PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:
We have a supply of natural gas
that can last America
nearly 100 years...
[APPLAUSE]
and my administration will take
every possible action
to safely develop this energy.
The development of natural gas
will create jobs
and power trucks and factories
that are cleaner and cheaper,
where we develop a hundred-year
supply of natural gas
that's right beneath our feet.
BILL CLINTON: The boom
in oil and gas production
has driven oil imports
to a near-20-year low
and natural gas production
to an all-time high.
HILARY CLINTON:
The United States will promote the use of shale gas.
Now I know that, in some places,
is controversial.
PAUL RYAN: With 21st-century
drilling technology,
you can get it out of the ground
in a very safe and secure way.
MITT ROMNEY:
I don't recall hearing about water being on fire.
We will have
North American energy.
We're going to be independent.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, God bless you,
and God bless
the United States of America.
MAN, VOICE-OVER: Hi.
My name is Josh Fox.
This is my house.
It's in the middle of the woods,
tucked away on a dirt road
in a small town next
to the Delaware River
called Milanville, Pennsylvania.
Just past my backyard,
there's a stream
that feeds the Delaware.
It's been 5 years
since the first proposal
to drill thousands of gas wells
in the Delaware River Basin
came knocking at my door.
Every day you wake up with it--
the fate of my backyard,
the watershed for millions
of people--
up in the air.
Sometimes,
you can't figure out
what's going on
in your own backyard
without figuring out all
the places around the world
that your backyard's
connected to.
And, as we know, in sequels,
the Empire strikes back.
So let's start where
we left off...
when the tide came in.
It was hard to believe my eyes.
As far as I could see,
the surface of the Gulf,
streaked with oil like ghosts
along the surface.
Nothing could really
prepare you.
We hadn't seen pictures
like this on the news.
It had been widely reported
that journalists' flights
were restricted
to 3,000 feet and above.
Journalists would call up
the FAA to clear their flights,
and BP would answer the phone.
And I don't know why.
Maybe because it was a Sunday.
Maybe because it was the Fourth
of July, and everybody was off.
But somehow, we got clearance to
fly at any altitude we wanted,
so this is what
it really looked like.
Down on the ground,
we weren't so lucky--
limited access to beaches--
but we weren't the only ones
hitting roadblocks.
I was getting
pretty good at this.
You don't really have time
to sit back
and say, "Why the hell
is this happening?"
Why is BP...
Are they in the back pocket?
They got a cozy deal?
Is their lobbyist in Washington
controlling this?
But, um, something stinks.
We're fighting harder with
the Coast Guard and BP
than we're fighting the oil.
I don't even want to start
to imagine things that--
Why would this be?
Why would they be protected?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: We found out
that BP was spraying chemical dispersants
on surfaces of the Gulf
in huge volumes.
A chemical that had been
banned in Britain
actually makes the oil
more toxic
and sinks it out of sight.
They weren't solving
the crisis, just hiding it.
It's going to be ugly
if we quit spraying dispersant.
It's going to be black oil
all over the surface.
But this monster that continues
to grow every day,
at least it's not invisible.
Right now, they're making it
invisible, impossible to fight.
For every decision they've made
throughout the catastrophe,
there's been huge negative
impacts, and we--
the people of Louisiana,
Mississippi,
Alabama, and Florida--
are going to have to deal
with those negative impacts
for a very, very long time.
FOX: Years? Decades?
SUBRA: Decades,
decades. Generations.
And that's what is
so devastating
to the fishing
communities.
FOX: So all
the dispersant does is it makes the oil sink?
It makes it sink,
and it spreads it
throughout
the water column and into the sediment.
And most of the water
column and the sediment
have been damaged
or destroyed
as far as aquatic
organisms are concerned
because it's toxic.
We lost the Gulf
of Mexico
as far as an ecosystem,
as a productive
ecosystem.
We didn't lose
the Gulf of Mexico
as a source
of fuel, fossil fuel.
And that drilling
and production will continue,
even though
the ecosystem has been destroyed.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
What I was learning in the Gulf
was that no matter
how huge the catastrophe was,
what really mattered was
who was telling the story.
Let's go catch the sunset,
guys, then we'll come back in and check.
You know, if I get sick
in 20 years, so be it,
but my kids' bodies
are still developing.
They say, "Oh, well,
everything's fine,
"but stay inside your house
and keep your doors closed
and your air conditioner
on recirculation."
You know, I was taught
not to throw so much as a Coke can in the Bayou.
This is our home.
This is where we eat,
sleep, live.
This is us. We're Bayou people.
People don't understand
something. This isn't just about an income.
This is about an entire way
of life in its entirety.
We'll go out here and catch
150 pounds of shrimp,
or go craw fishing
in the ditches or whatever,
a couple of hundred
pounds of craw fish.
5 or 6 families will get
together, no alcohol,
boil seafood, barbecue whatever,
and we have family time.
You know, without that there,
I mean, yeah,
we could cook other food,
but what about going in the bayou
and going in the pirogue with
the kids, with no video games,
no TV, no nothing?
One on one, some people go
into the mountains behind their house,
and they become one
with nature.
That's the bayou for us.
If it's not there, what's
the point of being here?
We're going to have
a dead fishery, contaminated land,
a bag full of bills,
and a court date when this--
when the federal government
tells BP that their cleanup has been completed.
Why stay?
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
That's when it hit me
how much of this whole culture
was going to have to move.
When I got home
from the Gulf, there was a new surprise neighbor.
The Delaware River
Basin Commission
was debating a new plan
to open up the river basin
to 18,000 gas wells.
The Commission had approved
15 exploratory wells,
and one was about a mile
from my house.
Wait. Stop.
I really want to start
at the middle,
but I got to start
at the beginning.
My parents built our house
in the Upper Delaware
in the same year
I was born, 1972.
It was my father's dream,
and my mom filled it with furniture.
He told my mother, "I want
to build a house of love."
I want to build a house
of love for you."
He ended up building it
out of a $2.00 diagram
out of "Popular Mechanics."
For my father--
a Holocaust survivor born
in Russia, fleeing the Nazis;
and for my mother, the child
of a poor Italian immigrant family from New York City--
on 19.5 acres, just a mile
from the Delaware,
home was in the right place,
one of those place
that maybe you might say,
"Nothing ever happens."
But then, in 2008,
just like most people
in the Upper Delaware,
we got a letter in the mail.
We learned that our land was
on top of a formation
called the Marcellus Shale,
and that the Marcellus Shale
was the "Saudi Arabia"
of natural gas.
We could lease our land
to the natural gas companies.
We would receive a signing bonus
in the neighborhood of $100,000
and untold thousands more
if we only let them...
well...
for the first time,
we heard that word.
You know the word.
It's just like it sounds.
If we only let them "frack us."
Fracking.
Fracking.
Fracking.
Fracking them.
The hydraulic
fracturing, or "fracking"--
fracking--
fracking.
So-called fracking--
fracking--
Fracking--fracking.
The Marcellus.
MAN: Shale gas.
The shale.
[Male newscaster speaks German]
...das Marcellus Shale.
[Speaks German]
...fracking.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The "F" word
isn't in the dark anymore.
It's an outright hit.
"Fracking" was Number 3 on
the list of most popular words
in the English language in 2011,
right behind "occupy"
and "deficit."
And with one to two million
new wells projected,
America is in a fracking frenzy.
Hydraulic fracturing,
or "fracking," is a method of gas extraction
drilling deep down thousands
of feet to a shale formation
and then forcing down the well
millions of gallons of water
laced with toxic chemicals
at such intense pressures
that it created fractures
in the rock and freed up the gas.
But you never just drill
one well in a shale play,
you drill thousands,
creating an industrial
redefinition of the landscape.
Millions of gallons
of water per well,
thousands upon thousands
of truck trips,
thousands of tons
of proprietary chemicals
injected into the ground.
And because fracking
explicitly is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act,
the industry doesn't have
to tell the public what chemicals they're using.
The bigger picture still is
that we were just in the corner
of the largest domestic
natural gas drilling campaign
in history, now occupying
34 states.
The gas drilling
and fracking industry
was knocking on
the doors of millions.
And with thousands of cases
of water contamination,
air pollution,
and health problems
reported across the U.S.,
it's not just the numbers
that get you dizzy.
There was only one problem.
The gas industry
denied everything.
To date, we have found
no verified instance
of hydraulic fracturing
harming groundwater.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The war for who
was going to tell this story
was on.
WOMAN, ON PHONE:
We had good water.
The people in Dimock
don't have good water anymore.
[Ticking]
LESLEY STAHL, VOICE-OVER:
In the shale gas gold rush,
Dimock is the ghost town.
STAHL: How many of you lost
your water supply?
MAN, VOICE-OVER:
They said, "Dad, we got gas in the water over there.
I can actually shake
the jug up and light it."
You put a match
to your water and it went up in flames?
I can take my water,
shake it up, turn it up,
and it will explode-like.
Scary?
FEMALE NEWS ANCHOR:
All Cabot representatives say
they don't believe
drilling operations caused the water problems.
WOMAN: We're not
greedy people.
We just want some
justice for something
that's terribly wrong
that happened here.
[Equipment beeping]
[Engines chugging]
GIRL: They look like
the Rovers on Mars.
WOMAN, ON PHONE: Cabot said that
they were not responsible for the contamination of the wells.
It is a scary situation
to accuse a large corporation
of anything like that.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: After years
of trying to negotiate with Cabot, the drilling company,
the Dimock families
bound together to sue.
When the lawsuit broke,
so did their silence.
Bill Ely lit his water on fire
on every channel on television.
And Sheila Ely, his wife,
the mysterious voice
on the phone,
invited me over to look at some
of her documentation.
I like my pictures
on the wall.
When you have
frames, you can't
get all the pictures
up that you want.
FOX: Uh-huh.
So I just laminate,
and I just keep
laminating and laminating.
I have a laminator.
BILL ELY: My ancestors
settled this spot
right here, back in
the 1800s.
