PUBLIC LETTER: Please read. There will be negative impacts from fracking. Rather than risk our community’s good environment for the benefit of a few people, we should ban fracking until it can be done with zero negative environmental impacts. Think of the impact on the local environment and economy if we did “stockpile” our gas & oil until the industry could extract the gas and oil with zero pollution, and the gas was not exported from St. Tammany Parish, but used here to generate electricity, power industry, and transportation. (Some regular citizens in California have modified their cars to us compressed natural gas. They have installed gas compressors at their homes and are running their cars off the natural gas piped to their homes.) The attached paper gives internet links that let you see pictures and hear personal witnesses of the destruction that fracking is causing elsewhere. There is a link to a satellite picture of intense fracking on public land near the Grand Teton National Park. There are videos of families talking about no longer being able to drink water from their once pristine wells, talking about the headaches caused from breathing polluted air, worrying about the loss in value of their homes and land, worrying about their children’s’ health. Use the attached paper and its links to the internet to learn about the negative impacts that are happening now in New York, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Texas and Louisiana. Help your friends and relatives understand fracking. Forward this email or this link to the document: https://dropbox/s/fylt2sdgsd2gdnz/Frack.docx to your friends and colleagues. Other communities, like Dryden, NY, and nations, like Switzerland, are banning fracking. We can too. Share the attached guide with your friends, relatives, public officials, and community leaders you think can help us stop the frackers. Most of us will not make money on fracking but we will have to live with the mess. Most impressive to me are the accumulated impacts of fracking. One fracking site often leads to many sites. For example, in Wyoming, the industry first asked the Bureau of Land Management for permission to drill 500 wells. A few years later, they asked for permission to drill an additional 3,100 wells in the same area. See satellite pictures at skytruth.org/issues/oil-gas/fracking/.That many wells in a small area has a major physical presence and impact. Each well and each processing facility may have a minor visual and chemical impact, but 3,100 wells, access roads, pipe lines and processing facilities have significant, negative visual and physical impacts. Robert Rhoden’s article focuses on the relatively benign current situation. He may not have been around when the first oil patch canal was cut into the La. marsh. It seemed like a good thing at the time. Better fishing and jobs. A small amount of air polluting gases from one or two wells or processing facilities may be acceptable but the industry is planning on installing thousands of wells and a related number of processing facilities. The film “GasLand 1” highlights the misery caused to people caught in a growing crowd of fracking sites. See youtube/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8. Imagine what happens to the value of their homes when they no longer can drink water from their wells and get headaches which they attribute to breathing the polluted air around their once pristine rural homes. One reason that you don’t hear much from people who have been harmed by fracking-related pollution is that when they win compensation for their losses from a fracking company, the fracking company has them sign a “gag order” as a prerequisite for receiving the compensation. See bloomberg/news/2013-06-06/drillers-silence-fracking-claims-with-sealed-settlements.html: “The strategy keeps data from regulators, policymakers, the news media and health researchers, and makes it difficult to challenge the industry’s claim that fracking has never tainted anyone’s water.” The lesson of the past 50 years in Louisiana is that neither the State nor the Federal government can protect us from pollution or the degradation of our environment by the petroleum/chemical industries. Witness Louisianas elevated cancer rates, its destroyed coastal zone, and its rising flood-insurance rates. We are told that the oil and gas drilling industries are using their best practices to minimize any detrimental impacts on our environment and our health. But with the experience of the past fifty years as evidence, we know that current best practices are not good enough. A growing percentage of Louisianan citizens are no longer content with the environmental price we are paying for economic development. We want all new drilling stopped until our resourceful oil and gas industries can develop techniques that will guarantee there is no environmental price to pay for the economic development they promise. The States have the responsibility to regulate the oil & gas industry. The States write regulations with the collaboration of the industry. For example, the State of Louisiana has exempted the industry from paying severance taxes on horizontally fracked oil and gas for the first 2-3 years. Both the State regulatory agencies and the industry believe that implementing “best practices” is all that is required because they believe the American public accepts that some environmental degradation is a reasonable price to pay for economic development. Unfortunately in the context of a major effort to reduce the size of government, state regulatory agencies do not have adequate resources to enforce environmental protection regulations, especially in the context of a rush to exploit the new fracking technologies by both reputable and “wildcatter” drilling companies. Louisiana experience indicates that the existence of good laws and regulations “on the books” does not necessarily translate into compliance or enforcement. We cannot rely on the State of Louisiana to protect us from environmental degradation related to fracking. Expecting the State to respond to requests to halt drilling until non-polluting practices are developed is naïve. It flies in the face of regulators’ mandate to develop natural resources and their beliefs relating to the costs of economic development. However, many of us believe that America has the technology to exploit its natural resources without significant environmental costs. To help create this new era and to protect ourselves from the existing policies of our State, we will have to appeal to powers beyond the State. I believe the Concerned Citizens of St Tammany Parish are correct: we have to appeal to the courts for our environmental rights. We must also build public support for our rights, otherwise, even the courts will not help us. John Dale “Zach” Lea, Ph.D. Agricultural Economist 826 Old Landing Rd Covington, LA 70433 Phone 985-871-9407 Email jdzlea@hotmail
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 15:14:04 +0000
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