This video is re-posted from Specialty Studios.
Most Americans know little about the source of oil for the proposed Keystone Pipeline—the tar sands of Northern Alberta. The tar sands are not a traditional oil field. The oil is extracted and processed from the sands at a significant and devastating environmental and health cost to the land and people, and the process itself is a major contributor to climate change.
White Water, Black Gold follows Canadian adventurer David Lavallee on his three-year journey across Western Canada in search of the truth about the impact of the world’s dirtiest and thirstiest oil industry. This is a journey of jarring contrasts, from the pristine mountain ice fields that are the source of the industry’s water, to the tar sands tailing ponds, where thousands of migrating birds have unwittingly landed and died.
In the course of his journey Lavallee, backed by university scientists, makes a number of discoveries that raise serious concerns for Canada and the U.S.
Native peoples living downstream are contracting unusual cancers; new science shows that water resources in an era of climate change will be increasingly scarce; the proposed expansion of the oilfields to meet Keystone Pipeline demand could endanger multiple river systems across Canada that makeup about half of its water supply; and planned oil pipelines across British Columbia and the U.S. bring fresh threats to rivers, salmon and the Pacific Ocean.
White Water, Black Gold is a powerful tool for waking up Americans to the potential impact of the Keystone Pipeline, and clearly shows that we will be paying the environmental, social and public health costs long after the oil has run dry.
You can watch the 54 minute film online at http://vimeo.com/32526916.
Oil and Gas Sector Ranks Number Two in Global Warming Pollution
This article by Tom Kenworthy is re-posted from EcoWatch.
When it comes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, power plants are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. But a new report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows that oil and natural gas are a pretty sizable monkey on our climate back as well.
Reporting for the first time on GHGs from petroleum and natural gas systems, the U.S. EPA this week said that the oil and gas sector ranked second in emissions to power plants, releasing 225 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2011. More than a third of that came from methane, the main constituent of natural gas, and a far more potent global warming gas than carbon dioxide.
The oil and gas sector was responsible for 40 percent of total U.S. methane emissions. In terms of greenhouse gas equivalent, the sector’s overall emissions were only about one-tenth those of power plants.
Emissions from petroleum and natural gas systems come from a range of activities from drilling oil and gas wells both onshore and offshore, and the processing, transmission, storage and distribution of natural gas.
This was the second year that the U.S. EPA, directed by Congress, has reported U.S. GHG emission data. The 2011 data includes a total of 41 sources, 12 of them new in the second year of the program.
This year’s release of the data shows that power plant emissions, which account for about one-third of all U.S. emissions, were abut 4.6 percent lower than 2010 levels.
Refineries ranked number three on the list of biggest emitters, with about 182 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Drug War Mexico, NAFTA, and Why People Leave
This interview is re-posted from Dissident Voice.
In this interview with the Real News Network, Peter Watt, author of Drug War Mexico, talks about how US policy and neoliberal ‘reforms’ helped create conditions for the growth of drug cartels and the impoverishment of millions.
Watt also talks about the nearly twenty years of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and how millions of peasants have lost their land and have little alternative than to come to the US, often undocumented.
The content of this interview is important, particularly now as the US government is debating new immigration policy.
How Immigration Reform Could Expand Incarceration of Immigrants
This article by Seth Freed Wessler is re-posted from ColorLines.
The House made its first formal foray into immigration reform yesterday at a lengthy Judiciary Committee hearing in which Republicans struck a familiar chord. Despite record-setting deportation levels in recent years, Republican members of the committee were in broad agreement that they want even more enforcement before they could sign onto the comprehensive reform ideas laid out by Senate negotiators and President Obama.
“There is not in my opinion very much enforcement going on at all in the interior of the country,” said Judiciary Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican.
The heightened enforcement that Goodlatte and others seek raises a thorny question for the immigration reform process: Will it address the dire concerns many have about the ways in which immigrants are detained while awaiting deportation?
Immigration reform advocates around the country are raising concerns about the sprawling complex of prisons and detention centers, run often by private corporations, that are used to lock up non-citizens. Today, a group of senators led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy will release a strongly worded letter to colleagues calling for greater protections for immigrants inside those detention centers.