I'm, like,
fifth generation, and I hope there's
5 more generations
after me that live here.
And I'm not selling.
I'm not leaving.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Just across the road, their nephew,
Scott Ely, had worked
for Cabot.
Now he was the key witness
in their lawsuit.
Imagine working for a company
that destroyed
your family's water...
We feel like horses being
pushed to a dirty hole.
And, you know, horses
won't drink bad water. They just won't do it.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Or having to tell your kids that they can't swim
or fish in the creeks
and ponds you grew up in.
I like fishing.
I like frog-catching.
Me, too!
All I ever do for my life.
Yeah, even when we go
in the pond,
we try to catch fish,
we just get sick.
Cabot should just deal
with us in the courtroom.
They don't want to do that.
They want to street-fight all this.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
The big, strong Ely family was ready for a fight.
Up and down Carter Road,
Craig and Julie Sautner and Ray Kemble
had created a kind
of art installation
of their well water
on their front lawns...
All we want is to, you know,
have some kind of normalcy here.
We want good water.
That's all we want.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: And a kind of
leader and spokesperson emerged from the Dimock families.
I've gone to
every congressman, representative,
anyone who would listen:
DEP, Cabot, anyone I could think of.
Begged for water
from Cabot.
All these people
begged--begged for water.
They told us there would be
one well out here, one well.
And within the following year,
we have 30 wells now.
I dread to imagine
what's going to happen to property value out here.
How would you
advertise this house: "Bring your own water"?
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
There was so much noise coming out of Dimock,
it felt like the town was
standing in for the whole state.
But Dimock wasn't alone.
Over the past 4 years,
a huge change had swept
across Pennsylvania.
Governor Ed Rendell
had rolled out the red carpet
for the gas drilling industry.
Thousands of wells drilled...
thousands of reported
violations.
The "New York Times"
investigated and found that
wastewater from drilling was
being inadequately treated
and dumped back
into water supplies
all over Pennsylvania,
and with this much evidence
bubbling up across the state,
even the pro-drilling
Rendell administration
had to take action.
DEP issued violations to Cabot
and stopped them from drilling
in a 9-square-mile radius,
but no permanent solution
for residents' water contamination
had been proposed.
What the Dimock families
really wanted was permanent public water,
and someone who could
make it happen finally showed up to listen.
MAN, VOICE-OVER: Lance Simmens.
I was special assistant
to Governor Ed Rendell
for Intergovernmental Affairs.
My primary responsibility
was to make sure
that the Governor knew, on the ground,
what was going on
in local communities.
There was something
obviously drastically wrong with this picture.
It's like, you know,
3 apples and a nail.
And I said point-blank
to the Governor,
who was sitting
within about 18 inches
from me in a meeting
one day, I said,
"We have got to get the people
of Dimock clean water.
"This is the United States
of America, and we need to have this
as a primary right for all
of our citizens."
He agreed and he asked me
what we should do about it.
And I said, "Let's connect
to a public water supply."
FOX, VOICE-OVER: After Lance
Simmens got to the governor,
it felt like
a new day in Dimock.
Pushed by a new policy,
Department of Environmental
Protection Secretary John Hanger
releases videotapes
of Dimock wells.
We have video
of gas bubbling at those gas wells.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
The DEP revealed that Dimock wells
had inadequate cement,
cracked cement, or no cement.
The crucial part of the well
that's supposed to keep gas
from migrating
into aquifers had failed,
showing scientifically
that Cabot Oil & Gas
had contaminated
Dimock's water with methane.
[Drilling equipment clanging]
But PA DEP had the videos
for a year and a half,
so John Hanger, Secretary
of the Department, was in
the uncomfortable position of
calling his own administration's policy inadequate,
while at the same time
playing the hero.
HANGER: We've had people
here in Pennsylvania
without safe
drinking water for close to two years.
That is totally,
totally unacceptable.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
The new policy was startling,
although it was just
common sense.
Pennsylvania would build
a water line to Dimock
from Montrose, 7 miles away--
the nearest municipal
water supply--
and the state would sue
Cabot Oil & Gas
for the cost--$12 million.
Protestors in the crowd
lifted signs of other towns in Pennsylvania
that had similar problems,
saying, "We, too, need a water line,"
insisting that the Dimock
water line be a precedent for the state.
Coming home from Dimock,
my own situation was escalating.
The only place
they hadn't managed to drill
in Pennsylvania was
the Delaware River Basin.
It's the border
with New York State,
and there are hundreds
of streams, tributaries
to form that mighty river.
15 million people get
their drinking water
out of the Delaware
River Basin--
New York City, Philadelphia,
and southern New Jersey.
A lot depends on nothing
ever happening up here.
There's an old adage:
"You can't ever step in
the same stream twice."
And from growing up
running up and down a trout stream connecting
to the Delaware River, it's
fairly obvious how that's true.
Every year, the snow melt
carves out a slightly new bank.
Every year,
the spring thaw rushes in,
takes down a few trees.
Every year, a new beach head,
a place where a swimming hole
is slightly deeper.
And, depending on the rainfall
and the weather,
there could be
a rushing current,
or a boulder revealed
by a drought that you've never seen before.
But in this case,
something besides nature had changed this.
Pro-drilling landowners
in my county
had leased over 80,000 acres.
The stream's always been
my property line, and now, just across from me,
I could wake up and see off
my front porch every day
the other side of the stream
was now leased.
If drilling began,
that side would be controlled
by the gas industry.
Now it didn't matter
that my family never signed.
I was completely surrounded,
and if they drilled,
you'd never step in
the same stream again.
The River Basin is controlled
by a 5-member body--
4 governors of the states
that border the river
and a representative
from the president--
and New York State had
been paying attention to what was going on
in Pennsylvania and
throughout the country.
The New York legislature passed
a one-year moratorium on drilling throughout New York,
and the federal government
was also taking a look.
Prompted by Maurice Hinchey,
congressman from New York,
the Federal Environmental
Protection Agency begins a two-year study
of the effects of hydraulic
fracturing on groundwater,
and EPA Administrator
Lisa Jackson declares
that if states are falling
down on the job enforcing regulations,
then the federal government
will step in.
One such failed state
was Wyoming,
and one such town was
a tiny little place called Pavillion.
My backyard, New York,
and national policy tied
to tiny little places
like Pavillion.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
EPA moved in and did
a full groundwater study,
testing for hundreds of chemicals
related to gas drilling
and the gas itself.
MAN: This is the ultimate
detective novel.
I mean, these people are
scientists and detectives
and researchers,
and they are doing an extraordinary job,
but they are absolutely
moving mountains to get this done.
FOX, VOICE- OVER: Most people
in the west don't own their mineral rights,
so when the gas company
showed up in Pavillion, drilling over a hundred wells,
landowners had no control
over where wells were drilled
and no share of the revenue.
FENTON: So, you know, they have
all this "Danger," you know, "No unauthorized personnel,"
but it's in the middle
of my field. I have to--
Now that we've got a big
oil field location
in the middle of the field,
we have to irrigate around it.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
On August 31, 2010,
the EPA released results
showing contamination
in 19 out of
the water wells tested.
Even though those chemicals
are in fracking fluids,
Encana--the company
doing the drilling-- denied responsibility,
and Wyoming's governor was
openly hostile towards the EPA.
Because of the gas
industry's exemption to the Safe Drinking Water Act,
they're not required to report
which chemicals they're using.
The investigation was ongoing,
but EPA told Pavillion residents
not to drink their water.
[Water running]
Just down the road, Louis Meeks,
John Fenton's neighbor.
Want a cold drink
of water? FOX: Yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
His water still smelled like turpentine.
This company come in,
right in the middle of our place,
and we didn't do
nothing to them.
It ain't no mansion,
I know it ain't no mansion, but it's home to us.
We was happy here.
We have a garden.
And we have fruit trees.
You know, there ain't much we need.
Our kids were raised here.
They rodeo'd and everything else, you know, and, um...
And this is the life
we wanted, but look at it now.
You want me to shut
my mouth?
I'm not gonna.
Do you want to see
them letters I wrote to the President? FOX: Sure.
You know, I never was
a tree hugger or anything,
but, you know, something
needs to be done.
I mean, you know,
this is terrible.
FOX: And you only got
the letter in return from EPA?
Yeah.
In terms of EPA, don't you think there's some hope there?
WOMAN: Yeah,
I hope there is,
but the state's
fighting it worse than Encana.
Yeah.
Encana's not fighting them.
FOX: Wait a minute.
The state is fighting EPA? Yup.
They say the Fed's
trying to run the state government,
so what they're doing
is trying to keep the EPA out of here.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Every day, John Fenton walks out into the field,
switches the direction
of the irrigation pumps--
surface water from a canal
that the dog can drink,
but that humans can't.
His own water, his groundwater,
that should be pure,
he knows is contaminated.
FENTON: The chemical that's
in our water, it's, uh,
something that's only
been seen a couple times.
[Fox scoffs]
So--I mean, ever.
If this world worked
the way it should,
if the laws were designed
to protect the people
and to protect
the environment and not to make corporations rich,
they'd have
the chemical list in front of them.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
There's a natural filtration system in the earth--
layers and layers
of mycelium in the ground,
filtering out bacteria
that can cause illness--
but natural filtration won't
take out fracking chemicals,
and once contaminants get in
the ground, they're nearly impossible to get out.
You have a whole series
of rivers and streams and lakes,
basically, underground,
you know,
that now have all these
interconnecting faults and cracks between them.
And even if you don't
count the fractures,
you have a bunch
of well bores that are penetrating everywhere.
I don't know how you would
ever restore that
or how you would ever right
a problem in there.
The people you
talk to and you ask, "Well, can you fix this?"
Heh heh!
You get, "We don't know,"
but you read the look
on somebody's face and it says more than their words, you know?
And I would tend to think
that it's going to be this way from here on out.
