68 Groups Urge Obama to Halt Fracking
Today, 68 leaders of public health, environmental, academic, faith-based, and other organizations, urged President Obama to do everything in his power to halt the largely unregulated expansion of hydraulic fracturing to extract shale gas (“fracking”), a practice which has been linked to contaminated groundwater across the country.
The letter to the President states, “[t]he lack of federal protections, combined with the current level and predicted increase of this activity, pose extreme and unnecessary risks to public health the environment,” and urges the President to put the brakes on the practice “until and unless the environmental and health impacts of this process are well understood and the public is adequately protected.”
The oil and gas industry have successfully lobbied for exemptions for fracking from several environmental laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Water Act. Companies that engage in fracking are not even required to disclose the nature and quantity of the more than 900 different chemicals used in the process.
View the full letter and list of signatories, here.
Photo courtesy of flickr