TV News LIES

A compilation of independent scientific studies and reports related to the health impacts of hydrofracking was presented to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo today by a representative of a delegation of medical doctors and scientists.

In a cover letter, the experts have requested a meeting with the Governor to discuss his desire for “the facts and logic and science and information,” which he says will be the basis for his decision on the controversial gas drilling technique.

Marine biologists and veterinarians say the bodies of more than 500 penguins have washed up on beaches in southern Brazil over the past week.

They tell the G1 online news site that the Center of Coastal and Marine Studies is investigating what caused the deaths of the 512 penguins found on beaches of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. The cause of death should be known in about 30 days.

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Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. has become the first major insurance company to say it won't cover damage related to a gas drilling process that blasts chemical-laden water deep into the ground.

The Columbus, Ohio-based company's personal and commercial policies "were not designed to cover" risk from the drilling process, called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, Nationwide spokeswoman Nancy Smeltzer said Thursday.

The Town of Highland on July 11 passed a local law to ban hydraulic fracturing, joining other Delaware River towns to form a bulwark against the controversial gas drilling method.

Highland joins the towns of Tusten and Bethel to the north, and Lumberland to the south, to ban fracking within their borders. In February, two State Supreme Court judges, in separate decisions, upheld the rule that allows towns to pass fracking bans.

Britain’s nuclear industry is again the center of controversy. The UK has the biggest stockpile of Plutonium in the world, but there are no definite plans for how to get rid of it – and the delays are costing the UK taxpayer billions.

A record number of radioactive particles have been found on beaches near the Sellafield nuclear plant, in North West England. The authorities who run it admit it’s the most radioactive place in Western Europe but insist it’s safe.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) heard the major findings of its two year investigation of the Enbridge tar sands pipeline spill, which released over a million gallons of corrosive tar sands into the Kalamazoo River watershed in July 2010. The Kalamazoo spill has clearly demonstrated how dirty and dangerous tar sands pipelines are, even more dangerous than conventional oil pipelines.

Nearly two years after what has become the most expensive pipeline disaster in U.S. history, emergency responders are still struggling to clean up the Kalamazoo River. The government's investigation raises serious questions about whether corrosive tar sands can be safely moved on the U.S. pipeline system, especially when they cross farms and waters in the U.S. heartland as the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would do.

Climate change researchers have been able to attribute recent examples of extreme weather to the effects of human activity on the planet's climate systems for the first time, marking a major step forward in climate research.

The findings make it much more likely that we will soon – within the next few years – be able to discern whether the extremely wet and cold summer and spring so far experienced in the UK this year are attributable to human causes rather than luck, according to the researchers.

One of the key arguments in the case for fracking rests on an appeal to common sense. The hydraulic fracturing process — pushing gallons upon gallons of chemical-laden water into shale rock in order to bubble up natural gas — takes place deep in the ground, thousands of feet below the earth’s surface and thousands of feet below the shallow aquifers that provide drinking water.

Given the distance between the water and the fracking fluid, there’s just no way fracking could contaminate aquifers, the gas industry and its allies argue. So many layers of rock lie between noxious fracking fluid and water that the risks of chemical-laced drinking water don’t compute.