Watch what you’re drinking….
….especially if you live in Pennsylvania. The NYTimes has been running an impressive series on hydrofracking and its impact on air, water, and land use. Today’s installment looks at the impact on drinking water and the treatment of the wastewater involved in the fracking process (releasing natural gas from seams thousands of feet below the surface by cracking open shale which holds the gas deposits).
A big part of the story includes the lobbying of oil and gas corporation to keep their drilling from federal regulation and the Clean Water Act requirements. The companies are dumping their waste water with toxic chemicals and radioactive elements into the ground and into treatment plants generally unable to detoxify them. Current drilling in Pennsylvania is the focus of much of the data the Times has been publishing (great map of toxic sites!) . Today’s story on water. Complete series.
Take it from a Louisianian — never trust an oil company. Never.
They seem oblivious. Talk about poisoning your own well.
“It’s like the science didn’t matter.” Scroll down, and on the left side of the page you see two reasons why: James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, two of the biggest cretins in the Senate.
They, among other Congressional types, are so much on the take that it’s hard to see how the gas and oil corporations will ever be brought under control. As the regulatory regime now stands, it is state officials who must regulate and they don’t seem very interested either. The taxes the state can collect and the royalty payments to landowners are certainly inducements to lax regulation.
So how’s the water in Philadelphia, Gene; doesn’t it come down the Delaware?
As Tom Lehrer said:
If you visit American city
You will find it very pretty
Just two things of which you must beware
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air
Pollution, pollution
They got smog and sewage and mud
Turn on your tap
And get hot and cold running crud
See the halibuts and the sturgeons
Being wiped out by detergeons
Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly
But they don’t last long if they try
Pollution, pollution
You can use the latest toothpaste
And then rinse your mouth
With industrial waste
One of the documentaries up for an Academy Award was an expose of this issue called Gasland. There is an extended discussion with one of the producers of the documentary on Talk of the Nation. Here is the link:
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/24/134031183/Gasland-Takes-On-Natural-Gas-Drilling-Industry
The apparent ability of industry to shut down regulation on this rather amazing.
Joe P. ==
You underestimate the power of the oil companies. It’s not amazing at all. I think the power is due to several things.
First, obviously, money. Historically they have had not just mountain ranges of money, but whole mountain ranges of money. Why do you think John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the richest of the rich, went into the oil business? They have so much they even pay their lowly employees very welll.
Second, the biggest states (except N.Y.) have or have had oil industries (Texas, California, Florida dna Pennsylvania. Add up their votes in the House of Reps. and throw in the votes from the small Gulf states, plus Oklahoma and Alaska, and you have a built in reservoir of votes.
Third, the smaller states are mostly poor, so they’re dependent big time on the companies, so the companies can easily buy the local votes they want.
Fourth, the American people have just wanted cheap oil, and they don’t care how it’s processed, especially since it’s processed in somebody else’s backyard. Ecology be damned.
Regulation is the problem, not the solution. We should stop demonizing the rich.
I think it was Alexander Hamilton who liked to say:
I cried because I had no shoes
Until I met a man who had no brake lights on his Jaguar.
The losing Democrat candidate for Texas governor in 2010, Bill White, was an oilman whose company specializes in fracking. One guess as to which candidate the Texas environmentalists voted for en masse.
Great work in The Times, but I’d like to give a shout-out for ProPublica, which has been following the story for quite a while:
http://www.propublica.org/article/natural-gas-drilling-debate-heats-up-read-our-guide
Thanks Paul. That’s an impressive line-up of coverage. New Yorkers are going to have to face up to this issue in the coming months. A moratorium declared by departing Governor Patterson and extended by the new (and younger) Governor Cuomo will run out in June. There is a lot of pressure to let the drilling begin (the Marcellus Shale extends from Pennsylvania up into New York west of the Hudson). The oil/gas companies are generally unwilling to report what chemicals they use (Proprietary information) and are equally reluctant to see federal Clean Water regulations apply to the disposal of wastewater.
Margaret and Paul, thanks for helping to shine a light on these practices.
Regarding ‘proprietary information’ – it seems reasonable that drilling companies may have developed drilling techniques that give them a competitive advantage, and if the ingredients/components of those techniques are part of the advantage, they wouldn’t be out of line in wishing to keep them confidential from competitors. But that legitimate business concern doesn’t excuse them from their responsibility to the environment, and it also seems reasonable that the government should be able to regulate and inspect the activity without unnecessarily publicizing the drilling company’s trade secrets.
It may be “proprietary information,” but in addition the companies may not want their chemical cocktails known to the folks whose water they are polluting. Propublica in one of it’s stories point to VP Cheney in 2005 working to keep the Clean Water Act from applying to this drilling. Hmmmm!
Margaret – I agree – having a cool way to extract oil from shale doesn’t give a company carte blanche to destroy the environment in the process.
Speaking as someone who works in the “finance” sector of the economy, I find that to me moral discussions about things like pollution, insurance, the Wisconsin public sector and such are hindered by a general lack of understanding on how our system works in terms of the transfer of risks, costs, and liabilities. What these actual costs are, which are contained in each and every transaction we make, is hidden to most people most of the time. I am not even talking about the costs of moral risks, like the question of what the appropriate response of the Muslim world should be to our invasion of Iraq. I am speaking first of all about dollars and cents.
