TV News LIES

The new Parti Quebecois government hasn’t wasted any time hinting about a long-term ban on the shale gas industry.

Quebec’s new natural-resources minister, Martine Ouellet, says she doesn’t believe the controversial method of extracting natural gas from shale, known as “fracking,” can ever be done safely.

She made the remarks Thursday on her way into her first cabinet meeting, less than 24 hours after she was named to cabinet. “I don’t foresee a day when there will be technology that will allow safe exploitation (of shale gas),” Ouellet said in Quebec City.

France's government on Wednesday asked a health watchdog to carry out a probe, possibly leading to EU suspension of a genetically-modified corn, after a study in rats linked the grain to cancer.

Earlier, French scientists led by Gilles-Eric Seralini at the University of Caen in Normandy unveiled a study that said rats fed with NK603 corn or exposed to the weedkiller used with it developed tumours.

Ask someone like Jon Entine, a science writer for Ethical Corporation, to describe the sort of person who claims hydraulic fracturing presents a pollution nightmare in waiting, and you quickly find yourself pummeled with talk radio invective: "ideological blowhard," "leftist loony," and "upper-middle-class lefties."  But none apply to Fred Mayer.

When a reporter arrives at his 200-year-old farmhouse on a cloudy June day, one of the first things Mayer asks is: "Do you know who Glenn Beck is? You should really listen to him. Now that man knows what he's talking about."

It gets worse by the hour. While France wisely outlawed wi-fi in its schools due to its serious effects on children, more appliances, transmitters, signals, antennas, phone masts, dishes, and electronic gadgetry is being added by the minute.

And we’re supposed to be excited about it.

here is no shortage of messaging from Big Oil trumpeting efforts to green “the Patch,” which is the euphemistic term applied to Alberta’s tar sands mine and melt sites.

They underplay the carbon impacts of what has been termed “the dirtiest oil on the planet” and trot out fancy technologies and plans that have yet to be put into action at industrial scale. And while there is a rosy picture painted for us Stateside, the business pages in Canada tend to lay bare the galling details of tar sands infrastructure pretty openly. There’s a great example of this from the Globe & Mail’s excellent reporter Nathan VanderKlippe.

Somewhere in West Texas is a 7-inch radioactive cylinder that Halliburton would like to find. Anyone who comes across it is advised to keep their distance.

The oil field services company lost track of the device, which is used to assess potential sites for hydraulic fracturing, last Tuesday while trying to transport it from Pecos to a well site near Odessa 130 miles away. A special unit of the Texas National Guard has now stepped in to aid Halliburton in a search for the cylinder, according to Bloomberg.

Millions of barrels of wastewater trucked into Ohio from shale-gas wells in Pennsylvania might be highly radioactive, according to a government study.

Radium in one sample of Marcellus shale wastewater, also called brine, that Pennsylvania officials collected in 2009 was 3,609 times more radioactive than a federal safety limit for drinking water. It was 300 times higher than a Nuclear Regulatory Commission limit for industrial discharges to water.

Sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk to its smallest extent ever recorded, smashing the previous record minimum and prompting warnings of accelerated climate change.

Satellite images show that the rapid summer melt has reduced the area of frozen sea to less than 3.5 million square kilometres this week – less than half the area typically occupied four decades ago.

Arctic sea ice cover has been shrinking since the 1970s when it averaged around 8m sq km a year, but such a dramatic collapse in ice cover in one year is highly unusual.