Meet Louis Meeks — a longtime landowner outside the picturesque rural community of Pavillion, Wyoming. The rolling hillsides here have hosted natural gas wells for decades, but the pace of activity has increased in recent years with the growth of the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Something else has increased over the last couple of years — nasty...
I’ve been reading a lot lately about everyday Americans getting fed up with fracking — with the way that the big gas companies have been running roughshod over lush rolling hills and pristine farmland with their unsightly rigs, poisoning water supplies and polluting the air. But nothing has quite gotten to me like the simple words of a Pennsylvania farmer named Stephen Cleghorn...
Kay Allen is a nurse who deserves some answers. She works at a health clinic in Burgettstown, Pa. — in the southwestern corner of the Keystone State where the rolling hills are now pockmarked with fracking wells in a natural-gas gold rush. In one sense, Allen and her co-workers at the Cornerstone Care community clinic are like a lot of health care professionals across the suddenly...
If there’s anything we’ve learned in the last couple of years since the word “fracking” entered our lexicon, it’s this: Natural gas drillers don’t want you to know what they’re up to. From the Oklahoma prairie to the forests of Pennsylvania, from the moment they get your name on a lease until the last tank of wastewater is dumped, these energy giants go...
More upside down priorities from the western fracking front. In drought-struck Colorado, oil and gas companies will have plenty of water for their fracking operations this summer, but farmers may not have enough to irrigate their crops. It seems our insatiable thirst for fossil fuel is now even trumping our most basic need for food. Can you eat natural gas? Consider this from an April 2 Denver...
Why would House Republicans bar an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker from last week’s public hearing on hydraulic fracturing? Hmmmmmm. Could it be that they’re hiding something? Nah, couldn’t be – particularly in light of the fact that the filmmaker happened to be environmental crusader Josh Fox, whose film “Gasland” awoke America to the grave environmental and...
Officials from Central New York Oil & Gas recently informed landowner Bob Swartz that the company plans to cut “a 50-foot-wide, 400-foot-long gash through an ancient stand of trees” in his front yard to clear the way for a $250 million, 39-mile natural gas pipeline in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. Not surprisingly, Mr. Swartz balked at the company’s heavy-handed...
