Black Gold, Texas Tea!
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the sunny, brisk and blue skied island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Friday morning, the thirtieth day of May, 2014, another spectacular one out there on the Hyannis Port waterfront, albeit a bit on the nippy side of summer, but hey, what the heck, at least the weather seems in tune with the ‘time’ of year it is positioned within for the moment…
It is time for the American public to get real with big oil and gas–an industry that has hijacked this nation’s environmental health for their own profit and ideological models–and expose them to the light of day. Fracking is a term seacapecod.net has used from time to time and I am sure you have suffered through enough commercials screaming to you over your flat screen TV as of late, assuring you of the USA! USA! USA! jingoistic hor$e$hit the ExxonMobil’s and Koch Industries of the world want you to digest–namely, that the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of ‘natural gas’ wells that have sprung up in the past decade are perfectly safe, ‘nothing to SEA here folks’, yes sir, these wells here don’t leak or nothin’, they are just a good source of ‘American jobs’ (death rates in oil and gas industry way up) and because that methane, I mean natural gas is so prevalent, we don’t have to worry ’bout them foreigners no more, yep, we can just drill, baby drill right in say, heck, the Grand Canyon and bring down customers rates and all. What?, there might be a problem with them tanks leaking up to 17 percent in the L.A. basin? 11 in the Uinta basin, 700 square miles up in the Utah eastern mountains, and in Denver, Colorado, the so called Denver basin, readings are well above four percent? That can’t be right. This means that the EPA is lying to US. Imagine that? The industry sworn to protect the environment is actually in bed with the oil and gas industry, the industry it is supposedly ‘regulating’. What a joke. According to any record you look at, the EPA agrees with the industry’s assessment that methane leaks from the fracking well heads is less than one and a half percent, at the highest. Again, a number the EPA gets FROM the oil and gas industry.
This is an oily and dirty tangled web that the average American does not have time to really look at, let alone fight. Rest assured though, in ten years time, they will be outraged whole lot more than they are right now. For you SEA, the aforementioned groups, along with Chevron, Shell, bp and the rest of the usual suspects are all in on the gag. Namely, to pull the wool over the public’s eyes in this United States of America, lying to them as to the dangers inherent with natural gas extraction. A two year study was released by NOAA recently, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, out of Boulder, Colorado, concluding that on the low end, 3.6 percent of methane leaks (well above the threshold of 3 percent for natural gas’ argument of being cleaner than coal or oil) and 7.9 percent of the high end, making it MUCH worse than oil or coal. Most experts who have a firm grip on reality and are not bought agree that living anywhere near a fracking well is UNsafe and should be avoided if possible, considering not only the poisonous fumes coming from the well, but the water around the well being contaminated with the deadly fracking fluid, as well as radioactive materials, yes sir, those lovely cocktail is chalk full of 596 secret chemicals that are now illegal to even talk about in the state of North Carolina, where one could go to jail for exposing what chemicals are in those horrible fracking pools that obviously leak into ground water, adding radium and all sorts of other toxins that kill everything living and feeding in the rivers around it. Just ask the people of Rifle, Colorado, they’ll tell ya!