FOX: So there's going
to be some source of contamination
into the aquifer here
that's going on...
Well, it's going
to outlast me.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: In 2009,
an air-quality researcher
at Southern
Methodist University,
Dr. Al Armendariz, figured out
that the 7,700 gas wells
in the Barnett Shale
caused as much air pollution
as all of the cars and trucks
in the Dallas-Fort Worth
Metroplex.
The Texas Commission
on Environmental Quality had no idea,
the TCEQ had no idea
how many gas wells were being put in
and were in the ground
around the city of Fort Worth.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Now, there are 15,000 gas wells in the Barnett Shale.
Looking at it from Google Earth,
the pock-marked landscape looks like an alien landing zone.
Al Armendariz was appointed
by Obama to be Regional Administrator of EPA
for Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma,
Louisiana, and New Mexico.
So, do you want to talk
about Barnett Shale?
Unfortunately,
because Texas wealth is
built on this industry,
this industry controls
state government.
But they're so busy doing
the denial thing.
You can't help the alcoholic
till they're willing
to recognize that
they got a problem.
The industry here
is not willing
to recognize that
they got a problem.
They want to fight back.
They don't want to--
the idea of any kind
of governmental regulation is reprehensible to them
unless they're in control
of writing the rules that are written.
There's really absolutely
nothing new about this.
I mean, we've been doing
resource extraction at the expense
of indigenous populations
the entire history of this country.
Kind of unique to
the situation is
you've got a lot of upper
middle-class white people
with college degrees
getting ticked off 'cause they're being treated
the way third-world people
have always been treated by corporate America.
Just because you have
a nice house doesn't mean
they're not going
to drill underneath it.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Steve and Shyla Lipsky weren't born with a silver spoon.
Self-made millionaires, built
a 12,000-square-foot dream home
in Parker County, Texas.
The house was completed
September of last year.
OK, master.
Our tub, that we don't
use anymore
because it takes 200 gallons
and we can't afford it. Ha ha!
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
I never met anyone prouder of their new house
than Steve Lipsky.
And the beach.
Ha ha ha!
My whole house,
I can control everything on my phone.
Waterfall's on.
You want to see it now?
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
But just outside of their gated community,
Range Resources drilled
a horizontal well
directly underneath their house.
This is the well.
Again.
Whoa!
There you go.
FOX: So, this is
going to make you sell this house?
Or walk away
from it or something? What are you going to--
What are your--I mean--
We don't know. Again, we simply--
Tell me what you're
going to do. Well, what--
If we have--well,
who's going to buy it? You know what?
What I'll probably do
is sell this
and then have the gas company
sue me for selling their gas.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: So much gas
venting off the headspace of their water well
that the hose never
failed to light.
Steve and Shyla Lipsky
went to the EPA for help, who immediately swept in
and issued an Imminent and
Substantial Endangerment Order against Range Resources,
saying that if the well water
continued to go into the house,
the house could explode.
You know, it's the first time
the Environmental Protection Agency
has ever blamed groundwater
contamination on natural gas drilling in the Barnett Shale.
ARMENDARIZ: We've ordered Range
to begin an investigation
and to take all necessary steps
to stop the migration
of the natural gas
into the drinking water aquifer.
We actually moved out
of our house
because we knew
how dangerous it was,
and then went and had
the water tested.
And I do give a lot of credit
for the EPA stepping in.
Well, they tell us
they can't contaminate the water wells,
but clearly they can,
so can they contaminate the river or the lake?
Our kids swim
in that, too.
This is the well water.
Mm-hmm.
It's positive
for methlylene blue active substances.
STEVE LIPSKY: Which is
basically detergents that they use for drilling.
There's no reason
that should be in my well.
It was positive for boron,
magnesium, and strontium.
Under the volatiles,
positive for benzene
and toluene.
This is
the water test again,
over the reporting limit
for both ethane and methane.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Despite EPA's
enforcement action,
Steve and Shyla Lipsky
were on their own,
paying for water deliveries
a thousand dollars a month.
STEVE LIPSKY: The laboratory
said it was off the charts.
They'd never seen
something so high,
and they were amazed that it
came out of a water well.
They said you have
to tell that homeowner that he cannot use it,
not for anything, and including
even watering the yard
because it just--your grass
will light on fire.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
With a store-bought methane detector,
Steve Lipsky would walk in
and out of his house,
gauging whether or not
it might explode.
[Rapid clicking]
But more sophisticated
air-monitoring devices had been installed
just down the road
in Dish, Texas.
Dish, Texas, changed
its name in a PR deal
to receive 10 free years
of Dish Network.
There's still 4 years
of free Dish in Dish, and now,
with 10 pipelines crisscrossing
the town and wells dappling the landscape,
there's also a lot of free gas
and other volatile organic compounds
floating around
in the atmosphere.
And even our regulatory
agencies here in Texas
didn't seem to know
what was being emitted.
We did mapping of the chemicals.
For example, this is
benzene, short-term.
This is probably a mile.
FOX: Wow.
So that's the one hour.
If you're exposed to this
for one hour, in theory,
there could be negative
side effects.
And if you look at every one
of these chemicals--
trimethyl sulfide.
Trimethyl benzene with
sulfur compounds,
but it's a neurotoxin.
For benzene, you came over
to probably here. Uh-huh.
If you looked at
the sulfur compounds... Right.
you covered this map.
You still can't give up.
Together we bargain,
divided we beg.
Is daddy the Mayor?
Um...
I've done a lot
of speeches with them sitting in the front row.
FOX: Do you guys get bored
when he's talking?
Yeah!
Ha ha!
You do?
WOMAN, VOICE-OVER:
It really started to bother me
when my boys were
having nosebleeds.
Josh, he'd wake up
and then he'd be panicked
because he has blood everywhere.
Seeing my baby
in that way was kind of
traumatizing.
At what point do you say--
nosebleeds are one thing,
but I don't want to see
my child with leukemia
and then look back and go,
"Well, if I had moved,
maybe my child
would be healthy."
Knowing what I know,
it's my duty
as a U.S. citizen
and a human here
that we go
and share
our experiences here.
You know, 3 years ago,
I was a Republican.
Now I'm an Independent.
You know, we just--
the things that they did,
they just pissed
all over us, you know?
But what they're doing here is
the biggest assault
on private property rights
that I've ever heard or seen.
And they're supposed
to be Conservatives?
That's one of the founding
principles of conservatism, is private property rights.
And you've got no
private property rights, not in Texas, at least.
Now, we got married
right here.
FOX: Right on the steps?
Right down there.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Bob and Lisa Parr aren't the sickly type,
and with trophy deer,
elk, mountain lions,
and, yes, even a grizzly bear
mounted throughout the house,
they're not
your typical tree-hugging environmentalists, either.
You know you're
a red neck if your taxidermy bill
is a lot larger
than your mortgage.
Ha ha ha!
Maybe I fit in.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Lisa and Bob Parr built their dream home
in Wise County, Texas,
not far from Fort Worth in the Barnett Shale.
But now, Lisa Parr had
fracking chemicals in her lungs.
Where our house is,
there's 21 wells
that is around us.
So, pretty much,
it doesn't matter
what wind direction
we have,
it's blowing it
to our house.
I come home,
I have a dead chicken.
The dog's laying
in the yard, I can't get her head up.
My daughter looks up,
her rash is all over her face.
She has a nosebleed.
Bob has a nosebleed.
Burning throat,
burning eyes.
I had a rash.
It covered my scalp.
It went through
my entire body,
literally to the bottoms
of my feet.
My throat would start
swelling.
I started gasping
for air.
I started stuttering.
I started stumbling.
My face drew up
on my left side
like I had Bell Palsy.
They have detected,
uh...
numerous chemicals
in my body tissues.
The hydrogen chloric
acid is what they use before they frack,
but that was
the number-one thing in my lungs.
LISA PARR, VOICE-OVER:
My internal specialist told me--
[Clears throat]
that if we didn't...
move...
that we would spend
more time and money
in hospitalization,
chemotherapy,
and morticians.
I moved here. I married
this wonderful man.
[Clears throat]
And...
I cannot ask him
to leave his house.
I can't do it.
But now we've been
forced to because we're all sick.
And they found it
in our blood and in our organs,
and we have to go
through treatment.
And I want to find a way
to come back home.
My daughter has spent most
of her time with me
in the past year picking me
up off the floor.
That's her drawing.
She had just found out
when she drew this
that we were going to have
to move out of our house.
For two weeks, she cried all
the way to school, but now she's adjusting really well.
This is the hardhats.
FOX: Yeah.
Ha ha ha!
It says, "Clean
Ure Mess! Okay?"
And they say "Okay?"
with a question mark.
Thought that was really weird
coming from a second-grader, like, "Okay?"
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
While Lisa Parr's daughter was making drawings
asking the gas companies
to clean up their mess,
the gas industry was making
their own drawings--
not by children, for children--
sponsoring schools
and science fairs
and sending out coloring books
featuring "Talisman Terry,
the Friendly Fracosaurus,"
or a dog mascot
for Chesapeake Energy,
dedicating several children's
books to Calvin Tillman's library in Dish.
CALVIN TILLMAN: This is
from Atlas Pipeline.
This is from Devon Energy.
Another one from Devon.
There's the Atlas Pipeline.
"To the children of Dish
in honor of Mayor Calvin Tillman from the Atlas Pipeline, Texas."
FOX: So, as far
as the situation in Barnett Shale
that I've witnessed,
all these families who are in deep trouble medically--
Move. Move.
They need to move.
Different people have
different tolerance levels.
If people are getting sick,
they need to take
the losses financially
and get out of where they are.
They--I mean,
your personal health is more important than anything else.
Do you say that
to 65% of Pennsylvania, 50% of New York--
No, I'd say fight
where you can fight and make a difference,
but if I had kids with
health issues because they're living in the Barnett Shale,
or if I had health issues
living in the Barnett Shale, I'd move.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
The gas industry hit back,
mounting a smear campaign
against Al Armendariz,
Calvin Tillman,
and openly challenging Lisa Parr in the media.