“Our laws mandate detention or deportation for many people, denying them access to a hearing before a judge, without guaranteeing legal counsel for those who cannot afford it,” the senators wrote, according to the Huffington Post. “Immigration enforcement measures frequently target minority and immigrant communities through impermissible racial profiling that instills fear and distrust of law enforcement and makes communities less safe. Our system is not fair. It is unnecessarily punitive and disproportionate.”
The tone at yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing suggests Republicans in that chamber would disagree. The ideas swirling there would instead expand policies that tightly entwine the criminal justice and immigration systems. Though a large-scale legalization of undocumented immigrants would seem on its face to render detention facilities obsolete, efforts are already underway to keep them growing.
Detention Reform or Detention Expansion
In recent years, the Obama administration has detained and deported immigrants at a record-setting pace. Though the administration purports to target serious criminal offenders, critics say immigration laws paint “serious” in exceptionally broad strokes. The bulk of the 1.5 million people deported in the last four years were charged with minor violations, and many of these people would still find themselves subject to deportation even if they’re on track to legal status or have a green card.
And for immigrants pegged with a long list of convictions, detention before deportation is mandatory. Laws passed in the 1990’s took the power away from ICE agents and immigration judges to review the particulars of cases, release detainees or stop their deportation. Approximately two-thirds of the 400,000 detainees last year were held on a mandatory basis in one of the more than 300 facilities that dot the American landscape, without the possibility of release, according to the advocacy group Detention Watch Network.
Advocates hope that an immigration reform bill will begin to replace punitive lock up with alternative, community-based measures to keep track of non-citizens in deportation proceedings. Last week, President Obama nodded in that direction. The White House’s guiding principles for immigration reform note that the president’s proposal “allows DHS to better focus its detention resources on public safety and national security threats by expanding alternatives to detention and reducing overall detention costs.”
In 2012, the federal government spent over $2 billion on detention operations, a nearly 150 percent increase from just seven years ago. And the two leading private detention companies, Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, together netted about $425 million in revenues from their ICE contracts. The industry spends millions lobbying Congress.
Republicans yesterday made clear that they’re not interested in cuts.
Rep. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, asked San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, who testified at the hearing, if the U.S. should be allowed to summarily deport people with gang affiliations “before they committed another criminal act.” In 2005, Rep. Forbes introduced the Alien Gang Removal Act, which would have led to the mandatory detention and deportation of anyone the government labeled a member of a gang, even if they’ve never been convicted of a crime. Similar language made it’s way into a comprehensive immigration reform bill considered by the Senate in 2006.
Belinda Escobosa Helzer, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, says that laws like these cast an overbroad net that encourages racial profiling. “What we’ve seen in practice in California is that a lot of youth of color are being documented as gang members because of where they live, who they went to school with, who they were walking with,” she said, not because they’ve committed a crime.
A provision like the one Forbes suggests would add to an already long list of exclusions Congress could build into a reform bill.
Civil liberties and immigrant rights groups, meanwhile, are advocating for reduced reliance on detention facilities in the immigration enforcement process and restored discretion to judges.
“It’s absolutely crucial Congress include a rollback of mandatory detention laws in any new immigration legislation,” said Emily Tucker, the advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, in a statement Tuesday.
The collateral effects of detention have only recently come into view. A 2011 Colorlines.com investigation revealed that the detention of parents regularly leaves children stuck in foster care or in other precarious situations.
“Because of the deportations that have taken place over the last few years there are anywhere from 5,000 to 6,000 children who have been placed in foster care because their parents have been deported. The children were citizens,” Rep. Karen Bass, a California Democratic and member of the House Judiciary Committee, said at the hearing yesterday, citing the findings of the Colorlines.com investigation.
Filling Federal Prisons
Democratic congressional staffers and Beltway advocates say they’re most concerned that in exchange for backing the legalization of undocumented immigrants, Republicans will demand an expansion of a program called Operation Streamline, which began in 2005 in counties along the U.S.-Mexico border to prosecute and incarcerate people crossing the border.
Advocates of the program say incarceration deters immigrants from crossing and contributes to the reported 40-year low in new migration over the border. There’s little evidence to support this claim, but Sen. John McCain, the leading GOP immigration reformer, and other border Republicans have nonetheless listed additional investments in Streamline as a key component of their border security demands in recent years.
Though congressional staffers and advocates say the demand has yet to appear on the table in the current round of Beltway trading, many expect it will.
