Help Blue America Defeat A Blue Dog

Early mockup of the billboard; it's way cooler now. And the url is www.facebook.com/FrackersHeartHolden

Blue America wants to erect some billboards in northeast Pennsylvania. We'd like to see Tim Holden held accountable for his atrocious voting record and his shady, self-serving career. If he's defeated in the April 24th primary, Matt Cartwright, a stalwart progressive will go to Congress to represent a newly drawn blue district that Holden has never represented. I used to live in Monroe County, in the Poconos, and we never had a Blue Dog representing us. Holden's from down in the southern part of the state. You can help us by contributing to the Blue America PAC here.

Holden is one of Boehner's and Cantor's best friends inside the Democratic caucus. Although he's sort of a Democrat, he agrees with the GOP leaders on ideological grounds most of the time-- and routinely votes against women's Choice and women's health issues and on a boatload of issues from AgriBusiness and Big Oil to voting rights, LGBT rights and freedom of speech. He's one of the only Democrats who voted with the GOP, not just on Choice, but on every single bill regarding contaceptives. This guy is PART of the Republican War Against Women-- a conservative foot-soldier embedded inside the Democratic congressional caucus. Since President Obama was elected, Holden has voted with the GOP on crucial roll calls 64.23% of the time-- and that's not on naming post offices. That 64.23% represents substantive legislation were his vote was needed by Democrats. He didn't deliver.

But it isn't all ideological with Holden; it never is. It's also who's paying him-- basically which sleazy lobbyists and which big corporate donors are pulling his strings. Take fracking. He's the Democratic voice inside Congress for the fracking industry. Watch him reading his talking points written for him by a lobbyist:



Big Energy PACs run by Dick Cheney's Halliburton donated $511,638 to help finance Tim Holden's slimy career. Why would they help finance a Democrat? Holden is barely a Democrat and, after all, he supported them when it really mattered most-- in creating the Halliburton Loophole, exempting Holden's big campaign donors from EPA regulations so they could poison the water table with impunity. In conjunction with Holden's congressional manipulations. the U.S. Forest Service announced it didn't plan to issue a universal ban on horizontal drilling on federal land, allowing many national forests to remain available for natural gas production, the agency's deputy chief said Friday. Continuing to push both GOP and Big Oil and Gas talking points, "extolled the importance of domestic energy production. Public land generated more than $112 billion in 2010, he said, noting the contribution of mineral resource management to that figure."

Walter Brasch has put together a three part opus on how Republicans conservatives and Big Energy are fracking up Pennsylvania. Part one looked at a state gag order on physicians and Pat three will examine why Pennsylvania is giving special consideration to the natural gas companies. This is from Part 2, about how the health and environmental impacts is greater than was claimed by the folks in a rush to stuff their pockets with cash.

Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, a pro-industry non-profit organization, claims fracking has been “a widely deployed as safe extraction technique,” dating back to 1949. What he doesn’t say is that until recently energy companies had used low-pressure methods to extract natural gas from fields closer to the surface than the current high-pressure technology that extracts more gas, but uses significantly more water, chemicals, and elements.

The industry claims well drilling in the Marcellus Shale will bring several hundred thousand jobs, and has minimal health and environmental risk. President Barack Obama in his January 2012 State of the Union, said he believes the development of natural gas as an energy source to replace fossil fuels could generate 600,000 jobs.

However, research studies by economists Dr. Jannette M. Barth, Dr. Deborah Rogers, and others debunk the idea of significant job creation.

Barry Russell, president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, says “no evidence directly connects injection of fracking fluid into shale with aquifer contamination.” Fracking “has never been found to contaminate a water well,” says Christine Cronkright, communications director for the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

Research studies and numerous incidents of water contamination prove otherwise.

In late 2010, equipment failure may have led to toxic levels of chemicals in the well water of at least a dozen families in Conoquenessing Twp. in Butler County. Township officials and Rex Energy, although acknowledging that two of the drilling wells had problems with the casings, claimed there were pollutants in the drinking water before Rex moved into the area. John Fair disagrees. “Everybody had good water a year ago,” Fair told environmental writer and activist Iris Marie Bloom in February 2012. Bloom says residents told her the color of water changed (to red, orange, and gray) after Rex began drilling. Among chemicals detected in the well water, in addition to methane gas, were ammonia, arsenic, chloromethane, iron, manganese, t-butyl alcohol, and toluene. While not acknowledging that its actions could have caused the pollution, Rex did provide fresh water to the residents, but then stopped doing so on Feb. 29, 2012, after the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said the well water was safe. The residents vigorously disagreed and staged protests against Rex; environmental activists and other residents trucked in portable water jugs to help the affected families. The Marcellus Outreach Butler blog (MOB) declared that residents’ “lives have been severely disrupted and their health has been severely impacted. To unceremoniously ‘close the book’ on investigations into their troubles when so many indicators point to the culpability of the gas industry for the disruption of their lives is unconscionable.”

We need your help to get some of these billboards up in PA-17

In April 2011, near Towanda, Pa., seven families were evacuated after about 10,000 gallons of wastewater contaminated an agricultural field and a stream that flows into the Susquehanna River, the result of an equipment failure, according to the Bradford County Emergency Management Agency.

