The summary accompanying the 9th Compendium is rather alarming when over 80% of U.S.A.’s and more than 60% of Canada’s energy consumption is from fossil fuels.
How many families live with frac’d water and harms like I do? I live not just harmed by frac’er Encana/Ovintiv, harmed also by: my ex lawyers Murray Klippenstein and Cory Wanless; AER; Alberta gov’t; Canada’s lying supreme court judges pissing on me, my case and the rule of law and Alberta’s lying AER-friendly judges; politicians; RCMP and police; NGOs; and mobs of angry Alberta men dropping in, threatening me and my dogs, trying to scare me quiet, some ordering me to “shut up” and or drop my lawsuit against their beloved Saint Encana.
Frac harms are one matter; the endless harms that cascade after frac’ing are much worse, notably industry’s agents and enablers like AER (judging me a terrorist without any evidence; enabling $Billions upon $Billions in bitumen, oil, gas and frac field liabilities/cleanup to keep piling higher and higher – leaving it intentionally for citizens/future generations to pay to clean up, etc.), politicians and judges, intentionally working to destroy democracy, the rule of law, our rights, and dividing to conquer community.
9th Edition of the ‘Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking and Associated Gas and Oil Infrastructure’ by The Physicians for Social Responsibility,Concerned Health Professionals of New York and the Science and Environmental Health Network, Oct 19, 2023
“The risks and harms of fracking for public health, the climate, and environmental justice are real and growing. Many early warnings in our previous editions have been borne out. The growing and substantial body of research reveals fundamental problems with the entire life cycle of operations associated with fracking and its infrastructure, which includes pipelines, LNG terminals, frack sand mining operations, and gas stoves inside homes.”
“As fracking operations in the United States and abroad have increased in frequency, size, and intensity, a significant body of evidence has emerged to demonstrate that these activities are harmful in ways that cannot be mitigated through regulation. Threats include detrimental impacts on public health, climate stability, water and air quality, farming and livestock, property values, economic vitality, and quality of life.”
“In sum, the vast body of scientific studies now published on hydraulic fracturing in the peer-reviewed scientific literature confirms that the public health and climate risks from fracking are real and the range of environmental harms wide. Our examination uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends. The rapidly expanding body of evidence compiled here is massive, troubling, and cries out for decisive action.”
Website: https://concernedhealthny.org/compendium/
637-page PDF: https://concernedhealthny.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/CHPNY-Fracking-Science-Compendium-9.pdf
Refer also to:
2023: Alberta’s “Orphanwellian” grossness doesn’t include the many harmed by frac’ing! Note: Danielle Smith’s ban on renewables is vile and intentional to enable escalating frac harms and other oil, gas, coal and bitumen pollution, but it’s only on projects over 100 megawatts.
Martin Z. Olszynski @molszyns:
Abandoned means properly sealed Dan!! It means sealed!! It’s in our glossary!!!!
Haha. Anyway, the main issue is 80,000 inactive wells (not producing, not sealed) and sealed (abandoned) but not remediated & reclaimed wells!
Jim Green@JimGreen1621252:
Why in this day in age are we still letting O&G vent straight natural gas into atmosphere all in the name of profits…Anyone that thinks that is ok needs to live next to venting wells
Must watch riveting 5 Min:
“I’m an independent journalist and author from Vancouver. My work is evidence-based and fact-based; there are about a thousand endnotes, footnotes and citations in this book. Fire Weather is currently a bestseller and a finalist for national prizes in three different countries. I think it’s because the topic — how our appetite for petroleum has supercharged the atmosphere, endangering us all — resonates with people, especially after this hellacious summer of CO2-driven heat and fire.
“Before I get into that, I want to say how honoured I am to be here. I come in good faith, as a proud Canadian who loves this country, and who is grateful for the extraordinary gifts petroleum has given us. Canada and the oil industry are about the same age, and we’ve both come a long way in a short time. So, unfortunately, has our climate.
“When Fort McMurray caught fire in May 2016, I was as shocked as anyone. Winter was barely over — local lakes were still frozen, and yet the temperature in northern Alberta hit 33 C. More disturbing was the relative humidity — 11 per cent. You know where 11 per cent humidity is normal? Death Valley. In July.
“When you transpose the climate of the hottest, driest place in North America to the Canadian boreal forest — a famously flammable ecosystem — otherworldly things are going to happen. And they did. Quick science lesson: radiant heat — the heat that tells you not to touch the candle flame — travels at the speed of light. On May 3, 2016, the radiant heat coming off the Fort McMurray fire — 10 kilometres wide with 100-metre tall flames — was 500 C. That’s hotter than Venus.
“That was Fort McMurray on May 3, and May 4, and day after day after day after that. That was also this summer in B.C., Alberta, Quebec and N.W.T.
“Firefighters in Fort Mac described houses burning to the basement in five minutes. I thought they were exaggerating; they weren’t. I talked to physicists: that’s what fire can do at 500 C. As a result, the firefighting operation became life-saving operations because there was no time to do anything else.
“What surprises everyone about 21st-century fire is how fast it moves. Talk to anyone in Slave Lake, or Fort Mac, or Kelowna, or Enterprise, N.W.T. There was a plume over there, and now I’m running for my life. This is happening because the hotter and drier the air and the forest, the faster and more explosive the fire.
“Climate science isn’t rocket science. By the 1770s, the greenhouse effect was understood in principle. By the 1850s, the heat-retaining characteristics of CO2 had been identified. In the 1890s, scientists were considering the possibility that industrial CO2 (from coal burning) could alter Earth’s climate. By the 1930s, evidence of warming was observed in global temperature records. In the 1950s, mass spectrometers could measure CO2 in parts per million (hence the Keeling curve).