Prosecutions for immigration-related offenses rose by 50 percent in just the last five years, and the federal Bureau of Prisons is building new facilities to make room. In the 1990’s the BOP began contracting out the operation of federal prisons to hold so called “criminal aliens,” who include people convicted of violations like reentry and of other crimes. Geo Group and Corrections Corporation of America now operate all 13 of the facilities that hold a cumulative 24,000 inmates. The companies took in over $460 million in revenue from federal contracts in 2011, the Huffington Post reports.
Advocates, journalists and the BOP’s own researchers have documented diminished quality and widespread abuse and neglect of inmates in private facilities and many are concerned that immigration reform could facilitate greater opportunities for these companies. Already, expansion looks likely.
In July the government put out a call for a 14th privately run facility—a 1,000 bed prison with a $25 million price tag. And a report released in September by the Government Accountability Office revealed that the BOP projects the addition of 1,500 more inmates to these facilities every year, increasing the population of the prisons by 50 percent by the end of the decade.
In a move that will help keep the prisons full, less than a month ago, California Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican on the Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation to add long mandatory minimums to sentencing rules for reentry and other immigration related offenses. In one case, his bill sets a sentencing range between 10 and 20 years for people coming back to the country. If passed, either on its own or as part of a comprehensive immigration reform bill, it would drive up the time these inmates spend behind bars.
God made a farmer ad revised to reflect a more honest reality of who does the work in our food system
During last Sunday’s Super Bowl, millions of viewers saw the commercial by Dodge Trucks, featuring the voice of conservative radio personality Paul Harvey.
Most people this writer talked to thought the ad was going to be for one of the big agri-business companies like Cargill or Monsanto. Instead, Dodge Trucks made their own cultural case for associating their vehicles with the iconic image of American farmers.
The creative people at Brave New Films and Cuenteme took the same ad and altered it with different images, to make a point about who really does the bulk of the farm work in the US, the millions of migrant workers.
Here is the altered ad.
This article is re-posted from EcoWatch.
Caleb Behn is the young, eloquent and enigmatic subject of a new documentary-transmedia project Fractured Land. An experienced hunter trained on the land by his grandfathers, Caleb is a modern Dene warrior, and a law student at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada.
He is a part of a dynamic dialogue on sustainable, equitable energy development in Canada, a country whose antiquated resource extraction practices are systematically decimating a way of life reliant upon the air, water and land.
“One of B.C’s bright, emerging native political leaders,” said Mark Hume, The Globe and Mail, Caleb is among an inspiring new generation of Indigenous leaders, balancing their ancestral customs with the modern world to forge a path to a sustainable energy future.
Vancouver-based filmmakers Fiona Rayher and Damien Gillis have followed Caleb to places of largely unseen beauty—from his traditional territories in Northern British Columbia, where he’s fished and hunted moose his whole life, to Maori lands in New Zealand, where he sought to learn how Indigenous law could be blended with the current legal system in order to protect our sacred ecosystems.
Now back in Canada, Caleb’s making a lot of noise—touring the country to speak about his experiences and concerns, and applying his legal education toward building bridges across divided communities.
Caleb has been an active voice in the recent Idle No More movement, using social media to engage in constructive discourse with other leaders and participants across the country and the globe.
Background: Caleb Behn and energy development in British Columbia
Both Caleb’s mother’s and father’s territories are deeply affected by decades of heavy oil and gas industry development.
His mother, from the West Moberly Nation of the Peace Valley region has seen development as early as 1922, with large-scale commercial development beginning in the 1950s, and growing rapidly since. The third proposed dam on the Peace River, known as Site C, would flood an 80 km stretch of the valley to power natural gas and mining operations.
Meanwhile, in Caleb’s father’s Eh-cho Dene territory around Fort Nelson, there are plans for 20 long-term licenses to draw a trillion liters of water out of surrounding rivers and lakes to use for natural gas “fracking” operations in the nearby Horn River Basin.
Fracking is a method of natural gas extraction that involves drilling deep into the Earth, to blast the shale with vast amounts of water, toxic chemicals and sand at high-pressures, to crack open the shale and release the gas.
The process has been flagged worldwide for poisoning water tables and releasing noxious gases into the atmosphere, severely damaging the health of residents living in the regions and causing unequivocal environmental destruction, including earthquakes.