But possibly the most
extreme reaction was to Steve and Shyla Lipsky.
Range Resources filed
a $4 million defamation lawsuit against the Lipsky family,
a slap suit meant
to keep them quiet.
The gas industry
had defended many lawsuits extremely aggressively,
but this was the first time
that I knew about
that they were actually taking
a family to court.
But behind closed doors,
the gas industry's strategy was even uglier.
At a Texas Oil & Gas
industry conference,
reporters made tape recordings
of gas-industry strategy,
recording several brainstorming
and tactic-sharing conversations.
[Man on tape]
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Psychological operations are employed in a war zone
to destabilize a population
from insurgency against an invading army.
PSYOPS were used
by the American military in Vietnam, in Iraq.
And here the gas industry was,
employing former PSYOPS experts
to actually write local laws
and develop techniques to be used against landowners
fighting the gas industry
in Texas and in Pennsylvania.
And Chesapeake had its own plan,
characterizing people fighting
the gas industry as insurgents.
MICHAEL D. KEHS, VOICE-OVER:
Chesapeake has got nearly 100 people
whose sole jobs are to deal
with community relations.
We have got people
going out and speaking in the community every night.
Basically, my entire career
has been dealing with audiences at chemical risk.
In almost every instance
where I've gone up against
a strong activist insurgency,
it does not matter
what the facts are
because the facts stand in
the way of your ability to raise funds.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The gas
industry was trading notes on their war effort.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Counterinsurgency,
strategies for managing outrage.
destabilization of communities.
These are terms of war,
but like the PowerPoint says,
you can't dramatically
change global energy
without ruffling some feathers.
It didn't seem to matter that
the Defense Department had ruled
that it was illegal
for the military to use PSYOPS techniques against Americans.
And, of course,
the next logical step
would be to start looking
for some terrorists.
Tom Ridge, former governor
of Pennsylvania
and the former and first
head of the Department of Homeland Security,
appointed right after
9/11, signs on to be the Chief Spokesman
for the Marcellus Shale
Coalition, an industry group
that fights environmental
regulation of gas drilling.
The very next month,
the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security
begins issuing briefs that lists
anti-fracking protest groups
as "possible eco-terrorists."
The bulletin said
that environmental extremism
trending towards eco-terrorism
and criminality
was a rising threat to
the security of Pennsylvania.
Virginia Cody, a retired
Air Force officer living near Dimock,
was forwarded
the August 30th bulletin.
She then posted it
on a gas drilling listserv.
When she did that,
unbelievably,
Pennsylvania Homeland Security
Chief James Powers wrote her
an email, assuming that she was
a pro-gas-drilling stakeholder,
actually indicated that
the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security
had communication
with pro-drilling groups like the Marcellus Shale Coalition.
PA Homeland Security
was showing up at protests,
spying on gas drilling
activists,
but they weren't only
sending the information to law enforcement;
they were sending it
to the gas industry.
Lisa Baker, my state senator,
a Republican,
held hearings
into the misconduct.
SENATOR BAKER: Raise
your right hand for me. We're going to swear in.
For the first time
in my life, I do not feel secure in my home.
I worry that what I say
on the phone is being recorded.
I wonder if my emails
are still being monitored.
Mr. Powers, I have not
had one person come forward
and say they believe
these bulletins were vital.
The information
that's sought by
the local municipalities
was situation awareness.
Situational awareness.
It was just
situational awareness.
It was just
about situational awareness.
FEMALE SENATOR:
None of it really makes any sense to me at all,
that we would go monitor
private citizens and private groups
and they're not
a threat to us, is what you were just saying.
"It's just for
awareness." It makes absolutely no sense.
And it does make me
think, "Where are we living?"
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
As it turned out, the state of Pennsylvania had a contract
with a group called
the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response.
A quick web search
turned up their website,
which featured pictures
of a scary owl,
an Israeli SWAT Team member,
and a strange blue hand
playing chess.
MALE SENATOR:
So what is your payroll?
What is your
employee payroll?
Is it 3?
Is it a hundred?
What is it?
I'm just curious.
It's more than 3 and it's
less than a hundred.
You know, you're
very creepy.
No, no.
You're very scary.
[Laughter]
No, I'm trying to be honest with you.
I don't know
if you're bi-polar or you have issues.
I mean, you're a very
scary individual. BAKER: Senator Ferlo,
and this is not for us--
OK, but let me ask a specific question.
to make comments about
individuals personally.
I have 12 staff
people. I'm just asking a question.
How many employees
do you have?
We have
about 15 employees...
and that doesn't include
the 70-some additional
employees that--
Operatives, or whatever
you call them, or--
People who, uh...
Because this is just
too unbelievable,
too surreal,
this hearing.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
After the hearings, James Powers resigned,
but there were
no indictments, no charges,
no real investigation of the
recipients of these Pennsylvania intelligence bulletins,
including Tom Ridge's
Marcellus Shale Coalition.
The trust barrier
had been broken.
And, that moment on,
none of us knew
if our names appeared on lists
of possible terrorists
somewhere in a strange
blue filing cabinet,
and two years of hard-fought
progress in Pennsylvania was about to unravel.
FOX-VOICE-OVER:
When the water line in Dimock was announced,
it had a ripple effect
across the state.
Towns and municipalities drafted
ordinances to ban drilling
outright at the local level,
including the entire city of Pittsburgh.
850,000 people,
and I'm one of them,
drink water out of
the Monongahela River.
When it tastes funny,
I get nervous,
and it tastes funny.
Really, this is about
a civil rights issue.
This is about
our inalienable rights.
I said, "Can you regulate
my inalienable rights
"that are embodied in
the Pennsylvania Constitution
"to clean air, clean water,
and the preservation
"of the natural environment
for generations,
"for now, and for
generations to come?
Can you regulate
those rights away?" "No."
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
But an election was underway, and the leading candidate,
Tom Corbett, had accepted
$1.6 million in campaign contributions
from the gas industry and was
running on a drilling platform.
With the election just weeks
away, the gas companies went all-in in Dimock,
attacking the water line
and the families.
Full-page ads
in local newspapers,
a YouTube video campaign
declaring Dimock water safe...
I'd like to show you
how dangerous this Dimock water is.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Threats to
pull out jobs in rural areas.
They even riled up a start-up
group called Enough Already,
saying that the water line
was going to come from taxpayer money.
You want to fire up a crowd?
Tell them they're going to pay higher taxes.
Their first meeting, held
at the Elk Lake School,
had a gas well being drilled
right behind the football field.
MAN: We're not here
for any confrontations.
Cabot is trying to pit
neighbor against neighbor with this whole deal,
and what it's doing is it's
destroying the community.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Their main
speaker, a "oil and gas expert" employed by Cabot.
MAN: I really would like
to give a bit of a primer,
a "Petroleum Engineering 101."
For those of you that read
the Bible, you will remember Noah's Ark.
It was caulked by bitumen
that had seeped to the surface
and biogenic gas,
which is generated from, uh,
I would say, neo--uh--
Neo--uh--ha ha ha!
[Clicks tongue]
What is water?
Casing needs to be set
to protect fresh water,
and that's not the term,
'cause "fresh water" is another definition that we don't have
unless it comes out
of this bottle.
Cheers, cla--
or cheers, group. Mmm.
Has anybody ever here
seen a Amish buggy?
Concluding thoughts,
and, yes, I will shut up...
FOX, VOICE-OVER: In the end,
he said absolutely nothing
about what actually happened
to contaminate the aquifer.
It was a dog-and-pony show
hiding behind a smokescreen inside a hall of mirrors.
CABOT EXPERT:
So, for those of you that are looking for jobs--
not me because I'm too old--
you're looking at an industry
that's going to be around here
for a hundred years.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Then it happened.
Republican Attorney General
Tom Corbett
was elected Governor
of Pennsylvania.
Cue the saddest newscaster
in history.
Well, it turns out there will
not be a pipeline connecting
Dimock, Pennsylvania to the
Montrose Municipal Water System.
That word comes
from the PA Department of Environmental Protection,
which has dropped its plan
to force Cabot Oil & Gas
to pay for the nearly
$12 million project.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Dimock
residents and Lance Simmens had fought hard for a policy
that should have been
a precedent for the rest of the state:
Contaminate a township's water,
and you're going to have
to pay for permanent public replacement.
FOX: Was it your hope
that would have become
a standard?
Absolutely.
I thought
that it would have
a long-lasting
and pervasive effect.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Unfortunately,
didn't work out that way.
Governor Ed Rendell and
John Hanger of the Department of Environmental Protection
made a deal, negotiating
without the participation of the Dimock families.
Cabot Oil & Gas would pay
each of the residents twice the value of their homes.
In other words, the state
and the gas companies
made a deal to tell
the people of Dimock to move.
Not surprisingly, the families
rejected the compromise.
The water line
would be canceled;
no precedent for water
replacement would be set.
FOX: So you're upset with
the way the situation was handled?
I am not happy with
the fact that that water line was not built.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
During the same period of time,
3 of Ed Rendell's top aides,
including his
Executive Deputy Chief
of Staff, went to work
for the gas industry.
DEP Secretary John Hanger joined
a law firm and lobbying
organization that's a member
of the Marcellus Shale
Coalition and represents
Pennsylvania's Independent Oil
and Gas Association.
And Governor Ed Rendell himself
joined a private equity firm
with interests in
the natural gas industry,
going on to advocate publicly
for drilling without disclosing his industry ties.
All this switching sides led
the public accountability initiative to issue a report,
concluded that the lines between
government and industry had been blurred to a corrupting effect
and that the public bodies
charged with regulating industry
instead had become
captured by it.
SIMMENS: You know,
the revolving door
between regulators
and the regulated industries
is as old
as bureaucracy itself.
I would never
underestimate the power
to make changes
in a system that is
as influenced as it is
by the power of money.