The following month, DEP fined Chesapeake Energy $900,000, the largest amount in the state’s history, for allowing methane gas to pollute the drinking water of 16 families in Bradford County during the previous year. The DEP noted there may have been toxic methane emissions from as many as six wells in five towns. The DEP also fined Chesapeake $188,000 for a fire at a well in Washington County that injured three workers.

In January 2012, an equipment failure at a drill site in Susquehanna County led to a spill of several thousand gallons of fluid for almost a half-hour, causing “potential pollution,” according to the DEP. In its citation to Carizzo Oil and Gas, the DEP “strongly” recommended that the company cease drilling at all 67 wells “until the cause of this problem and a solution are identified.”

In December 2011, the federal Environmental Protection Agency concluded that fracking operations could be responsible for groundwater pollution.

“Today’s methods make gas drilling a filthy business. You know it’s bad when nearby residents can light the water coming out of their tap on fire,” says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. What’s causing the fire is the methane from the drilling operations. A ProPublica investigation in 2009 revealed methane contamination was widespread in drinking water in areas around fracking operations in Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, and Pennsylvania. The presence of methane in drinking water in Dimock, Pa., had become the focal point for Josh Fox’s investigative documentary, Gasland, which received an Academy Award nomination in 2011 for Outstanding Documentary; Fox also received an Emmy for non-fiction directing. Fox’s interest in fracking intensified when a natural gas company offered $100,000 for mineral rights on property his family owned in Milanville, in the extreme northeast part of Pennsylvania, about 60 miles east of Dimock.

Research by a team of scientists from Duke University revealed “methane contamination of shallow drinking water systems [that is] associated with shale-gas extraction.” The data and conclusions, published in the May 2011 issue of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that not only did most drinking wells near drilling sites have methane, but those closest to the drilling wells, about a half-mile, had an average of 17 times the methane of  those of other wells.

“Some of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing-- or liberated by it-- are carcinogens,” Dr. Sandra Steingraber told members of the Environmental Conservation and Health committee of the New York State Assembly. Dr. Steingraber, a biologist and distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College, pointed out that some of the chemicals “are neurological poisons with suspected links to learning deficits in children,” while others “are asthma triggers. Some, especially the radioactive ones, are known to bioaccumulate in milk. Others are reproductive toxicants that can contribute to pregnancy loss.”

An investigation by New York Times reporter Ian Urbina, based upon thousands of unreported EPA documents and a confidential study by the natural gas industry, concluded, “Radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.” Urbina learned that wastewater from fracking operations was about 100 times more toxic than federal drinking water standards; 15 wells had readings about 1,000 times higher than standards.

Research by Dr. Ronald Bishop, a biochemist at SUNY/Oneonta, suggests that fracking to extract methane gas “is highly likely to degrade air, surface water and ground-water quality, to harm humans, and to negatively impact aquatic and forest ecosystems.” He notes that “potential exposure effects for humans will include poisoning of susceptible tissues, endocrine disruption syndromes, and elevated risk for certain cancers.” Every well, says Dr. Bishop, “will generate a sediment discharge of approximately eight tons per year into local waterways, further threatening federally endangered mollusks and other aquatic organisms.” In addition to the environmental pollution by the fracking process, Dr. Bishop believes “intensive use of diesel-fuel equipment will degrade air quality [that could affect] humans, livestock, and crops.”

...The response by the industry and its political allies to the scientific studies of the health and environmental effects of fracking “has approached the issue in a manner similar to the tobacco industry that for many years rejected the link between smoking and cancer,” say Drs. Bamberger and Oswald. Not only do they call for “full disclosure and testing of air, water, soil, animals, and humans,” but point out that with lax oversight, “the gas drilling boom... will remain an uncontrolled health experiment on an enormous scale.”

Dr. Helen Podgainy, a pediatrician in Coraopolis, Pa., says she doesn’t want her patients “to be guinea pigs who provide the next generation the statistical proof of health problems as in what happened with those exposed to asbestos or to cigarette smoke.”

And fracing isn' the only anti-environmental legislation corporate lobbyists pay Holden to carry for them. Recently Holden wooed the AFL-CIO by telling them that he only voted like a Republican in the past because he had such a lot of dumb rednecks in his district and now that he's in a blue district he'll start voting more like a Democrat. They bought into it; they almost always tend to stick with the DCCC. But when will Holden start voting like a Democrat? It sure hasn't happened it yet. Just this week American Rivers reported that Holden cosponsored a corporate-friend/pollution-friendly bill with Republican anti-environmental fanatic Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the Chesapeake Bay Dirty Water Act.

Don’t be deceived by the words” reauthorization” and “improvement.” The “Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization and Improvement Act” (H.R. 4153) introduced by Representatives Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Tim Holden (D-PA) is about rolling back protections under the Clean Water Act for the Chesapeake Bay, and by extension, the rest of the country.

Although H.R. 4153 applies directly to the Chesapeake Bay, it would set a precedent to disrupt the careful balance of shared federal and state responsibility for clean water for all Americans that is the foundation of the Clean Water Act. Much like the earlier “Dirty Water bill,” this proposed legislation would return us to the days of a patchwork of variable state protections. We know what happens when states alone are in control of setting pollution limits without consistent federal standards.

Before the Clean Water Act, you would have needed a tetanus shot if you fell into the Potomac River. Our rivers were too polluted for swimming or fishing, so polluted that they even caught on fire. Why would we ever want to go back to that?