In 2012, The David Suzuki Foundation reported that scientists have analyzed 40 years of satellite images of British Columbia, discovering a rapidly growing network of hydrocarbon infrastructure development, directly undermining the governments proposed goal to drastically reduce carbon emissions by 2020.
To transport the natural gas from British Columbia to Asia, as proposed, it must first be converted to a liquid state, which would require approximately 14, 500 GWh of electricity, enough to power 75 percent of all residences in the province.
This sophisticated web of hydrocarbon project development between Alberta and British Columbia is being referred to as “Canada’s Carbon Corridor.” The infrastructure required for these projects forges an archaic cycle of abuse of the region’s resources that threatens to lock Canada into an unsustainable and destructive social, economic and environmental path.
This Day in Resistance History: Gay Liberation Front tears down hate speech sign from bar
On this day in 1970, about 100 activists descend on Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood.
For 30 years the bar had posted a sign, “Faggots — Stay Out.” According to research done by Felice Picano on Gay activist Morris Knight, the Los Angeles branch of the GLF decided as one of its first actions was to target Barney’s Beanery.
The GLF had begun actions in January of 1970, just one month before, where they engaged in tactics such as shop-ins – getting people in the LGBTQ community to spend money there; change-ins – where people would come in dressed more hetero-normative, but change in the bathroom dressed how they wanted to be dressed; and sit-ins – where GLF members occupied space within the bar as a form of protest.
Management refused to remove the sign & even posted six additional warnings over a several week period. Because the bar owner refused to remove the hate speech sign, GLF activists on February 7, 1970 decided to physically remove the sign themselves.
This action brought out a significant number of the LAPD, which led to an additional confrontation on the streets.
However, the campaign did result in the bar finally removing any signage that the LGBTQ community found offensive.
There are several lessons that can be learned from such an action. First, the action by GLF members demonstrated that Direct Action is an important tactic to engage in. Secondly, the campaign against Barney’s Beanery gave momentum to the Los Angeles chapter of the GLF and other groups across the country.
According to Felice Picano, the success of the Barney’s Beanery action led to another 175 protests in the next two years by the GLF in Los Angeles alone, thus demonstrating the inspiring capacity and power of direct action to mobilize people against an injustice.
Lastly, the use of Direct Action in 1970 gave momentum to the national Gay Liberation Front, which wrote its manifesto the following year, a manifesto that reflected the radical call for ending systems of oppression.
Near the end of the manifesto it states:
The long-term goal of Gay Liberation, which inevitably brings us into conflict with the institutionalized sexism of this society, is to rid society of the gender-role system, which is at the root of our oppression. This can only be achieved by eliminating the social pressures on men and women to conform to narrowly defined gender roles.
The manifesto also encouraged an intersectional analysis and the need to build alliances with other oppressed groups.
As we cannot carry out this revolutionary change alone, and as the abolition of gender rotes is also a necessary condition of women’s liberation, we will work to form a strategic alliance with the women’s liberation movement, aiming to develop our ideas and our practice in close inter-relation. In order to build this alliance, the brothers in gay liberation will have to be prepared to sacrifice that degree of male chauvinism and male privilege that they still all possess.
On this day, February 7, we honor the courage of LGBTQ activists who not only challenged hate speech and discrimination, but eventually called for systemic change.
Black Agenda TV
This video is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.
In this edition of Black Agenda TV:
- Black America and the Genocide in Congo; African Americans have not used their political clout to stop the killing.
- Obama’s Race to the Top Hurts Black Students, Teachers, Communities; Drives school closings and helps charter profiteers.
- Black Misleadership Class to Launch “February 30th Movement” to hold President Obama (and themselves) accountable.
To My Male Relatives on Facebook Who ‘Like’ Sexism
This article by Jessica Valenti is re-posted from ZNet.
Dear cousin/nephew/second-cousin,
It’s generally a real pleasure to have you as a friend on Facebook. I appreciate that I can keep up on what the kids are listening to these days on Spotify and I thoroughly enjoy eyeing pictures of high school ragers. But I’ve noticed that lately your taste in “likes” has changed. It’s out with Bieber, in with Tosh.0.
