The fracking health scandal in the state of Pennsylvania just keeps getting worse. It was just last month that I told you that former mid-level workers in the Pennsylvania state Health Department had admitted to a reporter that they started getting unusual directives on fracking not long after the state’s pro-Big-Oil Republican governor, Tom Corbett, took office in 2011. They received a...
In January 2011, Republican Gov. Tom Corbett took office in Pennsylvania, heavily indebted to the fracking industry (in fact, he’d received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from oil and gas interests, and those numbers have continued to grow). Since then, he has run one of the most pro-fracking governments in America. He has blocked efforts for a severance tax — every...
Every day, new evidence emerges that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas or oil is not the environmentally safe procedure that industry officials keep insisting that it is. Whether it’s swarms of earthquakes in fracking zones, the massive amounts of drinkable water that is wasted in the drilling process, or the toxic air invading rural communities, the huge risks of the...
There hadn’t been a ton of oil and gas drilling in Pennsylvania for more than a century — not since the days of John D. Rockefeller — but that started to change about seven or eight years ago. That’s when companies like Halliburton had advanced the technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to remove large quantities of natural gas trapped in geologic...
We’re now roughly five years into the surge on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas that has been trapped under shale formations, deep below the earth. The sharp rise in this fairly new type of drilling has overwhelmed states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, formerly coal states where intensive drilling for fossil fuels hadn’t taken place for generations. One important...
One thing that often gets lost in all the conversation about fracking is the thing that really lubricates the whole machine: The toxic mix of money and politics. One place where that’s been on full display has been Pennsylvania, which has been the epicenter of the fracking boom since the technology opened up large supplies of natural gas under the Marcellus Shale. In 2010, right as the...
The exploitation of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale has epitomized everything that’s can go wrong with fracking. Drilling companies have run roughshod over a state that has little modern experience with the oil and gas industry. Drilling companies have polluted streams with waste — some of it radioactive — and numerous residents have abandoned their wells. As Josh Fox...
