what safeguards are in place to protect americans from unsafe food
Most people desire their homes to be a safe oasis where their families can grow and thrive. Yet for thousands of Americans who observe themselves living side by side to natural gas drilling sites, that sense of safety is condign harder to preserve.
A new study by researchers from the Colorado School of Public Health found that air pollution nigh natural gas fracking sites increased the risk of significant health issues for people living near drill sites.
The researchers detected a toxic stew of natural gas-related chemicals, including benzene, a known carcinogen, in the air. Exposure to these chemicals is linked to headaches, asthma symptoms, childhood leukemia, and multiple myeloma. They ended that people living within a half-mile of these drill pads were at greater take a chance for health problems. Colorado lets companies sink wells as close as 150 feet to people'southward houses.
Photo credit: Shane Davis, Sierra Gild, Rocky Mount Chapter
This report confirms reports of hazardous air pollution and related health issues in communities around the land near natural gas fracking. Fracking entails mixing dangerous chemicals with large amounts of water and sand, and then injecting this frack cocktail into wells at extremely high pressure in society to release natural gas reserves. This technique has allowed oil and gas companies to access previously out-of-reach reserves.
As a result, natural gas development has swept across many parts of America at break-cervix speed in the by ten years. Unfortunately, federal and land safeguards to protect people and the environment from fracking have not kept pace.
Energy companies have been allowed to run roughshod over communities, leaving contaminated drinking water, dirty air, gutted holding values, and greater convulsion risk in their wake. Companies don't e'er play by the rules that do be, and the industry has used its political power to escape accountability for its actions.
The Department of the Interior issued more than than 2,000 violations to oil and gas companies drilling on public lands betwixt 1998 and 2011 -- some for extremely dangerous deportment like failing to install blowout preventers or building dangerous wells. And yet only half dozen percent of violators had to pay a fine, and all together, those fines totaled but $273,875.
NRDC opposes expanded fracking until more effective safeguards are put in identify.
The American people want stronger protections. A recent survey conducted past a Bloomberg News National Poll found that 65 percentage of people said we need more regulations for fracking, while only eighteen per centum said there should be less regulation.
The back up cuts across region and political affiliation. Kelly Gant, a mother from Bartonville, Texas, put it this way: "I'm not an activist, an alarmist, a Democrat, environmentalist or anything similar that. I'm merely a person who isn't able to manage the health of my family unit because of all this drilling."
Families like Kelly Gant'southward shouldn't have to suffer because energy companies take non been held accountable. While no energy evolution can be completely safety, drilling and fracking can be fabricated safer than current operations. But this is simply possible if the country and federal governments adopt and enforce much stronger laws and standards.
NRDC supports establishing a fully effective arrangement of safeguards for hydraulic fracturing to protect our health and surroundings and is committed to working with the federal government, states, communities and industry to put these safeguards into place correct away.
These safeguards include:
1. Putting the most sensitive lands, including critical watersheds, completely off limits to fracking;
ii. Non allowing leaky systems by setting make clean air standards that ensure methane leaks are well under one percent of product to reduce global warming pollution, and requiring green completions and other techniques to reduce air pollution;
iii. Mandating audio well drilling and construction standards by requiring the strongest well siting, casing and cementing and other drilling best practices;
4. Protecting the landscape, air, and water from pollution by endmost Clean Air, Clean Water and Safe Drinking H2o loopholes, reducing toxic waste, and holding toxic oil and gas waste to the same standards as other types of chancy waste, funding robust inspection and enforcement programs, and disclosing fully all chemicals;
5. Using gas to supercede dirtier fossil fuels like coal by prioritizing renewables and efficiency, implementing recently established mercury, sulfur and other clean air standards, and setting strong ability plant carbon pollution standards; and
vi. Allowing communities to protect themselves and their future by restricting fracking through comprehensive zoning and planning.
This mail service originally appeared on NRDC'due south Switchboard blog.
Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/to-protect-americans-heal_b_1397555
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