Tag Archives | Fracking

Fracking Industry Using Military Psychological Warfare Tactics and Personnel In U.S. Communities

By on May 23, 2013 in News 0

I_cease_resistanceBrendan Demelle wrote at DeSmogBlog back in 2011:

At the “Media & Stakeholder Relations: Hydraulic Fracturing Initiative 2011” conference last week in Houston, Matt Pitzarella, Director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs at Range Resources, revealed in his presentation that Range has hired Army and Marine veterans with combat experience in psychological warfare to influence communities in which Range drills for gas.

As CNBC reported, Range spokesman Matt Pitzarella boasted to the audience:

“[“…looking to other industries, in this case, the Army and the Marines. We have several former PSYOPs folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments. Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of PSYOPs in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.”
[**Listen: MP3**]

At that same conference, Matt Carmichael, External Affairs Manager at Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, suggested three things to attendees during his presentation:

“If you are a PR representative in this industry in this room today, I recommend you do three things.

… Read the rest

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Food, Farms, Forests, and Fracking: Connecting the Dots

By on May 15, 2013 in News 0
Picture: Zarateman (CC)

Picture: Zarateman (CC)

Ronnie Cummins and Zack Kaldveer write at Common Dreams:

If ever there was a time for activist networks and the body politic to cooperate and unite forces, it’s now. Global warming, driven in large part by the reckless business-as-usual practices of multi-billion-dollar fossil fuel and agribusiness corporations, has brought us to the brink of a global calamity.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution in the atmosphere has now reached 400 ppm of carbon dioxide (CO2), the highest level since our hunter and gatherer ancestors evolved 200,000 years ago. We are now facing, even though millions are still in denial, the most serious existential threat that humans have ever encountered. Through ignorance and greed, through unsustainable land use and abuse, through reckless deforestation, through unsustainable food, farming and ranching practices, and through overconsumption of fossil fuels, we have overloaded the atmosphere with dangerous levels of greenhouse gases: CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and black soot.

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Fracking Our Food Supply

By on December 14, 2012 in News 4

Picture: LittleGun (CC)

Elizabeth Royte writes at the Nation:

Jacki Schilke and her sixty cattle live in the top left corner of North Dakota, a windswept, golden-hued landscape in the heart of the Bakken Shale. Schilke’s neighbors love her black Angus beef, but she’s no longer sharing or eating it—not since fracking began on thirty-two oil and gas wells within three miles of her 160-acre ranch and five of her cows dropped dead. Schilke herself is in poor health. A handsome 53-year-old with a faded blond ponytail and direct blue eyes, she often feels lightheaded when she ventures outside. She limps and has chronic pain in her lungs, as well as rashes that have lingered for a year. Once, a visit to the barn ended with respiratory distress and a trip to the emergency room. Schilke also has back pain linked with overworked kidneys, and on some mornings she urinates a stream of blood.

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Celebrities Line Up To Fight Fracking

By on August 24, 2012 in News 22

The fight over fracking in New York State has gone beyond indie film star Mark Ruffalo to encompass celebrities including Sean and Julian Lennon, Yoko Ono, Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman, Julianne Moore and Gwyneth Paltrow, Fred Armisen, Alec Baldwin, Jackson Browne, David Byrne, Deepak Chopra, Zooey Deschanel, Carrie Fisher, Roberta Flack, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Koons, John Cameron Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Todd Rundgren, Amy Ryan, Cindy Sherman, Patti Smith, Uma Thurman, Liv Tyler and Rufus Wainwright.

They’ve all signed up with a collective called Artists Against Fracking, where you can find out why they think fracking is a bad idea and send New York Governor Andrew Cuomo a message in anticipation of his decision on whether or not to permit fracking in New York. They also feature the Josh Fox film “The Sky Is Pink”:

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Middle America Is Experiencing a Massive Increase in Earthquakes

By on April 7, 2012 in News 16

Middle America Earthquake ZoneAlexis Madrigal writes on the Atlantic:

Earthquakes are striking the heartland from Alabama to Montana at an unprecedented rate — and human activity is probably to blame.

A new United States Geological Survey study has found that middle America between Alabama and Montana is experiencing an “unprecedented” and “almost certainly manmade” increase in earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater. In 2011, there were 134 events of that size. That’s six times more than were normally seen during the 20th century.

While the changes in the area’s seismicity began in 2001, the trend has really accelerated since 2009, the geologists note. That happens to coincide with increased oil and gas production using new extraction techniques in some parts of the area.

The new work is being presented at the Seismology Society of America’s conference later this month. An abstract for the presentation is available online. In some regions, the increase in earthquakes is even greater than six fold.

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America To Become More Like A Third-World Petro-State?

By on April 5, 2012 in News 5

petroleumVia Guernica, Michael Klare argues that that’s what the giant energy companies are aiming for:

The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states, where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy”—deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

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Pennsylvania Bans Doctors From Disclosing Fracking Dangers To Patients

By on March 30, 2012 in News 11

Marcellus Shale Gas Drilling Tower 1This is truly like something from a George Orwell novel. Via The Atlantic:

Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction — but they won’t be able to share it with their patients. A provision buried in a law passed last month is drawing scrutiny from the public health and environmental community, who argue that it will “gag” doctors who want to raise concerns related to oil and gas extraction with the people they treat and the general public.

Pennsylvania is at the forefront in the debate over “fracking,” the process by which a high-pressure mixture of chemicals, sand, and water are blasted into rock to tap into the gas. Recent discoveries of great reserves in the Marcellus Shale region of the state prompted a rush to development, as have advancements in fracking technologies. But with those changes have come a number of concerns from citizens about potential environmental and health impacts from natural gas drilling…

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How Fracking Caused An Ohio Earthquake

By on January 5, 2012 in News 11
Youngstown, OH. Photo: Blue80 (CC)

Youngstown, OH. Photo: Blue80 (CC)

As many as 11 Ohio earthquakes, to be exact. Pete Spotts reports for the Christian Science Monitor:

The link between “fracking” and earthquakes was thrown into stark relief over the weekend when a magnitude 4.0 quake struck Youngstown, Ohio – typically not a hot bed of noticeable seismic activity. The quake triggered shaking reportedly felt as as far away as Buffalo, N.Y., and Toronto.

The temblor struck Dec. 31 and was the latest and strongest of 11 minor-to-light quakes that have hit the region since March. The epicenters are clustered around a wastewater injection well for a hydraulic fracturing operation.

Understanding the potential effect hydraulic fracturing or related activities could have on local earthquake risks is one question some researchers hope to answer as they try to develop tools for communities.

Fracking allows energy companies to extract natural gas trapped in shale deposits deep underground.

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Hydrofracking Is Poisoning U.S. Water Supply

By on February 27, 2011 in News 5
Shale gas drilling rig in Texas. Photo: David R. Tribble (CC)

Photo: David R. Tribble (CC)

When the mainstream media decries the practices of large energy companies, you know they must really be operating outside any possibility of acceptable behavior. Case in point: hydraulic fracturing for natural gas deposits. Ian Urbina reports for the New York Times:

The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas.

The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.

So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare support from their usual sparring partners.

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