LETTER: Hydraulic fracturing industry spreads disinformation by Melinda Zemper, The Repository, Feb 18, 2026
Melinda Zemper is a Save Ohio Parks board member
The Feb. 4 Canton Repository opinion piece “Don’t buy into fracking scare tactics. It’s good for Ohio” should be studied as gas and oil industry disinformation.
I’ll address just three of the problems included in it: Save Ohio Parks founding member Randi Pokladnik is a chemist holding a doctorate degree in environmental science. She is one of Ohio’s most accurate, articulate experts on forest biodiversity and carbon capture and sequestration.
Save Ohio Parks is accused of wanting to stop Ohio economic development by banning fracking under state parks and public lands when supermajority lawmakers in our state have done a pretty good job of doing that on their own.
In 2011, Ohio Department of Job and Family Services promised 204,000 jobs would be created by fracking. The Ohio River Valley Institute’s most recent “Frackalachia” study reported after 15 years of fracking, the number of net jobs, income, and population in Ohio’s eight most-fracked counties have declined since the frack “boom” began.
Also, the ninth “Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking” consists of 2,000 abstracts of global, peer-reviewed, medical and scientific reports. It is published by health professionals and researchers. In its latest edition, physician reviewers concluded there is “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 2005 Halliburton loophole exempts oil and gas from most major environmental laws. Companies often use trade secret agreements to avoid disclosing the use of unregulated chemicals, including PFAS.
Did Ecana/Ovintiv add PFAS to their secret toxic brew when the company illegally frac’d Rosebud’s drinking water aquifers? Is that why my tap water suddenly went super slippery post frac’ing?
Gas and oil fracking waste brine is toxic and often radioactive. Excessive amounts of radium cause cancer in humans.
Encana/Ovintiv dumping waste on cropland at Rosebud, Alberta just east of where the company illegally frac’d the community’s drinking water aquifers. AER requires cumulative impacts assessments by companies, but frac’ers never do. If they did, they’d not frac.
Decaying radium becomes radon, the second-largest lung cancer cause in Ohio behind smoking.