Does that mean that I
could never--I would never have foreseen
forces upending it,
delaying it, canceling it?
Nope, I've come to accept that
as a fact of life in this...
dysfunctional political system
that is not only true
in Pennsylvania,
but, I think,
on a much larger scale
throughout the country.
Is it horribly
unsafe?
Is that what
this fracking is?
I do not know of one well,
one--they always say
it contaminates the aquifer.
I've never seen that happen.
I'm sure there are
people, though, who would say, "I have.
And it's been on my land
and I've seen the toxicity."
[Wooden turkey call squeaking]
[Squeaking stops]
[Squeaking resumes]
[Squeaking stops]
[Squeak]
[Squeaking resumes]
[Distant thunder]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Now,
I'm not much of a hunter-- you could probably tell--
but it was disappointing
to both Jeremiah and I
that we found a lot more
gas wells than turkeys.
JEREMIAH:
This is where we are. We are right here.
This, literally, is
the top of the ridge.
The elevation right here
is about 2,300 feet.
FOX: So they just
took the top?
Yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: One of the
first things that Tom Corbett did entering office
was to repeal the drilling
moratorium on state lands and state forests.
JEREMIAH:
Who needed those damn trees anyway?
This is only
a tiny taste of what's to come.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
In Pennsylvania, you live in the woods
just as much as you live
in your house.
Jeremiah and the Gee family...
they were getting
drilled on both.
JEREMIAH: Look at that one.
That's my house right there. Ha ha ha!
They literally moved
that thing as close as they possibly could
to our property line.
We were told they were
going to put this well
quite a bit farther away,
like a thousand feet farther away than they did.
I took some shots of Ada,
see, like that one,
like, "I can dig
a hole, too."
Hey. How you doing?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: About 200 feet
from Jeremiah's mother's window,
a 6-well horizontal pad.
JEREMIAH: You know,
they have all that technology and they can work 24/7 drilling,
but, doggone it,
they can't stop water from going downhill
from up into--
from that earth...
FOX: Right.
Into that pond.
You just can't do it.
And here's the
"chocolate milk"-type water
that is coming off
of the well pad.
May 2, 2011.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Contaminants were running
off the site onto his property
and killing his family's pond,
and under the ground,
methane had migrated into their water well.
JEREMIAH: Holy cow.
Today's date is April 6, 2011.
You know I'll get
a phone call in a few minutes,
asking why I was
up here with a guy with a camera.
We were told,
point-blank, that
the word "freshwater"
does not mean what you think it means.
"Freshwater" means
"fresh to this site."
Every bit of water
that will be coming here
and used
in the frack tanks
has already been used
at a different site,
therefore,
it's "fresh" to us.
So my question was,
"Could we just call it fresh enough water?"
And the answer was,
"Yes."
I also asked,
point-blank, "Does it have chemicals in it?"
And the answer was,
"Yes."
We have methane
in our water already
that we did not have
before.
Our pre-drill test
proved that our water
was pristine beyond
anybody's standards.
They will tell you
point blank there is no way
that frack fluid
will migrate. Right.
And yet other
hydrogeologists, who are not
on the gas company's
payroll, will tell you
it's not a question
of if it can migrate;
it's a question of when
it will migrate.
Every single one
of these gas-well guys that's come here
has said,
"Wow, you guys have a really nice place."
And we say,
"Thank you,
but you mean we had a really nice place."
The realtor told us
it's worth zero dollars and zero cents.
Tell me about
these water tanks. So...
on the day
that Shell found out,
they instantly brought
these water buffaloes.
This is what we call
"blue water."
I mean, that's my term
for it--"blue water." It's blue.
Because it's blue. Ha!
We don't drink it.
Right.
We drink bottled water.
We can't use it
for our animals 'cause it--
I don't trust this.
I don't know what this is.
The dogs have been
drinking Nestle brand water.
It says "Pure Life."
"Enhanced with minerals
for taste," and then
there are these happy
stick-figure people here
who are about to get
swept away by a tsunami of "Pure Life." Ha ha!
Well, I was thinking
about the 5 cents in Oregon.
If I could get those
empty water bottles 3,000 miles away,
I could get 5 cents out
of each one of those.
They don't ask
for those bottles back.
This is what
the chickens drink now.
I don't know any other chickens
in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, that drink bottled water.
Cluck, cluck, cluck.
Anybody want to say hi?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: After
the Gee family reported they could light their water on fire,
Shell tried several times
to squeeze, or fix the cement job.
All the while, the gas industry
in public continued
to deny any instances
of water contamination.
This just didn't make sense.
Everywhere I had gone, whether
it was Texas or PA
or Colorado, there were
the same problems.
I'd seen all this on the
surface, but what was actually happening under the ground?
Please welcome Tom Ridge.
You are the former Governor
of the great State
of Pennsylvania,
the Keystone State,
first Secretary of Homeland Security.
Now, you're a lobbyist for
the natural gas industry.
We've all seen the footage
of flaming water.
Whoa!
Is that really
happening to people's water supply, sir?
Out here is the rock.
We're looking in
a cross section of a well
that's being drilled
because, ultimately,
you want your gas
to come up
the steel pipe.
That inch, right there,
this is cement.
And what you don't want
is for that cement to fail...
Mm-hmm.
or to be absent,
to crack, to corrode,
to crumble, to disappear.
If what's down there
can get into this annulus...
Right.
then it can migrate.
Yes, it is happening
to some water supplies,
and it has absolutely
nothing to do with hydraulic fracting.
Methane gas is
naturally occurring.
They've had methane gas--
I'm speaking as a governor-- in some of our water wells
in Pennsylvania long before
any wells, frack wells, were located next to them.
Those are phenomena that
are very well known,
for as long as we've
been drilling wells, encasing them.
Naturally occurring
methane gas often ends up in water wells,
but there has not been
a single proven instance
where it has been related
to hydraulic fracking.
So now the shallow gas goes
into an open annulus,
pressurizes the annulus,
gas migrates into an underground
source of drinking water,
somebody's water well.
In my field, there are only
3 things that are certain:
death, taxes, and fracture.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Meet Professor Tony Ingraffea--
professor of engineering
at Cornell;
a two-time winner of the
National Research Council Award
for rock mechanics research;
co-winner of a NASA Group
Achievement Award;
a former researcher for
Schlumberger, the number-one fracking company in the world,
and for the Gas
Research Institute;
proud Sicilian;
accomplished turkey hunter;
and in 2011, one of "TIME"
Magazine's People Who Mattered.
But I like to think of him
as the godfather of cement.
Hundreds of thousands of
on-shore wells and thousands of off-shore wells,
there's a probability
of maybe one in 20
that a cement job will
fail immediately.
FOX: One in 20?
One in 20.
So 5%.
5% of all wells
immediately will show
a failure of a cement job,
and there will be methane migration.
Because that means
that this annulus, the area
between the casing
and the rock,
is now open
from below to above.
You now have a migration
pathway so that anything that's down there
in the way of salts,
heavy metals,
other deleterious things
that were stored in the rock,
now have a pathway and
a vector and something to carry them upwards.
I'm using the round number
of a hundred thousand Marcellus wells... FOX: Right.
in Pennsylvania alone, OK?
Right.
If one out of 20 is going
to immediately show a cement failure,
now we're talking
5,000 wells.
If that one water well
is going bad, it means that aquifer--
as what happened in Dimock,
it's the one aquifer that was servicing all those water wells.
9 square miles.
Yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Professor Ingraffea was basically telling me
that a gas well is
a long, steel pipe surrounded by an inch of cement,
and that that cement
cracks often.
But there's one part
of a gas well that he didn't mention--the PR department.
So my job, and I do have
a paid job as a consultant with the industry,
is to make sure,
as Pennsylvania, that we take advantage of the resources.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
I needed to talk to an expert in that part of the operation.
Naomi Oreskes, author of
the book "Merchants of Doubt,"
traced disinformation campaigns
from big tobacco all the way up
to climate change.
If we say, you know,
"Oh, yes, oil and gas come out of people's
taps naturally,"
you know, a lot of people just don't know.
They think, "Oh, really?
Is that true? You know-- Oh, well, I have heard
"people say that
in Santa Barbara the tap water smells bad,
you know, so maybe
it's true." OK, now we have a debate, right?
An ordinary person
who doesn't know what to think doesn't need
to think that I'm right;
they just need to think that there's a debate,
because so long
as there's a debate, then there's an argument
for staving off
regulation.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: In the fifties,
Hill + Knowlton, PR firm,
designed the strategy to dispel
that nasty little rumor
that tobacco caused
lung cancer--
misinformation
and supporting bogus science
that would call into doubt
the legitimate science.
America's Natural Gas Alliance
hired Hill + Knowlton
in 2009 as their PR firm.
All of a sudden,
ads were everywhere.
They even bought
my name on Google.
Oh, so there it is,
so 60 years later, right,
we have the same PR firm
that actually invented--
John Hill was
the originator of this whole strategy,
so there they are, still
doing the same thing again 56 years later.
Wow. It's--
Wow. Ha ha!
It's depressing,
isn't it? Ha ha!
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Just like the tobacco industry had memos in their drawers
that said all along
that they knew that nicotine was addictive
and tobacco was harmful,
the gas industry also has memos
that show they've known
all along.
Some of them, in fact,
have been published.
Others fell off
"the back of a truck,"
and they'll show you
how they've been trying to solve it for decades
and how they have no way
of completely fixing
or preventing the problem.
Number One, from
Southwestern Energy.
The diagram clearly shows
that the gas well has
a cement barrier around the
sides of it that prevents gas
from lower layers migrating
upwards into aquifers.
But this isn't a PowerPoint
about drilling wells.
This is a PowerPoint about how
cement and casings fail
and allow gas or other
substances to migrate into aquifers.
It's one of their own documents
about how cement fails.
Number Two comes
from Schlumberger--
"Oilfield Review,"
published in 2003--
that showed that sustained
casing pressure,
i.e. cement failure, occurs
at alarming rates.
