You can drink it. We did drink it, around the table, almost ritual-like…
Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper at a Senate hearing on natural gas, saying he once drank fracking fluid with Halliburton representatives.
Hickenlooper says the liquid he sipped was made entirely of “food additives,” but fracking fluids can contain chemicals ranging from lead to formaldehyde.
(via officialssay)
What Mr. Hickenlooper isn’t saying is that he fracked it up afterwards.
“This looks like a war zone; it really does,” said Indianapolis Fire Lt. Bonnie Hensley about the abvoe explosion, which took place at 11 p.m. Saturday and displaced around 200 people. “I was sleeping on the sofa and all of a sudden, my upstairs windows were blowing out and my front door was falling in,” said 59-year-old Pam Brainerd regarding the explosion, which happened in her sleep. “My front door came off the frame. It was the largest bang I’ve ever heard.” The explosion killed at least two, destroyed two homes and damaged at least 14 homes; authorities suspect natural gas.
I want to make sure that as President, I can disrupt the oil monopoly… we need to use a diversity of products, like natural gas.Jon Huntsman, who also stated support for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline as a means of American energy independence. Natural gas mining has become controversial in recent years, over health and environmental concerns posed by “fracking,” the explosive means by which natural gas is harvested from the earth.
Radioactive cows in Pennsylvania?! While Pennsylvania’s quickly-growing natural gas industry (thanks to fracking shale … really) clearly has some economic benefits for the state, the effects on the environment shouldn’t be ignored, based on this video from Time Magazine. Among the highlights/lowlights: A couple whose retirement home was essentially ruined by the natural gas industry, a farm with quarantined radioactive cows, and a woman with flammable tap water.
» Sleeping through the wake-up calls: Creaky gas lines leading to violent, deadly explosions have been more common than we’d like lately. You may recall last year’s colossal blast in San Bruno, California, for example, which killed eight people and raised a lot of concern over the state of gas lines nationwide. 2010 was a bad year for gas explosions, as this list attests, and it begs asking whether the U.S. government is shirking their responsibilities on infrastructure safety. In a world in which we’re constantly reminded and warned about very grand-scale, existential threats like global terrorism and the blight of nuclear weapons, the possibility that the ground is going to suddenly explode underneath us seems to get short shrift. With the Obama administration appearing to cede to a Republican-ish center on fiscal matters, odds are the concerted focus and infrastructure spending needed to answer these questions simply won’t be there. Which sucks, frankly.
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