You’ve indicated that you will be attending “Booty Slap Day” and have started to share videos of young men running up to women they don’t know in order to grope their behinds, run away and laugh—videotaping it all for hilarious posterity.
Now, I hate to get all Aunt Feminist Killjoy on you—but I love you and it’s my job. And I imagine you care about me too, at least enough to read on.
Here’s the thing: those guys running up to women just to grab their ass? Stuff like that happens to women all the time. It’s happened to me. When I was your age, guys—from boys in school to men on the subway—used to grope and touch me against my will too. I don’t know if any of them videotaped it or if they did it as a “joke”—all I know was that it was really scary.
Once it happened on my way to school on the train. I was wearing a dress because it was my seventeenth birthday. The subway was crowded and a man—I never saw his face—put his hand up my skirt and grabbed my ass right over my underwear. The memory of it still makes me feel like vomiting. This was just one incident—it’s happened to me at least a dozen times. The girls you know at school—girls you’re friends with?—I’m betting it’s happened to them, too.
Being touched against your will has become a twisted rite of passage for American females. It’s a reminder that you’re never safe anywhere. That your body is not really yours—but instead public property, there to be rubbed against by an old man or pinched and videotaped by a young one.
I know that a quick click on the “like” button may not seem like a big deal to you—but it scares me to think about the larger implications. I think about the high school kid in Steubenville, Ohio, joking and laughing about the unconscious teen girl in the next room who had just been raped by two of his classmates. That may seem a million miles away from “liking” a video—but it’s all part of the same world, the same culture that devalues women. Even laughing at a joke about rape supports the idea that women are less than and makes rapists think that you are like them. And the more you laugh at this stuff, the easier it becomes to take the ideas you’re laughing at more and more seriously.
Listen, I don’t think you’re an asshole who thinks it’s funny to do something that women find scary. You’ve been raised to think that this sort of stuff is all in good fun. Not by your parents necessarily, but by culture. You’ve grown up in a country where a Super Bowl commercial for Audi suggests that girls your age actually like it when a guy they don’t really know grabs and forces a kiss on them. (Seriously—they won’t like this.) You’ve been raised in a culture that positions women as existing just for sex, for humiliation, for objectification.
So please understand that I don’t blame you for partaking in the only kind of culture you’ve ever known. At least, I don’t blame you yet. Because here’s the thing—if you didn’t realize before that this kind of stuff is harmful and hurtful to women, now you do. So think of this as a chance to make a decision about what kind of man you’re going to be.
As you continue to grow up, you’re going to have plenty of opportunities (too many) to laugh at women’s pain, embarrassment or the sexual harassment and assault we face. These moments will define you. Will you laugh along? Share a video, like a status, laugh at a joke? Or will you say “no,” tell a friend that’s a fucked-up thing to say, and walk away?
Yes, if you choose the latter—the undoubtedly more difficult path—your friends may give you a hard time. They could laugh, call you a “pussy” or accuse you of not being able to take a joke. I’m sure that will be a pain. But it’s still the right thing to do. And you can be secure in your decision to stand with women—to stand with me—because you’ll know that you’re better than all that. Media, sexism, misogyny—all of these structures are depending on the idea that you won’t think deeply about the messages that are sent to you, that you’ll just accept them without consideration or critical thinking. But you’re better than the culture says you are. You’re smarter than that and you’re kinder than that. I know you are.
So please, the next time you’re considering sharing a video or laughing at a joke or saying something unsavory about a female peer—take the action seriously, think about what it really means. And consider your Auntie Feminist who loves you very much.
Michigan’s 21 Million Gallon Frack Job: A National Record?
This article is re-posted from Ban Fracking Michigan.
The destruction of the world’s fresh water due to fracking is at the uppermost of our minds, as we live and drink the water in the Great Lakes state. How much water is being used for Michigan’s frack industry is now proven to be obscenely underestimated. Michigan may have set a national record for allowing Encana Oil & Gas USA to frack a natural gas well with more than 21 million gallons of water.
A second nearby well is set to be fracked with more than 16 million gallons, according to a permit granted Encana late last year by Michigan regulators.
These big numbers are a big surprise. Most industry and government claims of water usage go by Marcellus shale figures, but here in Michigan, the frackers are using more water than perhaps anywhere else in the nation.
- According to Michigan regulators (Department of Environmental Quality) “up to 5,000,000 gallons or more.”
