The drilling of Marcellus, Utica and other Shale natural gas reserves is growing massively, yet, to date, drillers have been allowed to keep secret the chemicals they use in the process (called fracking) that releases the gas, This process involves injecting millions of gallons of chemicals deep under ground.
The movie Gasland has shown how some people who live above or near where Fracking has been used, have discovered that their sink water is flammable, that a match can literally ignite water running from the tap. Others have shown that their water, which drillers and even complicit environmental state orgs say are safe, looks brown or grey and totally, appearance-wise, undrinkable.
So for the many activists who have been calling for regulating an industry protected by the "Cheney loophole" that has virtually no accountability for drillers, the news that Department of the Interior secretary Salazar may call for disclosure of the ingredients in Fracking chemicals is a good step.
Calling fracking a "hot and very difficult issue," Salazar commented at a public forum he held, " As the nation's largest land manager, the Department of the Interior has a responsibility to ensure that natural gas is developed in a safe and environmentally sustainable manner and protects the other valuable resources on those lands, including preventing harm to the air, water and species that call these lands home,"
Shale gas drillers have argued, like manufacturers of the dispersants used in the BP Gulf oil spill, that the ingredients are proprietary.
Activists opposing the drilling have called for disclosure of the chemicals because the drilling leaves millions of gallons of the fracking chemicals in the ground that can affect ground water and ultimately can leak into major potable drinking water tributaries, like the Delaware river as well as drilled water wells used by single families and communities.
The
Wall Street Journal reports that Salazar stated, " We have not yet settled on how exactly we are going to move forward with respect to that issue."
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
