Frack you

I have been on an environmental rant of late and I might as well mention one last thing and get it out of my system. It's useless I know, a large segment of the population evidently having seemingly very little concern with clean air, or earth or water.

The Trump administration recently repealed the Obama administration’s 2015 rule setting standards for hydraulic fracturing on federal land.

“This final rule is needed to prevent the unnecessarily burdensome and unjustified administrative requirements and compliance costs of the 2015 rule from encumbering oil and gas development on federal and Indian lands,” the BLM wrote in the notice.

One of the upshots of this repeal is that now the public is prevented from knowing exactly what chemicals the frackers are injecting into the ground to remove the natural gas in the hydraulic fracturing process.

The rule focused on three things, it mandated that companies disclose the chemicals they use to frack, required them to cover surface ponds that house fracking fluids and set standards for the construction of the wells.

The regulation never took effect. Wyoming federal Judge Scott Skavdahl put it on hold in 2015, before overturning it in 2016.

And now nobody will ever know.

This blog seems to have looked into fracking chemicals and gives us an idea of what is in the secret sauce. They know more than I do, lets put it that way.

 "Among the chemicals that the fracking industry has reported using most often, all 24 that we have tested block the activity of one or more important hormone receptors," said the study's presenting author, Christopher Kassotis, a PhD student at the University of Missouri, Columbia. "The high levels of hormone disruption by endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that we measured, have been associated with many poor health outcomes, such as infertility, cancer and birth defects."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140623103939.htm 

The tough thing is that the EPA knew that many of these chemicals were toxic as well as neurotoxic and greenlit them anyway.

Call me old fashioned but I think citizens of this country have a right to know what is being pumped into their groundwater and aquifers. Stupid me.

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On another front it turns out that many of those Superfund cleanups that EPA head Scott Pruitt has been trumpeting were actually carried out on Obama's watch. Figures.