Risks, costs, and liabilities are spread “horizontally” throughout society both narrowly and widely. For example, in the article above, the oil companies have transferred costs, risks, and liabilities away from the company and narrowly onto the people who use the aquifer and widely onto people who don’t use the aquifer but will eventually have to bear part of the share of the mess. There is also a “vertical” cost in the sense that risks, costs and liabilities proceed over time. These are narrow and wide as well. People who drink from the aquifer without immediately getting sick right now are still in danger of getting sick in the long run. Since these people are supported by various kinds of public insurance, people well outside of their communities will have to bear part of the costs of these illnesses over time. Some of these people have not even been born yet.
I am not suggesting that if one has a very good grasp of the underlying costs, risks, and liabilities of any transaction the moral arguments easily fall into place. I am saying that a better purely technical understanding of these produces a different and perhaps more productive kind of moral argument.
If part of any moral argument assumes that we actually want to “do something”, then we really need to know the mechanics of cost, risks, and liability to be even able to act effectively. I am talking here about the “how” of things. The question of how things are happening in Pennsylvania is far more important that the question of the intentions of the people doing the things or discussing the things. Without knowing the “how”, the “why” can become academic.
Costs, risks, and liabilities in any transaction do have people trying to hide them. Part of government regulation is to create transparency and part of the movement for deregulation is the decrease transparency. But there is a deeper problem that rests in the individualistic way that both the Left and the Right looks at things in the United States. When a political or economic dispute arises and the mask hiding costs, risks, and liabilities is peeled back a bit, the hidden transactions of cost, risk, and liability sort of look like some kind of conspiracy to everyone else. But I don’t think that we live in a society where most transactions are transparent but where costs, risks, and liabilities are sometimes hidden by people with ulterior motives, or partially revealed or magnified by people who have other motive. Hidden costs, risks, and liabilities are part of every single transaction including ones that we ourselves don’t make. It is the costs, risks, and transactions that are the glue holding the economy and ourselves as society together, not transparent voluntary individual transactions. This comprises a web of unseen and involuntary moral consequences for things we think are seen and voluntary. We cannot easily see (and do not want to see) this web. And in this web, we are often just alienated flies buzzing moral arguments to each other.
Puts me in mind of Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People.” Here is a piece of Wikipedia’s plot summary:
“Dr. Thomas Stockmann is a popular citizen of a small coastal town in Norway. The town has recently invested a large amount of public and private money towards the development of baths, a project led by Dr. Stockmann and his brother, Peter Stockmann, the Mayor. The town is expecting a surge in tourism and prosperity from the new baths, said to be of great medicinal value, and as such, the baths are a source of great local pride. However, just as the baths are proving successful, Dr. Stockmann discovers that waste products from the town’s tannery are contaminating the waters, causing serious illness amongst the tourists. He expects this important discovery to be his greatest achievement, and promptly sends a detailed report to the Mayor, which includes a proposed solution which would come at a considerable cost to the town.
“To his surprise, Dr. Stockmann finds it difficult to get through to the authorities. They seem unable to appreciate the seriousness of the issue and unwilling to publicly acknowledge and address the problem because it could mean financial ruin for the town. As the conflict develops, the Mayor warns his brother that he should “acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community….
If natural gas, which is abundant, is to remain clean and affordable, we must eliminate any drilling process that releases toxic chemicals and radioactive elements into our water supply resulting in contamination of that water supply, as the costs and the consequences are not hidden but rather obvious.
Margaret, that plot summary sounds somewhat like the plot line for Jaws – maybe Benchley isn’t that original :-)
Unagidon, I’d like to hear much, much more about your thoughts on the moral dimension of costs, risks and liability. Maybe there is a Catholic magazine about who would pay you a living wage to publish an extended piece on the subject. :-)
John Deutch, a chemist and cabinet member in the Clinton administration, wrote a ringing endorsement of natural gas exploitation in the January-February issue of Foreign Affairs. As I read it I was watching for his professional judgment about fracking. It came in a brief paragraph, mid-way through the article, in which he admitted that there might be environmental dangers with the technology that should be carefully studied. How’s that for a disclaimer?
Deutch sounds like he’s late on the take up about the envrionment. The movie mentioned above, “Gasland,” and an earlier movie raised some of these issues a few years ago.
As the Times article makes clear some environmentalists have been big on natural gas as an alternative to oil. And as the back and forth (in the article) at EPA suggests there is disagreement among them (assuming too many haven’t been paid off). It is only when the “risks” (see unagidon above) of fracking have emerged as in Pennsylvania that someone has started to do the risk/benefit calculus. I suspect that’s what’s beginning to happen now.
An Addendum to Unagidon: Part of the calculus here depends on who is doing the cost/benefit analysis. The farmers in Pennsylvania who get cash for signing up for drilling and then collect the royalties once the gas is pumped have to put up with a lot (as Gasland shows), but it can be worth it to them because it may bring in more money than farming (or supplements farming). The state collects its taxes, and overlooks the waste water problem. And the companies sell the gas. Natrual gas is now very cheap so consumers benefit as well. It’s taking time for the risks (which the companies may not know or have hidden from themselves) to emerge. That will begin to tell us what the real costs are of “cheap natural gas.”