Their own documents showed
that cement and casings failed
in 5% of wells drilled
immediately upon drilling
and that the failure rate
increased over time;
that over a 30-year period,
50% of wells failed.
Number 3.
This report--leaked out of
a gas industry conference
from Archer,
a well services company--
shows enormous rates of leakage
in the Gulf of Mexico
and the North Sea, and
high rates of what they call
"uncontrolled discharge."
And this PowerPoint slide
from the Society
of Petroleum Engineers
shows that 1.8 million wells
exist in the world
and that 35% of them
are leaking.
It also states that
the industry plans to drill more wells in the next decade
than have been drilled in
the last hundred years.
Recent Pennsylvania
Department of Environmental Protection statistics
back up Schlumberger's
initial findings.
Well leakage was
between 6% and 8.9%
for newly installed wells--
gas migrating into aquifers.
The Pennsylvania Department
of Conservation and Natural Resources
predicts that there will
be 180,000 new gas wells drilled in Pennsylvania.
If 50% of them go bad
over 30 years,
that's 90,000
leaking gas wells.
It's safe to say
there's the potential
for contaminating
the entire state.
Can we ever predict
everything exactly? No.
But we're in much better shape
now than we were generations ago
of predicting probabilistically
the range of events that we expect to see.
Unconventional gas development--
it ain't your
grandmother's gas well.
Longer wells, higher pressures,
higher volumes of frack fluids,
more wells per pad.
We should expect higher risk,
higher accident rate,
and that's what we're seeing.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
For decades, they haven't been able to fix the problem.
There's no way to fix it;
just like tobacco,
they have a problem
that can't be solved.
Just as there's
no safe cigarette,
there's no safe drilling,
and they know it.
Kerosene, benzene,
urea, toluene.
How many of those can I
feed my toddler?
[Audience laughter]
'Cause it's
perfectly safe, right?
It's perfectly safe.
[Cheers and applause]
[Rumbling]
[Australian accent]
Right.
FOX: Oh, my God.
[Distant screaming sound]
FOX: And that's
the water well?
Right.
[All chuckle]
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
After drilling had taken place all around Cole Davies' farm,
methane from the coal seam
migrated into the source of his water well.
For 6 months, the pipe
that they pump water out
for cattle started screaming,
as if it had been tapped in
to a well of souls in hell.
[Screaming sounds continue]
FOX: Have you reported this
to the gas company that's around here?
Oh, yeah. They know
all about it.
What do they say?
They know very well all about it.
What do they say to you?
Oh, they just say that
they're not responsible.
Just a natural
occurrence within this area, they said.
Uh-huh.
[Crickets chirping]
[Screaming sound]
Have you had
enough there? [Chuckles]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Something
about Cole reminded me of American farmers--
soft-spoken, quiet.
He didn't dress up
for the interview,
had no interest whatsoever
in trying to impress us.
AUSTRALIAN MAN: If it's
damaging our water table in Australia,
you know, we're the driest
country in the world.
We've got this artesian
water table underneath us.
I think they're doing
huge risk to it.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Australia wasn't alone.
In April 2010,
the State Department,
under Secretary Hillary Clinton
and the Obama administration,
started the Global
Shale Gas Initiative,
charting shale plays
in over 30 countries
and pledging a government-
to-government engagement
to help develop shale gas
around the world.
So, in a matter
of months, this map
turned into this map.
So you know that now,
and to quote Calvin Tillman, mayor of Dish, Texas,
"Once you know, you can't
not know," right?
[Australian accent]
The first thing they--sorry, the second sentence they said
to me when they came through
that gate was, "If you don't let us come on here
"to search for gas, we will
force our way onto the land.
We will take you to court
and you'll lose."
And I'm just like,
"Pfff! Rightie-o. I'll see you in court."
Wrong group of people.
The people out here are tough, they're gritty.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: I interviewed
farmer after farmer,
rancher after rancher,
all across Australia.
Nobody wanted this,
and just like in the U.S.,
people were being told to move.
[Australian accent]
They've vowed to literally lock the gate
to the big multi-nationals
and are prepared to be arrested if necessary.
[Australian accent]
This is going to be the biggest single ecological impact
that I think we will have seen--
been seen in 150 years.
FOX: And all this happening
is the dawn of renewable energy technology, right?
Well, I describe it
as the last gasp of the fossil fuel era.
And as it goes, it lashes out
and destroys whole regions.
What's really at stake here,
apart from the environment,
and some really strong
environmental values,
is governance itself.
Democratic governance
is at stake here.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
But it wasn't just Australia that was rebelling.
Protests against shale gas
and fracking broke out across Europe--
in the U.K., in Bulgaria
and Romania,
in the south
of France, in Canada...
[South African
protestors chanting]
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
And a country founded on protests--South Africa--
where a huge area of land,
the Karoo, was leased out to Shell.
In America, hundreds
of thousands of letters
and emails, thousands
of citizens testifying
at EPA hearings, DOE hearings,
DEC hearings, DRBC hearings.
And Sean and Yoko went
on "Jimmy Fallon" and sang about it on national TV.
Don't frack my mother
Don't frack me!
Don't frack me!
BOTH: Please
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
The anti-fracking movement had arrived...
SEAN LENNON AND JIMMY FALLON:
Don't frack my mother
[Cheers and applause]
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
And we had a hammer.
The good and bad
are all tangled up in this world,
and you almost
laugh.
You never know what's
going to happen,
and I am convinced
we are gonna stop
this frackin'.
[Cheers and applause]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: But every time
you looked up, fracking was spreading someplace new,
even to Tinsel Town.
Not many people know this,
but there's a thousand-acre
oil field in the center of Los Angeles.
But when oil prices went up
and gas prices went up,
the Baldwin Hills oil field
became viable again.
Fracking rigs for oil were right
in the middle of L.A.
FOX: Where are we,
exactly?
MAN: Baldwin Hills.
Baldwin Hills.
We're smack in the middle
of Los Angeles.
Hollywood's that way,
Beverly Hills is that way.
Venice is behind us.
Right.
And there's talking
about fracking here?
They already are
fracking here.
On the fault line?
All through the fault line.
In fact, in one
of their original
injection wells, which is
the way they're doing it--
There's an
injection well here? Yeah.
In the middle
of L.A.? Oh, yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Fracking the fault line in L.A. sounded more
like a Hollywood plotline
than reality.
That kind of thing just didn't
happen in California.
It happened in places
like Arkansas.
CYNTHIA McFADDEN: In Arkansas,
some geologists think
the disposal of wastewater
from fracking may be leading
to an incredible uptick
in earthquakes,
more than 1,100
since September.
What happens.
[Chuckles]
This is what I think is
happening in this state.
And when something
goes on and the house starts rocking,
then you'll see it
start moving.
Every few minutes, we were
having another quake,
another quake,
another quake.
WOMAN:
You see all this? FOX: Mm-hmm.
And these are all
active wells.
Now, if I
zoom in here on Greenbrier...
Right.
all of these little
orange dots...
Right.
are earthquakes.
This house was literally
just rocking.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Most of the quakes were small, micro-quakes.
FOX: And how often
does this happen? Usually...
Every day.
Every day.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
But then a 4.7 put cracks
in the walls of
the local high school,
popularizing iPhone's
earthquake app
with high-schoolers
and knocked the
earthquake lady's husband out of his La-Z-Boy.
And he's a big man.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Dirk DeTurck,
a Vietnam veteran,
and his sons' friends,
who are Iraq War veterans,
are having PTSD flashbacks
from the drilling
and earthquakes.
He'd been obsessively
tracking earthquakes on a notepad at home.
DeTURCK:
October up till December.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Looked like he hadn't played pool in months.
DeTURCK:
There's, like, 630
or something like that,
in here, I believe.
[Voice cracking]
And these guys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan...
"Sorry if you made it
through that.
Good luck in
your neighborhood."
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
But it wasn't just in Arkansas.
Earthquakes near fracking
and wastewater injection wells
were happening in Ohio,
Oklahoma, Texas.
This is the magnitude-4
earthquake
which occurred very close
to Youngstown, Ohio.
TV NEWSWOMAN:
Before March, there had not been a recorded earthquake.
Since then, there have been 11.
MAN: These earthquakes
were sitting there, waiting to happen.
We have triggered
these earthquakes.
TV NEWSWOMAN: Armbruster
believes the trigger was this Youngstown well
that disposes
of contaminated water.
The water is a by-product of oil
and natural gas extraction
called "fracking."
The disposal well pumps
thousands of gallons of the waste
into rock a mile or more below.
Armbruster says the fluid
may have made its way
into an earthquake fault line.
BRITISH NEWSMAN:
Exploration digging for shale gas deep
in the rocks of Lancashire
has been suspended
after two earthquakes
in two months.
PAINE:
Just behind that truck
are some of the wealthiest
neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
That's Santa Monica,
Beverly Hills, Bel Air,
West L.A.--it's all,
like, there.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: FEMA did
a study of what a 7.2 earthquake
would do to Los Angeles
along the Newport-Inglewood fault line:
thousands of projected
casualties,
trillions of dollars of damage,
comprehensive damage
to buildings,
bridges, and infrastructure.
But the thousand-acre
oil field in Los Angeles
is far from California's
biggest emerging problem...
so I'm going to show you
a little bit here on the map
where most of the produce is
created in California--
the Central Valley,
central California's
agricultural basin.
Dependent on irrigation,
it's the stuff
of American lore--"Land's End,"
the promise of America.
The Central Valley is
over the biggest shale play in the west, the Monterey Shale.
That could mean hundreds of
thousands of oil and gas wells up and down California.
But there's one other thing
that's in American mythology
and American life
that we know really well--
California earthquakes--
and the San Andreas Fault,
probably the most famous fault line in the world,
runs straight through
the Monterey Shale.
I was starting to add it up...
worldwide energy,
choices about where
it was going to come from.
