fracking
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Texas' fracking disclosure law has huge omissions
Yesterday we told you about Texas governor Rick Perry doing something right for once -- he passed of a law forcing drillers to disclose the chemicals used in the controversial and environmentally destructive practice of hydraulic fracturing. Turns out the law has a bunch of loopholes that corporations are duty-bound to exploit in accordance with their legal obligation to maximize shareholder value, even if doing so threatens people’s health. Maybe you've heard this story before?
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Critical List: Al Gore praises Romney; a fifth Brazilian anti-logging activist dies
Al Gore is doing his best to ensure Barack Obama gets reelected. Yesterday, he endorsed Mitt Romney's climate stance.
The Arizona wildfire is the largest in the state's history.
A fifth anti-logging activist in Brazil was killed.
Your HD cable box uses more electricity than your refrigerator. -
Is natural gas becoming a cover for the same old dirty fossil fuels industry?
One of the great ironies of the transition to renewable energy is that it's going to require a great deal of fossil fuels to build all those wind turbines, solar panels, and smart grids — because we simply don't have enough renewables already in the mix to bootstrap them up to the level we need […]
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Mark Ruffalo wants you to stand up to hydrofracking
Actor Mark Ruffalo, who lives in a rural New York town on the Delaware River with his family, is not one of those celebrities who parachutes into a random political cause and starts ignorantly pontificating about solutions. He has been actively involved with efforts to keep potentially disastrous hydrofracking practices out of New York State […]
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Pro-fracking ad accidentally reveals dangers of fracking
ExxonMobil has been running full-page ads that make underground hydraulic fracturing operations — the same ones responsible for massive environmental problems all over the U.S. — look about as threatening as a World Book encyclopedia illustration of a water pipe. The ads highlight the multiple layers of steel and concrete used to protect shallow aquifers. Too […]
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Maybe fracked natural gas isn’t dirtier than coal, after all
The climate story on natural gas is gnarlier than ever. First there was a paper from Robert Howarth of Cornell claiming that natural gas from fracking is worse than coal, as far as net warming effect on the earth. Now the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has fired back, sort of, with […]
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Fracking with our food: how gas drilling affects farming
Photo: Gilt Taste This story originally appeared on Gilt Taste. There’s a stunning moment in the Academy Award-nominated documentary Gasland, where a man touches a match to his running faucet — to have it explode in a ball of fire. This is what hydraulic fracturing, a process of drilling for natural gas known as “fracking,” […]
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The most danceable fracking explainer you’ll see today
"My Water's On Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song)" is "Why Does The Sun Shine?" for fracking. ("Your groundwater is a mass of incandescent gas …") It explains enough about hydraulic fracturing — what it's for, how it works, where it can go wrong, why your sink just went up in flames — for you to […]
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Yesterday’s fracking blowout: What happened, and will it happen again?
Yesterday, on the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill, a natural gas well in Bradford County, Pennsylvania — perhaps suffering from an overload of irony — ruptured and leaked "thousands and thousands of gallons" of fracking fluid over the surrounding farmland and into a nearby creek. Officials say no gas was released, but local […]