.

But there is good news, too, and that is all that it failed to do. Sandy did not kill hundreds – as Hurricane Katrina did in New Orleans in 2005 – thanks, in part, to timely evacuations and rescue efforts. And luckily, it did not trigger an even greater disaster at one of the region's nuclear power plants. But it could have.

In the early spring of 2006, a nice man was in the area, promoting a chance to dream of better times for Bradford County and its farmers. There was promise of jobs for everyone and the farmer would generate money from signing a lease, and if a gas well was drilled on the farmer’s property he would become rich.

Two years passed with little activity. By now, the older leases were about to expire, gas companies were beginning to drill, and excitement was in the air. Here, the majority of farmers signed early, receiving $5- $85/per acre. There was this belief that the person with the gas well would become the next “shaleionaires.” We later found out small acre properties started signing leases at $2,500/ per acre.