- According to industry’s public relations front group, Energy In Depth “as much as 5 million gallons.”
- According to the industry group website, FracFocus, by Ground Water Protection Council and Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission states it takes (referring to the Marcellus shale in the eastern U.S.) “5 million gallons of water per well.”
The truth is now coming out
FracFocus says the first well, State Excelsior 3-25 HD1, was fracked on Oct. 30, and Encana used 21,112,194 gallons of water. Combined with two other horizontal wells on the same pad, FracFocus says more than 42 million gallons went permanently downhole. The Excelsior pad (named after the township) is on Sunset Trail between Kalkaska and Grayling in the Mackinaw State Forest in Kalkaska County.
Fracking Sites in Michigan
A permit that was issued Nov. 30, for Encana’s well State Roscommon 1-7 HD1, states the company intends to frack with 400,000 barrels. That equals 16,800,000 gallons. The company’s application adds that the wellpad is sized to accommodate “up to six or 8 HD’s” (horizontal drills). If there are eight horizontal drills on the pad, the total water usage will be more than 100 million gallons. The pad is in the Roscommon State Forest, south of Houghton Lake.
The per well figures are three and four times what the industry and regulators have been saying. And it cannot be compared to the water used by farmers. Irrigation water returns to the aquifer and the hydrologic cycle. Water used for fracking is lost forever deep in the frack wells and disposal injection wells.
Why is the gas industry allowed to suck up so much water? Industry’s latest answer is that fracking is ok because burning natural gas synthesizes new water in the atmosphere, chemically, where it didn’t exist before. Eventually the new water rains to earth. If enough gas is burned from a well, the water created can actually surpass the amount of water destroyed in the fracking process.
This is a diversionary tactic to try to ignore the fact that millions of gallons of water are being destroyed forever, leaving our landscape full of frack wells and injection wells filled with toxic and carcinogenic frack wastes–water permanently diverted from the Great Lakes and now buried in the ground … in literally bottomless pits.
The industry’s newest gimmick is only telling half the story about the chemistry and, there’s a catch: Little of the rain will fall in Michigan. Atmospheric winds whirl it around the world. It can fall anywhere, usually on places with wet climates or in the oceans. In addition to creating H2O, burning methane creates CO2, a greenhouse gas that accelerates climate change.
Michigan is in a drought. Great Lakes levels are at near-record lows. Water is limited. Gas extracted here—or anywhere—will bring scant amounts of it to rain in our state.
There’s a second catch: Inevitably some wells are duds. Duds don’t produce enough gas to generate enough water to equal the amount lost during fracking.
Exponentially more water threatened by future wells
Encana’s threat to Michigan is profound. Encana has identified 1,700 potential Collingwood well locations in Michigan. Each location may host more than one frack well. Encana holds oil and gas leases on 430,000 net acres in the state. Recent pipeline applications say it anticipates drilling a significant number of wells in Kalkaska and Crawford Counties over the next several years.
It’s painful to do the math on how much water this will destroy. If all 1,700 Encana well locations used 21.1 million gallons of water, 35.8 billion gallons of water would be used for Encana’s wells alone, producing even greater amounts of frack wastes, when adding in the amounts of chemicals, additives and silica sand in the injectate. And if the Roscommon and Excelsior wells are the model for the industry, it is likely there will be more than one frack well on each of the 1,700 frack well locations, more than doubling or tripling the water and wastewater estimates.
Since learning of the high water use figures at the Excelsior and Roscommon wells, Ban Michigan Fracking has asked industry and environmental sources around the country to see if anyone has heard of any larger well anywhere. So far, no larger well has been identified. We will keep readers posted.
Michigan will become a toxic wasteland of frack wastes that will be unrecoverable and unfixable
The burgeoning problem resulting from all this fracking and unconventional shale gas drilling is where to put all the toxic wastes directly made by the process? Already Ohio is the recipient of the Pennsylvania frack industry’s toxic wastewater, in addition to its own, overwhelming the injection wells there. Michigan, with more than 1,000 injection wells, will quickly become a toxic wasteland, taking in frack wastes from Michigan and other locations.
Is this the kind of Michigan where healthy crops can be raised, where industries like wineries and breweries can produce uncontaminated products? Where pure Michigan groundwater can continue to sustain us?
