Progressive Media Advocates
Fracking is a technique used to increase or restore the rate at which fluids, such as petroleum, water, or natural gas can be produced from subterranean natural reservoirs.
Walter Brasch: Fracking — the process the oil and gas industry uses to extract fossil fuel as much as two miles below the ground—may directly impact the nation’s water supply, reduce water-based recreational and sports activity, and lead to an increase in the cost of food.
Dan Bacher: State legislators first weakened and then voted down this bill, which would have placed a moratorium on the controversial method of oil and gas extraction – even as a new poll shows few Californians support fracking!
Dan Bacher: Despite intense political pressure by the oil industry, the Assembly Natural Resources Committee on April 29 approved three bills proposing to halt fracking, a controversial method of oil and natural gas extraction, in California.
Walter Brasch: “The gas companies pay a one-time fee for your land, but you lose the right to utilize it as anything more than grassland forever. . . . You can never build on those easements. They took my retirement away by eminent domain.”
JP Sotille: Just imagine—what if people could stop burning oil and gas and even coal, and just use these miracle devices to transform Old Sol’s sunny disposition into the power needed to run just about everything?
Walter Brasch: It is important that the people push a weak-willed Congress, inflated by Big Energy political contributions, to force the natural gas industry to be accountable for all laws that protect the public health and environment.
Kathleen Peine: There is new adventure afoot in the plunder and grab realm. Once again, it’s a pursuit of tangible, rapid wealth – this time it’s natural gas.
Diane Lefer: If the seven planned meetings help build a movement, the voices of so many citizens may help the legislature and governor find the political will to resist oil industry demands.
Kathleen Peine: There’s something buried in a new law and it’s every bit as toxic as the chemicals used to unearth natural gas through that process called fracking. Lurking in that law is a form of enforced ignorance. The legislated ignorance is rapidly emerging to keep our public in the dark as anything and everything is tried to cover for the corporate coup that has already taken place
Walter Brasch: The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—armed with an industry-favorable law recently rammed through by the Republican-controlled legislature and eagerly signed by a first-term Republican governor who received more than $1,6 million in campaign contributions from the energy industry—has decided that fracking the earth, threatening health and the environment, is far better for business than taking care of the people. Here’s how that approach hurts Pennsylvania’s average Joes.
Walter Brasch’s three-part series that takes an in-depth look at the process of fracking to extract natural gas from deep below the surface leads this week’s parade. Fracking, a little known or understood process for extracting gas, is controversial and dangerous.
Walter Brasch: Mixed into the state’s energy production is not only a symbiotic relationship of business and government, but a history of corruption and influence-peddling.
Walter Brasch: What is the connection between fracking, the environment and health? Research “strongly implicates exposure to gas drilling operations in serious health effects on humans, companion animals, livestock, horses, and wildlife.”
Walter Brasch: A new Pennsylvania law endangers public health by forbidding health care professionals from sharing information they learn about certain chemicals and procedures used in high volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing.
Charley James: Almost unnoticed in the haze of big oil’s petro-fumes, GasLand explores how the natural gas industry’s push to drill more wells may be responsible for as much environmental harm to individual people as big oil is to the globe.
Dana Lone Hill: It seems as if the ongoing battle within the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe over alcohol will still continue, but the biggest obstacle will be the battle will be with each other. The days of working together as a tribe seems to be a thing of the past…when there was no alcohol.
Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: As inequalities in wealth continue to create an ever-widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us, the concept of “shared sacrifice” is becoming increasingly ludicrous.
Lauren Steiner: So while America is supposedly coming out of the recession, many Americans are not experiencing any relief. 50 million Americans live in food insecure homes, including 17 million children.
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