TV News LIES

The environmental group Friends of the Earth released e-mails this week revealing a cozy and collaborative relationship between TransCanada Corporation lobbyist Paul Elliott and an employee at the U.S. State Department, the agency currently weighing approval of TransCanada's permit application for the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

A New York Times report notes that the emails show the State Department official providing "subtle coaching and cheerleading" for TransCanada:

France will maintain a ban on fracking until there is proof that shale gas exploration won’t harm the environment or “massacre” the landscape, President Nicolas Sarkozy said.

“Development of hydrocarbon resources underground is strategic for our country but not at any price,” Sarkozy said during a visit to Ales in southern France. “This won’t be done until it has been shown that technologies used for development respect the environment, the complex nature of soil and water networks.”

E-mails between lobbyists for a firm proposing a Canada-U.S. oil pipeline and the State Department reveal a sometimes-cozy relationship, environmentalists say.

The New York Times reports environmental groups say the e-mails show "complicity" between TransCanada, the pipeline company, and U.S. State Department officials charged with evaluating its environmental impact.

Ozone loss over the Arctic this year was so severe that for the first time it could be called an "ozone hole" like the Antarctic one, scientists report. About 20km (13 miles) above the ground, 80% of the ozone was lost, they say.

The cause was an unusually long spell of cold weather at altitude. In cold conditions, the chlorine chemicals that destroy ozone are at their most active.

Nobody has systemically tracked how many health complaints there are, whether the complaints are similar, whether they can be tied to any specific chemical exposure or any environmental cause. It makes it very difficult beyond an anecdotal answer to get a handle on how widespread a problem this might be."

Part of the problem, writes Lustgarten, is that "the drilling companies have complicated efforts to gather pollution data and to understand the root of health complaints."

It’s not enough to have to worry about oil and gas companies building more and more shale gas wells in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. We also have to worry about them drilling wells 8,000 feet deep to store the leftover fracking fluid, like they do in Cambridge, OH, with a company called Devco.

Next door, in Pennsylvania, industry trieddumping the wastewater leftover from fracking into streams. When environmentalists questioned this disposal method, industry responded with claims that the streams dilute the chemicals enough to make such a method safe.

Much of the focus on hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) for natural gas pertains to potential effects of this technology on water resources, as I discussed in an earlier blog entry.

Yet, the process of fracking, oil and gas production, natural gas processing, natural gas transmission, and natural gas distribution also releases a variety of potentially harmful gases into the atmosphere.

The United States secretly sought Japan's support in 1972 to enable it to dump decommissioned nuclear reactors into the world's oceans under the London Convention, an international treaty being drawn up at the time.

Countries working on the wording of the pact wanted to specifically prohibit the dumping of radioactive waste at sea.

But Washington wanted to incorporate an exceptional clause in the case of decommissioned nuclear reactors.