Fracking is Great! The Administration loves it so it must be Great. Here's more Great Fucking

[ProSense]

2. No,

"Fracking is Great! The Administration loves it so it must be Great. Here's more Great Fucking"

...it is not "great." Governor Brown just signed a fracking bill into law.

California Fracking Bill Signed Into Law By Governor Jerry Brown

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The California law would require oil companies to obtain permits for fracking as well as acidizing, the use of hydrofluoric acid and other chemicals to dissolve shale rock.

It would also require notification of neighbors, public disclosure of the chemicals used, as well as groundwater and air quality monitoring and an independent scientific study.

The hotly contested bill drew strong opposition from many environmentalists, who said it did not go far enough and complained that a proposed moratorium was taken out, along with some tougher regulations.

In his signing statement, Brown, who favors some level of fracking in the Monterey Shale, said he believed more changes would be necessary even as the law goes into effect next year.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/21/california-fracking-bill_n_3965069.html

More information from the Center for Biological Diversity:

OUR CAMPAIGN

CALIFORNIA

The Center is a trailblazer in the movement to stop dangerous, destructive fracking in California as the oil and gas extraction method becomes increasingly common in the state despite a startling lack of necessary regulation.

In December 2011, the Center and the Sierra Club sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to prevent dangerous fracking in Monterey and Fresno counties. In July 2011, we and our allies had filed a formal protest against the BLM’s plans to lease about 2,700 acres of delicate ecosystems in Monterey and Fresno counties for oil and gas activities, including fracking. The agency rejected our protest and green-lighted the lease without reviewing the potential effects of fracking.

The lease sites include habitat for the San Joaquin kit fox — protected as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act and as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act — and for the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, protected as endangered under both Acts. This land also includes important watershed areas in Monterey County. Fracking under the leases would risk a great disaster for California’s wildlands, wildlife, water and air quality.

To stop this disaster, in August 2012 we launched federal litigation challenging the Bureau of Land Management for failing to properly evaluate hydraulic fracturing’s threats to endangered species on public land leased for oil and gas activities in California. In October of that year, we filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Conservation, Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (the agency responsible for regulating the state's oil and gas industry) to force it to abide by the California Environmental Quality Act in regulating fracking — because, as a December 2012 Center analysis revealed, proposed California fracking regulations would do little to protect the state's public health and environment. We filed suit again in Alameda County Superior Court in January 2013 to protect the state from fracking, since California regulators hadn't followed the law by allowing fracking to expand without lawful oversight.

Not despite our long, hard work on the issue, on May 7, 2013, the BLM postponed all oil and gas lease sales in California for the rest of the fiscal year.

NATIONAL

The Center is also fighting fracking beyond California. In August 2011 we went national, joining a broad coalition of public health, environmental, academic, faith-based and other organizations in sending a formal letter calling on President Barack Obama to do everything possible to halt the expansion of fracking across the country. The next year, we submitted comments to the BLM opposing the Mary’s River Project in Nevada, a 20,622-acre oil and gas project that would use fracking on public lands providing important habitat for the imperiled greater sage grouse and other wildlife — and that would threaten Nevada's public health as well.

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/california_fracking/our_campaign.html

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8. Don’t state and federal laws protect people and wildlife from fracking?

Fracking is poorly regulated. In 2005 Congress exempted most types of fracking from the federal Safe Water Drinking Act, severely limiting protections for water quality.

The industry has also been free, until recently, to spew essentially unlimited air pollution during fracking. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just finalized new Clean Air Act rules called “New Source Performance Standards” that will limit air pollutants from fracked gas wells, but the rules don’t cover oil wells, don’t set limits on methane release — and won’t take effect until 2015.

Some states do little or nothing to regulate fracking. California officials, for example, don't currently even keep track of when or where fracking is done in the state or what chemicals are used in the process.

Inadequate disclosure and poor protections are common features of state laws. In Texas, for example, companies routinely exploit a trade secrets loophole to avoid disclosing what chemicals they’re using in fracking fluid. Companies used the Texas trade secrets exemption about 19,000 times in the first eight months of 2012, according to a Bloomberg News investigation.

Even oil and gas companies fracking wells on federally managed public lands are rarely fined for violating environmental and safety rules — and the few fines levied are small compared to industry profits, according to a 2012 Congressional report.

Fracking pollution occurs even in states with regulations. The best way to protect our water, air and climate is to ban fracking now.

9. But hasn’t fracking been done in the United States for many years?

Yes, but today’s fracking techniques are new and pose new dangers. Technological changes have facilitated an explosion of fossil fuel production in areas where, even a decade ago, companies couldn’t recover oil and gas profitably.

Directional drilling, for example, is a new technique that has greatly expanded access to rock formations. Companies also employ high fluid volumes to fill horizontal “well bores” that sometimes extend for miles. And oil and gas producers are using new chemical concoctions called “slick water” that allow injection fluid to flow rapidly enough to generate the high pressure needed to break apart rock.

As fracking methods have changed and fracking has expanded, so has the threat to public health and the environment.

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http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/fracking/10_questions.html

Letter to the administration, 2011:

On behalf of Americans who live in every US state and territory, we urge that you employ any legal means to put a halt to hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), a highly controversial and dangerous method of “natural” gas exploration, until and unless the environmental and health impacts of this process are well understood and the public is adequately protected.

Fracking involves shooting millions of gallons of water laced with carcinogenic chemicals deep underground to break apart rock to release trapped gas. Despite its obvious hazards, regulation necessary to ensure that fracking does not endanger our nation’s water supply has not kept pace with its rapid and increasing use by the oil and gas industry.

To date, fracking has resulted in over 1,000 documented cases1 of groundwater contamination across the county, either through the leaking of fracking fluids and methane into groundwater, or by above ground spills of contaminated and often radioactive wastewater from fracking operations. Rivers and lakes are also being contaminated with the release of insufficiently treated waste water recovered from fracking operations. In addition, fracking typically results in the release of significant quantities of methane – a potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere despite the availability of cost-effective containment measures.

We acknowledge the steps your administration has taken to address fracking. However, much more needs to be done. For example, EPA has convened an effort to study the impacts of fracking on drinking water. The first phase will end by 2012, but this study will take several years to complete. By this time, even more of the nation’s drinking water may become contaminated by fracking. In addition, the EPA study will not include an analysis of the efficacy of the existing regulatory framework to address fracking impacts. And while Secretary Chu has assembled a committee to recommend and identify best practices to improve safety and environmental performance of fracking, best practices, assuming they are even implemented, can of course not in themselves provide adequate protection from risks that are not yet fully known.

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http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/energy/dirty_energy_development/oil_and_gas/pdfs/11-8-8_CEO_fracking_letter_to_Obama.pdf