Flying over the United States
on my way home,
seeing the pockmarks of wells
drilled all across
the Rockies...
brought the choices
into high relief,
right out the window
of a commercial flight.
This is what
it really looks like.
July 1st, the year was up...
and Governor Andrew Cuomo
let the moratorium
on drilling and fracking
in New York State expire.
The decision in my backyard
was now in the hands
of Governor Cuomo
and President Obama.
Governor Cuomo announces
that he's going to let science,
not emotion, decide his policy
on hydrofracking.
In the fall of 2011,
he got both--mounting protests across New York
and 67,000 public comments
on their Environmental Impact Statement.
But I was about to find out
that this was much bigger than my backyard.
That fall, Hurricane Irene came
storming up the East Coast.
It was the first time
that I could remember a hurricane
hitting upstate New York
and central Pennsylvania.
The stream swelled to 9 feet
above its normal level.
We lost lots of trees,
but it was nothing
compared to what happened
in upstate New York.
Whole towns washed away.
Hundred-year-old bridges washed
away in the blink of an eye.
A freak storm supercharged
by warming temperatures,
two words on everyone's mind--
climate change.
MAN: I don't think
we live in times
that are particularly kind
to objective information.
Well, the hypothesis here is
shale gas is better for global warming
than other fossil fuels and it's
a good transitional fuel.
So we tested that,
and the answer is, well, no, it's not.
The White House has
clearly bought into this idea
that natural gas is part
of the solution
to moving us gradually
off of fossil fuels.
I don't think they did that
with good science.
We estimate
that somewhere between
3.6% and 7.9% of the total
amount of gas produced
over the lifetime of
a well is emitted to the atmosphere as methane.
There's a continual leakage at
the well head, there's leakage
from the storage
and processing facilities,
purposeful venting,
also accidental leaks.
They throw it into
the pipeline systems and the distribution systems
and storage systems--
there's leakage in all of those.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Global warming is caused by greenhouse gases
emitted from
fossil fuel burning.
When you burn coal,
you get a lot of CO2.
When you burn natural gas,
you get about half as much,
but methane is the second-most
important greenhouse gas,
and it's 105 times more potent
at trapping heat in
the short 20-year timeframe.
Bob Howarth's research shows
when you add up the methane
escaping into the atmosphere,
the fugitive emissions,
and the CO2 from fracked gas,
it makes it the worst fuel
for global warming.
There's only one planet,
you know.
We're doing the experiment
now of how global warming is going to work.
We're sitting in this bowl,
you know, this--we're down here
at the bottom, and the climate
goes back and forth
within some regime,
year by year.
The worry is that,
in warming, it'll switch up
and go over into some
other bowl over here,
and you'll have a dramatically
different planet and that,
once you've switched
from this stable regime
over to there, there's
no easy way to get back.
You don't suddenly start
reducing your greenhouse gas emissions
and go back up
over this hill, back to the way things used to be.
You're over there,
in a new universe.
If you believe that we might be
approaching a tipping point
over the next couple
of decades, then you need to be really careful
about pumping methane--that's
such a potent greenhouse gas
in the short timeframe--
into the atmosphere.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Frank Finan,
a woodworker near Dimock,
surrounded by gas wells,
bought a FLIR camera--
a camera that can see methane
undetectable to the naked eye.
FOX: When I heard that
for the first time, I said, "Who is this guy?
He bought a FLIR camera?
Is he out of his mind?"
Yeah, I was.
I was out of my mind. [Clears throat]
Things like this
will put you out of your mind.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: He started
to discover what Bob Howarth had calculated--
methane exploding into the air
in huge clouds
out of fracking sites.
FRANK FINAN: And then
it occurred to me it was like Disneyland
compared just to
the world, and now it's not anymore.
For some people,
it still is.
For some people,
we're just a story in the news.
[Scoffs]
You know, I'm a woodworker.
Why does a woodworker
have all this equipment?
So don't tell me
this is not your job. FOX: Yeah.
Step out of your box.
Go where you've never
been before.
Yeah.
The times have changed.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: One night,
I went out with him,
but this time, we didn't need
the FLIR camera.
[Siren blaring]
[Gas hissing]
FINAN: Yeah,
going in the air.
FOX: Huh?
I just don't believe it.
Look through
your window on this side.
It's something,
isn't it?
Whoa! That one--
did you see that one? It just went out.
Shooting methane
up in the air.
[Hissing continues]
MAN: Oh, dude, it's right
behind somebody's house.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: This is
what Bob was talking about...
methane venting straight up
into the atmosphere.
There had to be a better way.
So we did a study looking
at the possibility of powering the entire world
for all purposes
with clean, renewable energy.
And among those that
we considered beside--
was wind, concentrated
solar power,
solar photovoltaics,
geothermal power,
hydroelectric power,
tidal power, and wave power.
And we find that
there's enough wind power in fast wind locations
to power the world
5 to 10 times over.
FOX: Just the wind?
Just the wind.
The red is--the more red
it is, the faster the wind speed.
Wow.
And the more blue, the slower, so you can see
the Great Plains
of the U.S. has a lot of wind resource.
And offshore, the East Coast
has a huge amount of resource, plus it's shallow.
And then we looked at
can we match power demand, or supply with demand,
and found that by bundling
resources together--
because the wind doesn't
always blow and the sun doesn't always shine,
but it turns out, based
on physical laws of nature,
when the wind is not
blowing, the sun is often shining.
And if you take those
two resources and then use
hydroelectric to fill in
the gaps between them,
you can match almost
all supply with demand...
Uh-huh.
in places that have reasonable hydroelectric resources.
FOX: We don't need
to drill for natural gas is what you're saying?
No, we don't need--
there's no need
to drill for gas,
for coal, for oil.
We have sufficient
resources that are clean and renewable.
It's not necessary.
Natural gas is just
not necessary
in solving this problem.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
It occurred to me that looking at the root of the problem,
I was going to have to try
to investigate something that no one wanted to talk about.
I called all 500-and-change
members of Congress.
15 people answered the call.
We have no energy policy
in the United States
to take us out of
our energy predicament.
What we do in this country,
unfortunately, is lurch
from one golden dream
to another.
So, right now, it looks,
in so many people's minds
on Capitol Hill,
"Well, natural gas.
Oh, that's what we've been
looking for," you know,
"Why didn't we think
of this before?"
All that's getting
across is this new,
large reserve that's going
to be so easy to tap.
The oil companies don't--
on some of these matters, don't even need to lobby.
FOX: Right.
Because it's just...
not questioned.
FOX: ...interested
in hearing about
is the influence of oil
and gas on Congress. Oh, yeah.
Influence? Heh!
Try "ownership." Ha ha ha! Really?
Would you care
to elaborate?
Have we started yet
already? We have started.
Oh, OK. Sorry.
I was just chatting.
In Washington,
I have seen...
committee meeting
after committee meeting
where a great many members
just read the same talking points
that are exactly
the same thing that the industry witnesses are saying.
FOX: People are out there
battling for their homes,
and they're trying
to make their case here in Washington
for the Safe Drinking
Water Act, for the Clean Water Act,
for the Clean Air Act,
the Super Fund Law.
Essentially, they have
a lesser voice, is that what you're saying,
on Capitol Hill,
than the corporations?
I'm saying that corporations
have extraordinary influence in Washington,
more than ever,
and that influence
has been propelled by two
Supreme Court decisions:
"Buckley vs. Valeo,"
and the Citizens United case.
That has given corporations
the chance to influence
elections of members
of Congress directly.
With the new majority
that is here,
is that their decisions
have been informed.
It doesn't have to be
that the oil and gas people
are sitting in the audience
or have been visiting.
The mind is set.
I think that's the concern,
is about whether or not
contributions are
influencing public policy
and where they kind of
disconnect selected officials from common sense.
There have been periods
of our history
when our political system has
been entirely controlled
by a tiny economic elite
who really just run the country for their own benefit.
Exxon could write a check--
I'm not saying they would--
for a billion dollars
if they wanted to.
There's no limit.
And there's no reporting.
They can do that without
the same disclosures
that are required
for other contributors,
and they can do that
in a way that gives you
little opportunity to be
able to defend yourself. FOX: Mm-hmm.
That puts, I think,
all of us at risk.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: ExxonMobil
didn't write a billion-dollar check in one election,
but the fossil fuel industries
combined contributed $150 million
to the 2012 election,
and Common Cause tracked lobbying expenditures--
$747 million to gain and keep
the exemption to the Safe
Drinking Water Act, known as
"the Halliburton loophole
for hydraulic fracturing."
Considering that's
just one election and one exemption to one law,
a billion dollars is
actually the low end.
OK, we got it.
Government's bought off.
Time to go home.
Thank you. Roll credits.
It just didn't seem that simple.
There had to be something else
going on under the surface that I couldn't see.
The price of gas in Asia
right now, depending
on the contract,
can be as much as $16,
whereas it's $2.50 here.
So, if you're in the business
to extract hydrocarbons,
you're going to look for
the customer that's going to pay you the most money.
And that is most decidedly Asia
at the moment, and Europe.
Europe's paying about, what,
$9.50, $10, something like that.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
As of December 5, 2012,
the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission
had received over
20 applications to build
liquefied natural gas ports
to ship American gas overseas.
The EIA--Energy Information
Administration--reported that, as a result of export,
domestic natural gas prices
would rise by more than 50%,
and that developing
20 LNG ports--
at costs of billions
of dollars each--
made fracking
the U.S. at a large scale a foregone conclusion.
And despite the nationwide shift
towards exporting gas,
the DOE refused to look at
environmental impacts from LNG.
FOX: So what is
happening here?
Well, I think there's
a longer-term thing going on with this.
I personally think
that this is tied to crude oil prices.
This populist argument
that industries used about, you know,
"American gas, by Americans,
for Americans,"
while, in the background,
they're working very hard
to be able to export this gas
out to grow other economies.
