March 3rd, 2013

Dozens of people worried about the environmental effects of gas and oil drilling in the US, gathered at the Stop the Frack Attack conference in Dallas this weekend. Highlights included presentations by people whose water and land have been contaminated by fracking, and a Skype address by Gasland director Josh Fox, who urged people to “stand and fight.”

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January 8th, 2013

Promised Land, the fictional movie starring Matt Damon, is sure to raise more discussion about the merits and risks of hydraulic fracturing. But did you know there’s also a new documentary about the potential dangers of fracking?

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November 12th, 2012

From Green Right Now Reports New Yorkers Against Fracking will be holding vigils in several communities this week, stretching from Brooklyn to Syracuse and several other cities. The coalition is urging Gov. Cuomo to maintain a moratorium against natural gas fracking, which it sees as endangering private and public water supplies and the Hudson River [...]

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July 25th, 2012

Last February, when Raymond Orbach, director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, announced the release of a major study by UT researchers on the effects of hydraulic fracturing, he noted that public policy should be based on “the very best science.”

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December 9th, 2011

In a first, federal environment officials Thursday scientifically linked underground water pollution with hydraulic fracturing, concluding that contaminants found in central Wyoming were likely caused by the gas drilling process.

The findings by the Environmental Protection Agency come partway through a separate national study by the agency to determine whether fracking presents a risk to water resources.

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December 14th, 2010

Actor Mark Ruffalo, environmentalists and a couple from Dimock, Penn. whose water well was contaminated by gas well drilling, rallied after New York Gov. Mark Patterson issued a moratorium on horizontal gas fracturing or “fracking,” which has been blamed for sullying drinking well water in several incidents across the country. One of the best known incidents of contamination occurred in Dimock, Penn., which is located above the same Marcellus Shale formations that gas companies want to tap in New York.

Protesters of drilling in New York worry that gas production there will damage the watershed that New York City, among others, depend upon.

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May 18th, 2010

Two years ago, an AP investigation found that America’s medicine habit had a boomerang effect. Discarded and excreted medicines — heart and mood drugs, tranquilizers and hormone treatments — that had been flushed down the toilet were turning back up in drinking water. (Yes, that’s how our managed water cycle works.)

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September 21st, 2009

By Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica

A drill site entrance near the spill site in Dimock, Pa., taken this past winter. (Photo: Abrahm Lustgarten /ProPublica)

Pennsylvania environment officials are racing to clean up as much as 8,000 gallons of dangerous drilling fluids after a series of spills at a natural gas production site near the town of Dimock last week.

The spills, which occurred at a well site run by Cabot Oil and Gas, involve a compound manufactured by Halliburton that is described as a “potential carcinogen” and is used in the drilling process of hydraulic fracturing, according to state officials. The contaminants have seeped into a nearby creek, where a fish kill was reported by the state Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP also reported fish “swimming erratically.”

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July 23rd, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Feeling guilty about your bottled water? Or worried that it is not as pure as the pastoral scene on the label implies? Your worries are justified. Bottled water is unregulated in the US, and often as not, it is just filtered tap water – with a heavier carbon footprint thanks to the requisite plastic container and the shipping.

Luckily, just as you’re re-evaluating this resource-intensive habit, so is everyone else, from the cities that have passed bottled water taxes to the bottled water companies themselves to entrepreneurs trying to figure a better way.

Culligan, the big kahuna of bottled water service companies now makes a cooler that hooks up to your tap – an apparent concession that the days of carting around those big blue bottles may be numbered.

But one of the most unique solutions to filling your cup without filling the landfill may be generating your own purified water. You can do that by tapping into the humidity in the air with an Atmospheric Water Generator, which pulls water from “thin air” (as long as that air registers at least 35 percent humidity).

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December 17th, 2008

By Harriet Blake

Drill, baby, drill may be what’s on the minds of gas companies, but if you’re a landowner of a potential gas site, you probably have a lot of questions.

Thanks to a new software application that’s being test marketed by MIT, landowners may now extract data to see if the gas companies’ proposals to drill are fair and safe. The software tool, called the Landman Report Card (LRC), will help landowners in any state navigate the government and corporate databases, as well as get feedback from other landowners who’ve been in similar situations. And they can do all this before agreeing to a drilling contract.

The term “land man” refers to an oil company representative who often times shows up on the doorstep of unsuspecting property owners who’ve been targeted as having prospective drill sites.

“People often will sign the day the land man shows up at the door,” says MIT professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. “There are lots of negotiations that people can do, that they often don’t know they can.”

Csikszentmihalyi , co-director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, and Sara Wylie, a grad student in the Science , Technology and Society Program, are the directors of the Landman Report Card project, which is coming to fruition just as natural gas exploration in America gains traction as a potential energy source that doesn’t rely on foreign oil — affecting land and homeowners from New York to Texas to the Rocky Mountains states.

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