“By the 1970s Exxon — Rich Kruger’s old company — was doing cutting-edge climate science. Internal memos reveal surgically accurate predictions regarding the relationship between increasing CO2 and the climate disruption we are now experiencing. Exxon knew, and so did Suncor.
“And then, in 1989, they turned their backs on their own science. They did it because they cared about the money more. They did it because they know the oil industry is, in essence, a fire industry — which means it’s a CO2 industry — which means it’s a climate-changing industry. This is basic chemistry and physics, and we cannot deny, or gaslight, or greenwash that fact away.
“To be clear, oil is a 19th-century fuel. The internal combustion engine was prototyped in 1860. Why on earth are we still using it? Two hundred thousand Canadians were driven from their homes by wildfires this summer. Tens of millions of North Americans were shrouded in toxic smoke. The Amazon River is drying up. If we don’t reduce emissions now, we’re going to make this planet uninhabitable.
“Canada’s leadership matters here. Our survival depends on it. Here’s the upside: when it comes to renewable energy potential, Canada really is a superpower. Right now, we are perfectly poised to embrace the greatest, greenest energy opportunity the world has ever known.
“So, who’s stopping us?”
2023: Synergy Strikes Again! CAPE (BC doctors) & CANE (nurses) blame LNG and frac’ing for rampant wildfires and disease but do not call for a ban, instead they ask for a pause on new fracs to study harms that have already been studied (for years)!CAPE knows well the frac-harms and research history. It’s disgusting they work to enable frac’ing by calling for it to be studied. Synergy Alberta at its worst.
Harper’s anti-terrorist RCMP squad trespassed, without a warrant, on my private property after the Alberta gov’t, Encana/Ovintiv and AER were served with my legal papers. I was in my own home, not attending any protest (contrary to what media and NGOs, claim, I am not an activist). It seems my only crime was warning the public about frac harms and filing a lawsuit against Encana et al, trying to protect the public interest. The squad wanted into my home. I refused, told them I didn’t trust them or their surveillance techniques.
“We don’t do surveillance,” they replied.
I laughed at their absurdity and didn’t let them in (I was terrified, I live alone rurally).
I let them interrogate me outside. It was a cold February day; I gave the lead interrogator a metal chair, I sat in a wooden one; I offered blankets, tissues for their runny noses, hot tea with honey, all declined.
When the officers were done trying to scare me and get me to admit to crimes I had not committed (like AER’s lawyer Rick McKee failed at three years earlier trying to get evidence after the fact to justify the “regulator” violating my Charter rights), they left, shoulders slumped, knowing their mission for Herr Harper and buddy Encana to snare me had failed.
2017: BNN Interviews Alberta Oil Patch Consultant Brent Nimeck on Lexin and AER’s Orphan Wells: “This problem is 30 years in the making. … I would call it a Ponzi Scheme…. This is an orchestrated fraud from multiple angles: Industry, CAPP and the Alberta Energy Regulator have enabled this to happen. … Through our independent analysis and we’ve confirmed this at multiple sources within the energy regulator, the liabilities are over $300 billion. That’s what’s on the hook for Alberta taxpayers right now – $300 billion.”This does not include providing safe water for the many frac-harmed!
2013: Brief review of threats to Canada’s groundwater from the oil and gas industry’s methane migration and hydraulic fracturing by Ernst Environmental Services (EES)
Cover photo by Colin Smith, 2006, after Encana illegally frac’d Rosebud’s drinking water aquifers, repeatedly.
2009: Tom Myers CBM causes groundwater drawdown impacts that will last years
… A numerical groundwater flow model simulated drawdown that will exceed 90 m in the middle of the CBM fields with 6-m drawdown extending up to 29 km from the fields. Simulation results indicate that river flux will decrease up to 40% and drawdown will encompass hundreds of wells and springs. Recovery requires up to 45 years for significant decreases in river flux to recover and is not complete for 200 years. … In the area around Rosebud, Encana didn’t just illegally frac our aquifers, the company also drew them down on a mass scale. Encana did this with blessings from the “regulators” and gov’t while violating Guide 56, which at the time required consultation with the soon to be harmed communities. Some neighbours of mine didn’t just get frac’d and contaminated water, their water wells went completely dry, with no mitigation or assistance from Encana. One supplied horses for the Calgary Stampede. Post frac’ing, he was unable to water his horses, so had to sell them, breaking his heart.
2006 02 06: Encana’s CBM Technical Briefing
Encana, the law violating frac’er had even conducted its own frac harm and mitigation study, but kept it confidential.
Encana rarely tells the truth. It illegally and secretly frac’d our aquifers in 2004, intentionally, as stated in their 2003 filing on the Alberta gov’t’s waterwell data base.
Encana supplied water to a few frac’d families, not most of the others all relying on the same frac’d aquifers the company had contaminated.
The federal gov’t, Alberta gov’t and Wheatland County contracted the construction of a water pipeline to pump alternate safe unfrac’d water from Calgary to Gleichen, Standard, Rockyford, Redland and Rosebud, at a cost of over $50Million paid for by Canadian taxpayers, not a penny was contributed by the guilty frac’er, Encana. That’s how fucked and frac’d Canada is.
I live just outside the hamlet of Rosebud, so do not have pipeline alternate water. I continue hauling water which is expensive, time consuming and infuriating.
I’ve relied on water hauled by truck since 2006. It’s a super shitty chore.
2003:I started speaking out and tried to warn Canadians about the harms of frac’ing. I understand well why I’ve been treated so terribly by our authorities, including the lying supreme court of Canada that sleazily used me and my suffering to damage our Charter (Steve Harper hates Canada and our charter; 7/9 of the supreme court judges that heard my appeal were plunked there by him, including recently stepped down, “creepy” drunken Russell Brown).