Drill, baby, drill. First the Gulf gets oiled-up and spit out by BP — but now, will drilling for natural gas leave New York feeling nauseated as well?
Gas extraction, made possible by hydraulic fracturing (or fracking, for short) has to sit right beside deep sea drilling and dirty tar sands oil in the pantheon of insane ways to get our fossil fuel fix. Patented by Halliburton, fracking is a process that mixes millions of gallons of precious fresh water with a proprietary cocktail of toxics, injects it through our drinking water table, and into the ground at a pressure that will fracture rock, making it possible to harvest the natural gas below.
When (ex-Halliburton CEO) Dick Cheney was VP, he slipped a fracking exemption into the Safe Drinking Water Act — and under current rules, New York can expect much of the same dirty drilling that has polluted water in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and Colorado.
Check out the evils of fracking in the video below: Flammable tap water! Streams bubbling with natural gas! Tony Hayward! Oh my!
Full disclosure: A generous funder of Grist commissioned the creation of this video. Frack it or leave it.
