![]() “That’s because these slippery chemicals that they’ve added to fracking fluid decrease friction while fracking, and they don’t lose that property when re-injected down into the earth with wastewater.” “We know without a doubt that fracking is linked to earthquakes that occur over longer periods of time and wider geographic area than previously thought,” she says. (Photo by Tara Lohan)Īnother area where the science is settled is the earthquakes caused by the injection of fracking wastewater underground, she says. Gas being flared at a drilling site in Powder River Basin, Wyo. “Methane is a source of air pollution that’s deadly - and that’s become clearer and clearer,” says Steingraber. It’s also a contributor to smog, otherwise known as ground-level ozone, which is linked to strokes, heart attacks, asthma and preterm births. And that’s contributing to a surge in methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere.īut methane isn’t just a climate danger. “There’s really definitive evidence now that methane leaks at every stage of the fracking process” from drilling to storage, she says. She says this latest collection of research reveals some significant and noteworthy trends. Those efforts drove public engagement on the issue and eventually led to a ban on fracking in her home state of New York in 2014. She helped lead an independent investigation into the scientific research on the health risks from fracking that was a precursor to the current compendium. Sandra Steingraber, a biologist, author and distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College, is one of the compendium’s co-authors. The research collected and summarized is wide-ranging and includes the harms not just from drilling and fracking, but the long tail of the process, including compressor stations and pipelines, silica sand mining, natural-gas storage, natural-gas power plants, and the manufacturing and transport of liquefied natural gas.ĭr. “There is no evidence that fracking can operate without threatening public health directly and without imperiling climate stability upon which public health depends.” “Across a wide range of parameters, from air and water pollution to radioactivity to social disruption to greenhouse gas emissions, the data continue to reveal a plethora of recurring problems and harms that cannot be sufficiently averted through regulatory frameworks,” write the eight public health professionals, mostly doctors and scientists, who compiled the compendium. The research has been piling up for years, and the verdict is clear, the authors conclude: Fracking isn’t safe, and heaps of regulations won’t help (not that they’re coming, anyway). In June the nonprofits Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York released the sixth edition of a compendium that summarizes more than 1,700 scientific reports, peer-reviewed studies and investigative journalism reports about the threats to the climate and public health from fracking. When people asked me if they should leave their homes, it was hard to know what to say there weren’t many peer-reviewed studies to understand how fracking was affecting public health. Many were already woozy from the fumes or worried their drinking water was making them sick. In the following years I visited with people in frontline communities - those living in the gas patches and oilfields, along pipeline paths and beside compressor stations. Suddenly the term fracking - little known outside the oil and gas industry - became common parlance. That same year Josh Fox’s documentary Gasland, which featured tap water bursting into flames, grabbed the public’s attention. ![]() In 2010 when I first started writing about hydraulic fracturing - the process of blasting a cocktail of water and chemicals into shale to release trapped hydrocarbons - there were more questions than answers about environmental and public-health threats.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |