
Food & Water Watch
This week, State Sen. Mike Skindell (D-Lakewood), State Rep. Denise Driehaus (D-Cincinnati) and State Rep. Robert Hagan (D-Youngstown) introduced legislation to ban Class II fracking waste injection wells in Ohio. The bill would prevent waste from being discharged into Ohio’s waterways after treatment, and would make it illegal for municipalities to use the liquid waste from oil and gas operations for dust and ice control on roadways.
Today, grassroots leaders from around the state applauded the bill, citing that none of Ohio’s wastewater treatment plants are equipped to handle the level of toxicity and radioactivity present in fracking waste.
“Ohio communities should not be declared wastelands for dumping toxic waste into what amounts to a hole in the ground, thereby endangering local drinking water supplies and public health,” said Teresa Mills, fracking coordinator with the Buckeye Forest Council. “Community groups have been working with state legislators on ways to address the problems associated with fracking injection wells, and we’re thrilled to see this legislation introduced.”
“We need to take the necessary time to consider all the consequences of drilling so many additional injection wells in Ohio,” said State Rep. Denise Driehaus. “We should avoid the pitfalls other states have encountered and focus on protecting our land, water and residents. Drilling for oil and gas produces an abundant amount of waste, which is then injected deep beneath the ground. These wells are changing the Earth's geology by adding man-made cracks that allow water and waste to flow freely. We cannot sit idly by as our state is used as a dumping ground for toxic waste and Ohioans’ health and safety are increasingly put at risk.”
“Ohio politicians and regulators have been too lenient on oil and gas industry disposal of fracking waste,” said Alison Auciello, Ohio-based organizer for Food & Water Watch. “Just because the industry is creating a tremendous amount of toxic waste doesn’t mean Ohio has to accept it. In the absence of truly safe disposal methods, the burden should be placed on the industry to come up with safe alternatives or cease to create the waste in the first place.”
In 2012, Ohio’s 178 active injection wells accepted 13,846,657 barrels of brine and liquid waste. Radioactivity in oil and gas wastewaters has been found to exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s safe drinking limits by up to 3,600 times, exceeds federal industrial discharge limits set by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency by more than 300 times.
“The state should follow our lead,” said Joanne Gerson, chair of the Southwest Ohio No Frack Forum, which was instrumental last year in helping to enact an ordinance passed by the Cincinnati City Council banning the underground disposal of waste within city limits.
Visit EcoWatch’s FRACKING page for more related news on this topic.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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