By Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog
As a whole, the American fracking experiment has been a financial disaster for many of its investors, who have been plagued by the industry's heavy borrowing, low returns, and bankruptcies, and the path to becoming profitable is lined with significant potential hurdles.
By Ben Price, Shareable
ather than "regulate" the amount of harm that fracking would inflict on a city that had been cleaning up smog and brownfields for decades following the withdrawal of the steel industry, CELDF offered to draft a local civil rights law that would guarantee certain community rights, including the right to clean air, pure water, the rights of natural ecosystems to flourish, and the right to be free from toxic trespass (poisoning).
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
After swarms of earthquakes caused by hydraulic fracturing, Oklahoma has introduced tougher regulations than those used by any Canadian energy regulator. Last month the Oklahoma Corporation Commission ordered all drillers to deploy seismic arrays to detect ground motion within five kilometres of hydraulic fracturing operations over a 39,000-square-kilometre area in the centre of the state.
By Joe Romm, Climate Progress
The evidence is now overwhelming that natural gas is not part of the climate solution, it is part of the problem. A new study finds that the methane escaping from Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry “causes the same near-term climate pollution as 11 coal-fired power plants.”
By Stephen Quirke, DeSmog Blog
Last month one of the largest fracked gas projects in the Pacific Northwest was dealt a legal blow when its development permit was canceled for failing to fully account for the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions. The project, backed by Northwest Innovation Works (NWIW), would refine fracked gas into methanol, an industrial feedstock used in chemical production, that would be shipped in bulk from Kalama, Washington, to China, where backers say it will produce plastics.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
A 2013 technical memo on seismic considerations at Site C dismissed fracking as a potential threat to public safety. But since then a wave of industry-triggered earthquakes — and BC Hydro’s concerns about the waste water disposal well near the Peace Canyon Dam — suggest that fracking and dams are simply incompatible land uses.
By Paul Mobbs, The Ecologist
The issue here is about science and uncertainty. So first, What is 'science'? It is a process for how we find, measure and then evaluate the real world in order to identify how it works. The problem is, particularly for contentious debates in the media and politics, that we seldom hear about the degree of confidence attached to scientific findings, or the uncertainties that surround them.
By Sharon Kelly, Steve Horn, DeSmog Blog
In a 58 page ruling, Magistrate Judge Martin C. Carlson discarded the jury's verdict in Ely v. Cabot and ordered a new trial, extending the legal battle over one of the highest-profile and longest-running fracking-related water contamination cases in the country.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
A new University of Guelph study proves what many western Canadian landowners have long documented — that methane gas leaking from energy industry wells can travel great distances in groundwater and pose safety risks, contaminate water and contribute to climate change.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
The recent Supreme Court ruling on Jessica Ernst in her case against the Alberta Energy Regulator demonstrates once again that Canada’s myopic legal system can easily lose sight of justice.