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Chemicals from fracking, acidizing, and gravel packing make us sick – Faces of Fracking
Chemicals from fracking, acidizing, and gravel packing make us sick – Faces of Fracking.
It is well-known that many of the chemicals used in fracking, acidizing, and gravel packing are harmful to our bodies. Just look at the above graphic. What hasn’t been so clear is the evidence that highlights incidences where these chemicals have actually made people sick.
There are two main factors why we still don’t have a comprehensive overview of the health impacts of fracking: industry secrecy (there are laws that protect companies from disclosing the chemicals they use) and government inaction (for example, the EPA has backed off several studies to investigate the health impacts of fracking). Additional factors compound the problem: non-disclosure agreements, sealed court records, and legal settlements (all which prevent families and their doctors from talking about how they got sick).
Nevertheless, the stack of evidence that tells us that fracking and similar techniques does make us ill is piling up. Based on peer-reviewed studies, accident reports, and investigative articles, we know now that fracking can not be practiced without endangering human health. Chemicals can and do leak from well casings and get into the water supply. Chemicals released into the atmosphere worsen our air quality. Chemical spills from pipelines get in the soil we use to grow food.
Ocean Plastic Estimated at 5.25 Trillion Pieces — But Where’s the Rest? – Our World
Ocean Plastic Estimated at 5.25 Trillion Pieces — But Where’s the Rest? – Our World.
The deluge of plastic detritus — from the large to the microscopic — swirling about in our oceans weighs in at 269,000 metric tons, according to the most comprehensive research on marine plastic hot off the press yesterday. One of the researchers, Dr. Marcus Erikson, visualizes it like this: “Two liter plastic bottles stacked end-to-end forming a column to the moon and back TWICE.” That’s roughly 6 billion bottles afloat on the high seas.
But as devastating as these numbers are, Erikson says they’re way too conservative. Given that we produce 300 million tons of plastic every year and the National Academy of Sciences estimates 0.1 percent of it ends up in the ocean, he says he knows there’s more. Way more.
So exactly where is the rest?
Especially the most toxic and chemically laden fragments — microplastics — which numbered 100 times less than expected.
There are two mechanisms accelerating the marine plastic phenomenon: gyres, which pulverize plastic, and ocean currents transporting it to the ends of the earth.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Full scale of plastic in the world’s oceans revealed for first time | Environment | The Guardian
Full scale of plastic in the world’s oceans revealed for first time | Environment | The Guardian.
More than five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes, are floating in the world’s oceans, causing damage throughout the food chain, new research has found.
Data collected by scientists from the US, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand suggests a minimum of 5.25tn plastic particles in the oceans, most of them “micro plastics” measuring less than 5mm.
The volume of plastic pieces, largely deriving from products such as food and drink packaging and clothing, was calculated from data taken from 24 expeditions over a six-year period to 2013. The research, published in the journal PLOS One, is the first study to look at plastics of all sizes in the world’s oceans.
Large pieces of plastic can strangle animals such as seals, while smaller pieces are ingested by fish and then fed up the food chain, all the way to humans.
This is problematic due to the chemicals contained within plastics, as well as the pollutants that plastic attract once they are in the marine environment.
“We saw turtles that ate plastic bags and fish that ingested fishing lines,” said Julia Reisser, a researcher based at the University of Western Australia. “But there are also chemical impacts. When plastic gets into the water it acts like a magnet for oily pollutants.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Disaster Persists 30 Years after Bhopal Gas Catastrophe – SPIEGEL ONLINE
Disaster Persists 30 Years after Bhopal Gas Catastrophe – SPIEGEL ONLINE.
When the monsoon washes away the dust of the Indian summer from the landscape, huts and people of Bhopal, the dry basin behind the slum of J.P. Nagar turns into a lake. Laughing children swim in it, fishermen wait for the telltale tug on their lines to signal a catch, and buffalos greedily devour the succulent stems of water lilies.
In Hinduism, water is considered the source of all life. But in Bhopal, a cycle of death begins with each year’s rainy season.
“The people can’t see, smell or taste the poison,” says Rachna Dhingra, “but it’s there.” It’s in the water, in the flesh of fish and in the milk of the water buffalo, and it’s in the dark mud that slum residents scrape from the shores of the lake to fill the cracks in their houses. Dhingra, 37, is standing on a small hill in her blue kurta, a long traditional Indian garment, angrily trying to talk sense into the fishermen. “This is suicide,” she shouts.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Conservationists slam plans to dump mining waste into Norwegian fjord | Environment | The Guardian
Conservationists slam plans to dump mining waste into Norwegian fjord | Environment | The Guardian.
Norway’s image as one of the world’s cleanest, greenest countries with some of the finest unspoilt scenery will be tarnished if the government allows a giant titanium mining company to dump hundreds of millions of tonnes of waste directly into a fjord, conservationists warn.
Nordic Mining has applied to dump nearly 6m tonnes of tailings a year for 50 years into Førde Fjord, one of the country’s most important spawning grounds for cod and salmon, and a site where whales and porpoises congregate. The government is expected to give a decision in the next few days.
According to company statements, the plan is to remove around 250m tonnes of minerals from the nearby Engebø mountain. The annual waste would include 1,200 tonnes of sulphuric acid, 1,000 tonnes of sodium, 1,000 tonnes of phosphoric acid, 360 tonnes of carbonic acid and 90 tonnes of acrylamide as well as other acids, solvents and heavy metals including copper, nickel, lead, zinc and mercury.
But it contends that this will have negligible ecological effects even over 50 years. In a letter to the environment ministry last week it argues that waste deposits will cover no more than 13% of the flat fjord bottom which is less than 200 meters deep.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
3 Billion Gallons Of Fracking Wastewater Pumped Into Clean California Aquifiers: “Errors Were Made” State Admits | Zero Hedge
Dear California readers: if you drank tapwater this morning (or at any point in the past few weeks/months), you may be in luck as you no longer need to buy oil to lubricate your engine: just use your blood, and think of the cost-savings. That’s the good news.
Also, the bad news, because as the California’s Department of Conservation’s Chief Deputy Director, Jason Marshall, told NBC Bay Area, California state officials allowed oil and gas companies to pump up to 3 billion gallons (call it 70 million barrels) of oil fracking-contaminated waste water into formerly clean aquifiers, aquifiers which at least on paper are supposed to be off-limits to that kind of activity, and are protected by the government’s EPA – an agency which, it appears, was richly compensated by the same oil and gas companies to look elsewhere.
And the scariest words of admission one can ever hear from a government apparatchik: “In multiple different places of the permitting process an error could have been made.”
Because nothing short of a full-blown disaster prompts the use of the dreaded passive voice. And what was unsaid is that the “biggest error that was made” is that someone caught California regulators screwing over the taxpayers just so a few oil majors could save their shareholders a few billion dollars in overhead fees.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
