Pennsylvania, Under siege by Marcellus marauders!

[Bravo Zulu]

Pennsylvania must adequately regulate and tax gas companies before opening the Marcellus Shale to rampaging exploitation, argues labor professor CHARLES McCOLLESTER
Sunday, June 13, 2010

Pennsylvanians are only slowly becoming aware that we are under siege. More than a thousand Marcellus Shale drill sites are in the works, with tens of thousands more poised to descend on Penn's Woods, its towns and neighborhoods, threatening to poison water tables, suck streams dry, pollute the air with ear-splitting noise and toxic fumes -- all without meaningful regulation, without meaningful taxation.

Like coal, which successfully resisted a severance tax, leaving taxpayers and volunteer associations to wrestle with the social and environmental damage wrought by more than a century of exploitation, gas drillers enabled by politicians expect Pennsylvania to remain the only major gas-producing state without a severance tax. These deep-drilled deposits of natural gas will be severed from the commonwealth forever without compensation and with little or no enforceable liability for the devastation wrought on the land, water and air. We cannot allow this to happen!

Without labor protections, community protections, landowner protections and public health protections, we cannot allow this toxic invasion to proceed.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10164/1064951-109.stm?cmpid=newspanel#ixzz0qlKBHLHO

[enough]

1. Having entered a recommendation for this story, I see that at least one person has

UN-recommended it. I wonder what possible reason there could be for not wanting this story to be seen. Maybe as a Pennsylvanian I'm over-sensitive?

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. DU a**holes

[William Z. Foster]

6. that is very, very revealing

Here on the ground Haliburton infiltrated media and did everything they could to keep the public in the dark about this. They have been waging a massive disinformation campaign. People unreccing this could not be doing so to "support the President" nor to "defend the Democratic party" nor to beat back the "fringe left" which are often the excuses for trying to block and subvert the free flow of information here.

What is being done with the "fracking" is so corrupt, so destructive, and so dishonest, and the takes are so high that it is absolutely in the interests of the corporations involved in this to squelch any and all discussion.

[Liberal_in_LA]

2. I had no idea. Thanks for posting this

[spinbaby]

3. I live in gas country

In our part of western PA, there's a gas well going in every two or three miles it seems. When they set fire to the wells, it lights up the night with an eerie orange flicker.

[William Z. Foster]

5. bigger than the Gulf catastrophe

Vast tracts of land are being destroyed in a profound and fundamental way, probably permanently. Unlike the Gulf, which was an accident, this is intentional. Millions of gallons of toxic chemicals are being intentionally injected into the ground water, and the integrity of the substrate is being intentionally compromised. This is happening in 32 states, and massive amounts of acreage are involved - 65% of rural land in Pennsylvania, for example.

I was on the ground and close to it when Haliburton descended here, and heard all of the lies, saw the way they operated, and have seen now as previously pristine ground water has been recklessly contaminated. The EPA, Congress, the administration, the state agencies, have all rolled over and signed off on this. It is the same sad story of corporate domination of public agencies - the revolving doors, the listening to lobbyists, the taking of massive amounts of money in "donations," the unwillingness to challenge the "winners" and their plans and agenda.

This is but one area - and I think many more will begin to emerge now - where the frantic and reckless drive to pursue more and more resources to exploit in order to push stock prices up and make killings for the few on Wall Street, the complete and utter corruption of all of the public agencies, are all coalescing into some sort of orgy of escalating destruction of the environment. It can only get worse, as the desperation to increase profits grow, and there is no longer anything to stop them.

Decades of alarming reports about environmental destruction have made us weary and depressed, lulled us into a sort of complacency, and it is tempting to want to escape - "I have too much on my plate" and "this is depressing me too much" and sigh in resignation and then miss the forest for the trees. The desperate mad frenzy to make that big killing on Wall Street - and that frenzy has complete control now over our government, the economy, our communities and our lives - is getting more and more bizarre as it is getting more and more difficult to find new markets, to exploit workers any further, and to exploit any more resources. We are now seeing a rapidly escalating final assault on the environment, and this is quickly approaching the point of making much of the planet uninhabitable - not in the distant future, not if "present trends continue," not "unless we change our lifestyles," but soon, very soon, and on a scale we can't imagine.

[William Z. Foster]

7. kick

Who here lives in a community that is under assault from fracking? Anyone here signed one of those leases? Let's compare notes and get to work on this.

[scarletwoman]

8. K&R -- is there any organized resistance happening? Any hope of any?

[scarletwoman]

9. Some great links in this post from an earlier thread:

Some very informative links...

excerpt: For a long time, shale gas was thought to be unattainable. But in the 1990s, first in Texas and later in other Western states, new drilling techniques, sophisticated technology and industry exemptions from environmental laws paved the way for economically viable fracking.

Many of those exemptions — from provisions in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act — are longstanding. The most notable among them was introduced by Vice President Dick Cheney as an amendment to the 2005 energy bill.

The so-called Halliburton Loophole, named after Cheney's former employer and the company that pioneered the fracking process in the 1940s, stripped the EPA's authority to regulate hydrofracking through the Safe Water Drinking Act. Companies were essentially given free rein to drill however and wherever they see fit, and to use and dispose of proprietary fracking fluids without any disclosure or safety requirements.

The only remaining shred of federal oversight was a voluntary agreement with the three largest companies not to use diesel fuel—which they proceeded to ignore.

sw

[HopeHoops]

10. Yeah, and the spill in Clearfield was caused by EOG - Enron Oil Group.

They pulled a BP and switched to initials after the Ken Lay thing.