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Rolling Stone responds:
Which raises a question you might ask in a state whose legislature is so rabid for oil and gas money that it set aside millions to sue the federal government for the right to drill near Moab and Desolation Canyon, some of the state’s most sacrosanct places: How many dead infants does it take before you’ll accept that there’s a problem?
While the deliberate, angry denial of Vernal’s citizens whose livelihoods depend on the fracking industry is understandable, what will anger readers is the background Rolling Stone provides on the Wild West fracking boom that put oil and gas exploration ahead of infant lives. It reaches back to the early days of the Bush/Cheney administration, describing once again for those who have forgotten, the closed-door meetings helmed by Cheney in which fossil fuel barons essentially rewrote U.S. energy law to benefit themselves, massively expanding drilling on public lands and exempting themselves from environmental regulations.
In essence, Cheney’s program turned the Department of the Interior into a boiler-room broker for Big Oil, and undercut the power of the Environmental Protection Agency. Cheney’s plan was such a transparent coup for Big Oil that it took four years, two elections and the Republican capture of both houses of Congress to make it to Bush’s desk as legislation. Along the way, the bill gained a crucial addendum, known today as the “Halliburton loophole”: a carte-blanche exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act for an emergent technique called fracking.
The impact of these sweeping changes affected the daily lives of people in towns like Vernal.
“Fracking moved the oil patch to people’s backyards, significantly increasing the pollution they breathed in small towns,” Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Rolling Stone. “Basically, it industrialized rural regions and brought them many of the related health problems we were used to seeing in cities.”
And Rolling Stone describes the official silence on the growing health problems as extending far beyond Vernal, as wells in formerly pristine areas leaked, blew out and emitted methane flares, and rather than responding, the state of Texas tied its citizens’ hands, passing a bill forbidding them from regulating the growth of fracking in their towns.
Rolling Stone says:
Whatever Cheney’s doing now, he must look upon his handiwork and smile. OPEC has lost its whip hand over oil prices, SUVs are selling off the lot again, and Obama takes victory laps because we now produce more oil than we import. Glad tidings for all—except the people in more than 30 states who wake up to the thump of fracking rigs. To them, the message from Washington has been tacit but final: You folks are on your own out there.
After four of her five clients had miscarriages recently, Donna Young has the water in their homes tested. Rolling Stone reports:
Most of the batches tested were positive for extreme toxicity from hydrogen sulfide, H2S, one of the most deadly of the gases released by drilling. Exposure to it has killed a number of rig workers over the past few decades. In high enough concentration, just one breath is enough. In much smaller amounts, H2S can cause miscarriages—and the amounts Young says she found were more than 7,000 times the EPA threshold for safety.
“I know I have to call somebody, but who?” Young told Rolling Stone. “Who is there to trust in this town?”
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