TV News LIES

Much of the focus on hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) for natural gas pertains to potential effects of this technology on water resources, as I discussed in an earlier blog entry.

Yet, the process of fracking, oil and gas production, natural gas processing, natural gas transmission, and natural gas distribution also releases a variety of potentially harmful gases into the atmosphere.

The United States secretly sought Japan's support in 1972 to enable it to dump decommissioned nuclear reactors into the world's oceans under the London Convention, an international treaty being drawn up at the time.

Countries working on the wording of the pact wanted to specifically prohibit the dumping of radioactive waste at sea.

But Washington wanted to incorporate an exceptional clause in the case of decommissioned nuclear reactors.

This proudly liberal city has been out front on gay rights, protection of animals and limits on handguns, and even declared an upcoming "Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day."

But its latest move has the fur flying in a catfight between animal-rights activists and fashionistas. A unanimous City Council vote last week to ban the sale of fur apparel has outraged the fashion industry, one of the primary businesses this tiny city, wedged between Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, has worked hard to attract.

The natural gas industry and its advocates claim that hydraulic fracturing, the modern technique for extracting natural gas, also known as "fracking," is beneficial to the interests of American energy independence.

However, a simple report recently issued by KARK 4 News in Little Rock, Ark., suggests that fracking operations, which involve pumping large amounts of water and chemicals deep underground, may be responsible for triggering the mysterious earthquakes that have been striking in unusual locations across the nation in recent months.

Think fracking for natural gas means jobs? Think again.

In a new assessment of fracking's potential and risks, the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation projects that if the natural gas industry is permitted to conduct hydraulic fracturing to exploit the state's gas-rich shale deposits, less than a quarter of the jobs would go to people who live in the state.

We are blowing up mountains to get at coal, felling boreal forests to get at tar, and siphoning oil from the ocean deep. Most ominously, through the process called fracking, we are shattering the very bedrock of our nation to get at the petrified bubbles of methane trapped inside.

Fracking turns fresh water into poison. It fills our air with smog, our roadways with eighteen-wheelers hauling hazardous materials, and our fields and pastures with pipelines and toxic pits.
I am therefore announcing my intent to devote my Heinz Award to the fight against hydrofracking in upstate New York, where I live with my husband and our two children.