A New Environmentalism for an Unfractured Future – Part 3

Concerns and Plans for the Future, Part 3

From a Speech by Sandra Steingraber, New Environmentalism Summit, Brussels, Belgium, June 3, 2014

Fracking destroys water. With no method to turn poisonous frack waste back into drinkable water, gas companies have resorted to pumping the waste back into the ground via deep-well injection. But this solution—which considered a “best practice”—has triggered earthquakes by stressing geological faults and making them vulnerable to slippage

In the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico and Ohio, geologists have also linked fracking itself to earthquakes. Members of the Seismological Society of America warn that geologists do not yet know how to predict the timing or location of such earthquakes, but they do know that they can occur tens of miles away from the wells themselves.

In New York State, both the certainties and the uncertainties about the risk of earthquakes from fracking operations raise serious, unique concerns about the possible consequences to New York City’s drinking water infrastructure from fracking-related activities. No other major U.S. city provides drinking water through aging, 100-mile-long aqueducts that lie directly atop the shale bedrock. Seismic damage to these aqueducts that results in a disruption of supply of potable water to the New York City area would create a catastrophic public health crisis.

Now let’s look at fracking-related air pollution.

Air pollution arises from the gas extraction process itself, as well as the intensive transportation demands of extraction, processing and delivery. And yet, monitoring technologies currently in use underestimate the ongoing risk to exposed people.

Fracking-related air pollutants include carcinogenic silica dust, carcinogenic benzene and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that create ozone. Exposure to ozone—smog—contributes to costly, disabling health problems, including premature death, asthma, stroke, heart attack and low birth weight.

Unplanned toxic air releases from fracking sites in Texas increased by 100 percent since 2009, according to an extensive investigation.

Rural areas with formerly pristine air now top the list of the nation’s 25 most ozone-polluted counties. In these areas, questions about possibly elevated rates of stillbirth and infant deaths in the area have prompted an ongoing investigation.

Finally, community and social impacts of fracking can be widespread, expensive and deadly.

Community and social impacts of drilling and fracking include spikes in crime, sexually transmitted diseases, vehicle accidents and worker deaths and injuries. We know that traffic fatalities more than quadrupled in intensely drilled areas even as they fell throughout the rest of the nation.

Even as evidence of harm continues to emerge across the United States, reviews of the science to date note that investigations necessary to understand long-term public health impacts do not exist.

To explain why science is missing in action, we emphasize in our letter to the governor of New York the obstacles faced by researchers seeking to carry out the needed research. These include industry secrecy on the part of the gas industry which routinely limits the disclosure of information about its operations to researchers and routinely uses non-disclosure agreements as a strategy to keep data from health researchers.

Thus has the anti-fracking movement in the United States sprung up as a human rights movement to reclaim our right to live in a safe environment with clean air and clean water and not be enrolled as unconsenting test subjects in a vast experiment whose risks remain unassessed and unquantified.

In spite of remaining uncertainties, important studies continue to fill research gaps and build a clearer picture of the longer-term and cumulative impacts of fracking. Many such studies currently underway will be published in the upcoming three–to–five year horizon. These include further investigations of hormone-disrupting chemicals in fracking fluid; further studies of birth outcomes among pregnant women living near drilling and fracking operations; further studies of air quality impacts; and further studies of drinking water contamination.

Angela Knight of Energy UK asks for an energy policy that is “properly costed.”  So do I.

And a properly costed energy program must take into account the economic consequence of the resulting health impacts. In the densely populated Northeastern region of the United States where fracking has now penetrated, the medical costs for treating those affected by the resulting water contamination and air pollution have never been tallied.

Doing so would require conducting a comprehensive Health Impact Assessment with an economic analysis that monetizes the costs. These costs could be considerable. In the densely populated continent of Europe, the health costs of energy security based on fracking could also be considerable.

Angela Knight of Energy UK asks for an energy policy not based on emotions. So do I.

And I submit that an energy policy based on gold fever that has oversold the benefits, underpriced the costs and overlooked long-term risks is not emotionless. As described by Bloomberg in a story headlined, “Shale Drillers Feast on Junk Debt to Stay in the Treadmill”:

People lose their discipline. They stop doing the math. They stop doing the accounting. They’re just dreaming the dream, and that’s what’s happening with the shale boom.

Sounds like a highly emotive state to me.

We Americans and Europeans share a common destiny. We each live above bedrocks that are ancient sea floors suffused with bubbles of methane. These bubbles represent the vaporized corpses of sea lilies and squid that lived 400 million years ago. Biologically speaking, our bedrocks are a cemetery of vaporized corpses.

The U.S. plan is to frack them out of the ground, liquefy them and send them over here—all in the name of freeing you from Russian gas. And to encourage you to frack your own bedrock.

If that’s the future you choose, it is not possible to also create a circular economy and attain zero waste, which is the stated goal of the EU Commission’s Green Week, because in this shale are many other hydrocarbon vapors that are liberated along with the methane during fracking. Ethane is one.

In the United States, we have so much excess ethane—a waste product of fracking—that we are planning to build a massive ethane cracker in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania that will turn this waste product into ethylene.

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is the birthplace of Rachel Carson. It is a county that already suffers from high levels of air pollution and excess rates of cancer. Ethane crackers are notorious air polluters.

By turning ethane into ethylene, this facility will solve a waste problem for the gas industry and create the feedstock for the manufacture of disposable plastic. Ultimately, this plastic will end up in our oceans as nanobits of non-biodegradable petrochemical.

If this is not what you had in mind, if a new, vigorous environmentalism is what you want, I ask you stand with us in calling for a moratorium on fracking in the EU, just as we have called for a moratorium on fracking in the U.S.

Our future is unfractured. Thank you.  Sandra Steingraber

>> Ecologist, author, and cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber, PhD, is recognized for her expertise on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health. <<

Tagged as: air pollution, drilling, environmental impacts, fracking, marcellus shale, NY, OH, PA, public health, social impacts, toxic chemicals, wv