None of this information gets into the main stream media, until it is too late of course, save via real journalists such as Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, or Bill Maher’s HBO’s VICE, and say Showtime’s “Years of Living Dangerously”, who have all offered up some very sobering FACTS regarding all the ingenious ways we humans are destroying the planet for PROFIT. They exposed what we here at seacapecod.net has been eying for years, groups like “The Heartland Institute”–a powerful global warming denier that is funded by, who else, the two most powerful forces in that oil and gas industry--Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, who gave, not only to Heartland, but to the overall propaganda effort, from the years 2003 to 2010, 558 million bucks. That’s right, a half a billion to deceive the American electorate that not only is global warming not real, but if, on the off chance, 97 percent of world class climate scientists from every corner of the globe who conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt that man is the CAUSE of GLOBAL WARMING (the other three percent are bought and sold by the aforementioned groups as well as ‘thousands’ of other schmucks with no climate science knowledge, let alone degrees and stuff!, then drank the Koch Kool-Aid and signed the “Oregon Petition”, in blood of course), that ’s right, that it is real then hey, it must be good for you, for the free market is always right. With ALEC, the ‘American Legislative Exchange Council’, firmly in place, Congress gets more corporate everyday (115 bills from ALEC became law in 2013), for her members include, again, the aforementioned oil and gas giants, along with thousands of state and local legislators. These bills write themselves, then are simply signed and voted on by the puppet republican politicians–thus jammed through the legislature with no problems, e.g., the famous 2005 “Halliburton Loophole”, that took the Clean Air Act of 1970 (and the Clean Water Act of 1972) out of the picture when it came to fracking, all while the George W. Bush administration took the teeth out of the EPA, allowing drilling, fracking and more polluting to go on unabated…just look to North Carolina and Duke Energy’s coal ash dumps into the Elk River, Dan River, Cape Fear River…
Wake UP AMERICA! Water will become more precious than GOLD soon, but it may be the methane in the air that causes the waters to rise even faster than they already are. Methane gas is 110 times more potent than CO2 and if the projected 35,000 wells a year goes on unabated, the earth’s temperature will rise exponentially in that coming decade, leading to a deepening of the problem with devastating consequences to our everyday lives due to extreme weather patterns world wide. I wonder if the “Electricity Freedom Act” will help us in any way, what are your thoughts Senator?
Yes, Global Warming, to quote Martha Stewart, ‘is a good thing’, just like the NRA is a blessing from God and GMO’s are food. The way in which a Charles Koch (whose net worth, coupled with his brother David, is 100 billion) wants to change our country permanently is to eliminate government all together, save the military and the police state they wish to erect, especially those pesky regulations on anything that has to do with his precious Koch Industries profits, chalk full of refineries and chemical potions, with interests in the tar sands up north, hence the Keystone XL pipeline, where, if built, GOD FORBID, he and his brother would probably double their money in the next ten years, being in the position to buy just about anything they want–the Judicial, the Legislative, and the Executive, hence, the United States of America. They are already doing just that, only in the dark. Through mechanisms such as “Donors’ Trusts” or “Donors’ Capital Fund” those climate denial groups like the Heartland Institute can shield their donors from the light of day, hence, any backlash from the public, for really, think about it, ‘how can you hold someone accountable if you don’t know who they are?’.
Michael Woelk, CEO of Picarro Inc., the fine company that manufactures the equipment used in measuring the leaking methane gas (1000 times more accurate and sophisticated than the equipment used by industry and the EPA) wells all around the country said this about this oil and gas industry’s claim that the escaping methane is ‘no big deal’—”…they’re wrong, they’re flat out wrong, and so is the EPA, listen, like so many other inaccuracies, if you repeat them often enough, and you repeat them loud enough, and defend them with vociferously, then that kind of becomes accepted as truth.” It is not a lie if YOU believe it~ This same equipment was used in Boston and Washington D.C. lately and it appears that ’some’ of the 1.5 million miles of natural gas pipeline’s infrastructure is throwing out readings of 45 percent pure methane, truly, 45 percent coming right out of the street! With the corrosion and leaks, it is surprising more explosions have not occurred like the one we saw recently in New York.
It seems this energy boom is here to stay, for it is estimated that there is 15 trillion bucks of methane trapped in that shale rock all over this great land of OURS. Who do you think is going to win this fight? Sing it with me boys, “…this land is your land, this land is my land, from California, to the New York islands, to the redwood forests, to the Gulf stream waters (don’t eat the shrimp! thanks bp!), this land was made for you and me, but mostly ME, didn’t you get the memo?!” (beautifully sung by “the Koch Brothers”–show band and review, not to be confused with the great Blues Brothers who are on a mission from God, look down upon US now John Belushi!). Have a nice week end folks and steer clear of those wooden nickles thrown about by FOX “News”, like the side effects from living too near a fracking well sight, those side effects still include, but are not limited to, vision problems, nose bleeds, ear ringing, migraines and the never ending delusions of grandeur–you know that feeling deep, deep down, the very real conviction that you were once the King of England? PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M