It doesn't really play with
the, you know, that populist argument that's been so--
that's worked
so well in this current political environment.
But, you know, again,
is that what we want?
And if we begin to export,
the price of gas is going to move up.
I mean, international
pricing pressures are just going to dictate
that the domestic price
is going to go up.
And wouldn't it be great
for industry
if they get us to be much more
dependent upon natural gas,
and then suddenly
the gas price starts rising?
To me, that's a classic
consumer squeeze,
and we will have done it
to ourselves
and put ourselves
right back in the same boat
that we're in
with crude oil right now.
We'll be much more dependent
upon natural gas, and it will no longer be cheap.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Thousands of miles of pipelines
proposed to connect
shale plays to LNG ports.
Thousands of miles
to connect shale plays
to natural gas-fired
power plants.
WOMAN: Now, what's the...
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Pennsylvania's
woods crisscrossed,
fragmented with clear-cut
swaths of pipeline
that could never be
built upon.
Well these trees
have been here forever, you know?
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Meanwhile, the water buffalo was becoming
the fastest-growing
species in the state.
Duke University released a study
that showed that you were
17 times more likely to have
elevated levels of methane
in your water if you were within
3,000 feet of a gas well.
5,000 environmental violations
across the state,
and in one county, Bradford,
close to a hundred reported
cases of water contamination
in the first year of drilling.
That fall, everyone was moving.
TV NEWSWOMAN:
That's part of the reason why the Hallowich family
that lives about 600 yards from
the fire scene this morning wants to move.
Out of frustration,
they carved the words "GAS LAND" in their yard.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Jeremiah Gee's family moved.
All of Jeremiah's meticulous
documentation sealed away,
the way that Shell had
destroyed 4 generations of being on the same land.
If you ask the family,
they're not allowed to tell you.
Lisa Parr--moved;
dozens of other families--
pushed out;
their court cases settled,
their stories sealed away,
non-disclosure agreements
keeping them silent.
When he was going
into radio silence, Jeremiah sent me a note.
It said, "Matthew 6:20."
I looked it up.
"Do not store for yourselves
treasure on earth.
"Store up for yourselves
treasures in heaven,
"where moths and rust
do not corrupt
"and where thieves do not
break in and steal,
for where your treasure is,
there your heart will be also."
As a storyteller,
there was something inhuman
about forcing people
into silence.
If you take away a person's
home, their connection to where they live,
and you take away their ability
to tell their story,
seems to me you've taken away
two of the most fundamental
things about who they are.
And there was one other person
that was being forced out.
[Vacuum cleaner humming]
Calvin and Tiffiney had
to make a painful decision.
With Clay's asthma
and Josh's nosebleeds, and with Calvin knowing full well--
from the air-monitoring stations
that he had fought to get installed--
exactly what was in
the air in Dish,
they decided
to pick up and leave.
You know things are bad when
the mayor moves out of town.
TILLMAN: This won't do me
any good anymore.
No more free Dish Network.
When we signed up, we're going
to get cable installed,
and it reminded me how much
that stuff actually costs,
so I'm going to miss
free Dish Network.
So these people are
coming out here, spending their life savings on a house,
and then you're stuck.
Nothing you can do.
This is the view where you have
to ask yourself, "My God,
would I really want that
in my backyard?"
Because it's in
this guy's backyard.
He's in litigation with them.
You know, they ruined this guy.
His horses started having
health problems,
started dying, started
having miscarriages;
started having
neurological problems.
Strangely enough,
there's a bunch of neurotoxins in the air.
Funny how that works,
isn't it?
This guy had his house for sale
for years, couldn't sell it.
These people got their house
on the market; they're not going to be able to sell it.
This guy lost
a hundred thousand dollars in property value in his house.
About half of the people
that are on this road right now
just filed suit
against those companies,
so about every other
house, you could say.
I hope that these people...
get enough money
out of their suit
that they can move out of here.
They come in here and they
just got 3 pipelines going
across here, going
in all different directions,
and it's just completely
destroyed this guy's property.
Realistically could have been
a multi-millionaire.
That's just gone.
Just absolutely gone.
So, that house right there,
that 3-story house,
that's my old house.
It's been almost a week.
After we moved out, I drove back
by the house and, you know,
at that point, I knew that,
you know, it's really starting to sink in that this is real
and that...you know,
I'm out of here.
I'm not going
to live here anymore.
You don't know
what this is all about.
You don't know how it feels to
be run out of your house until you're run out of your house,
so...
TILLMAN, VOICE-OVER:
It's with mixed emotions, but it's what I have to do.
You owe it to your kids
to get them out of harm's way,
and it was
the right thing to do,
but it's not always
the easy thing to do.
Yeah, so...
WOMAN: The scale of drilling
has gone up astronomically.
A thousand wells a year
in the Fort Worth Area.
FOX: Your stated position was,
if the states are not doing
their job, EPA will
come in and do it? Absolutely.
Remember,
oil and gas drilling and development is
primarily, in this
country, regulated at the state level.
States like Texas,
states like Wyoming,
states like Pennsylvania
are going to have to step up.
We do have cases where
we believe we see,
many cases,
of groundwater contamination
and drinking-water
contamination that are, if not brought on
entirely by natural
gas production, were exacerbated by it;
not just methane, which is
natural gas, but other contaminants as well.
FOX: So the whole process has
been proven to contaminate, but you can't separate
that one part of the process
from the whole rest of the process?
I can't separate
the part of the process.
That's why we're doing
a two-year study.
So, from that
perspective, we'll have something to say.
In the meantime,
though, citizens should be very vocal
with their local--
heh!--elected officials.
It'll still be up
to Congress to step forward and legislate
to make a law,
to ensure that we do have a national--
FOX: So the real
enforcement is still-- is with the electorate?
It's always with
the--listen, in the environmental movement,
the real power
has always been with the people,
whether that's from
the first Earth Day,
when people got tired
of their air polluted
or their water catching
on fire, all the way up to today.
Inside this beltway,
you often hear people say,
"Well, we should just
get rid of the EPA.
The two don't go
together." Mm-hmm.
And I feel, as head
of the EPA, my job is to do my job:
enforce the Clean Water Act;
enforce the Clean Air Act;
enforce the Safe
Drinking Water Act.
FOX: What can I do
to interact with this agency and say,
"These are the cases
where the states are doing nothing"?
Josh, if you have
concerns, plea--
Let me start again.
Right.
Josh--ha ha!--
if you have concerns, please bring them to us.
Remember, we have said,
and I have said, we are not walking away
from enforcing the law
while this study is going on.
We're going to ensure
that you steward the water resources.
We're going to ensure that
you stew--you take care of the air resources.
We don't want you
to pack up and leave a problem
that we or the taxpayers
are going to have to fix years from now.
[Paper rips]
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
When we were leaving the interview, we noticed
that the grand room
that we were in was actually the "Rachel Carson Great Hall."
And then I noticed that just
under the "Rachel Carson" plaque
was a fake plastic plant.
Lisa Jackson, with all
the attacks on the EPA,
had her work cut out for her.
[Truck door closes]
JOHN FENTON: This is
a good time of year to work.
It's kind of brisk and cold
in the morning and it's usually nice and warm in the afternoon,
and this is my favorite time
of year, I think, sometimes.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: 3 years since
the painstaking investigation in Pavillion, Wyoming began,
the EPA was about
to release its results,
but the burden of proof was
weighing everybody down.
FENTON: They said,
"We've moved up the test results date.
"We're going to release it
now on the ninth
of November," which is
day after tomorrow.
To hustle around and move
that test results date up by over a month and a half?
FOX: Mm-hmm.
There's something there.
I'm freaking out
a little bit.
I'll have to be honest
with you. I, uh...
[Sighs]
[Stammers, chuckles]
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Can you imagine waiting 3 years
just to find out
if you had a case?
John, Louis, and the rest
of the Pavillion families--
I was amazed at their endurance.
But from the moment we stepped
in the door, it was clear
the man with the Purple Heart
from Vietnam
was about to cost us
our "G" rating.
It's bullshit.
Somebody better grow
some fucking balls
and know what they're doing.
We're living
in a cesspool out here.
When the DEQ had come out here
and they said, "Well,
"you know, we could talk
Encana, you know, to...
see if they can't sell--
buy you out,"
I said, "Fuck you."
And they said, "Why?"
I said, "Do you think
I'm going to leave all my fucking neighbors here?"
I said, "What kind of asshole
do you think I am?"
I'm so fed up.
The sons of bitches.
FOX: Well, but this
could be the moment where you actually win.
I mean, it's got
to be emotionally driving you insane.
Oh, you're
goddamn right it is.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Two days
before the EPA results would be released,
we went out to the gas fields
just south of Pavillion.
Wyoming, Colorado, and the west
play host to bands
of wild mustangs,
roaming around on the BLM
and often in conflict with
gas production in the fields.
Well, we turned around.
We're just trying to find
some wild horses.
You guys haven't
seen any, have you?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The Department
of the Interior rounds up wild horses by helicopter,
pens them in for
relocation, sterilization,
and sometimes they end up in
the slaughterhouse.
The helicopters had been through
the day before.
If there ever was a symbol
of oil and gas production competing with the old ways,
wild horse roundups
would have to be it.
Far in the distance,
up on the ridge...
a single mustang on the plains,
by himself.
Had he escaped?
I'm always--have kind of
a knot in my stomach before these go.
Once it gets going,
it seems to--I forget about it pretty quick.
Uh...it's a--
you never know what
you're going to hear.
WOMAN OFFICIAL:
The drinking water well results.
We did find methane
in 10 of the 28 wells.
They were isotopically
very similar to the gas
from the production
reservoir.
We found synthetic
organic compounds,
including a couple
of gycols,
some alcohols,
and 2-butoxyethanol.
We found several
petroleum-related compounds,
including benzene
at 50 times the safe number
for maximum
contaminant level.
We also found diesel
and gasoline range organics on a fairly widespread basis.
[Applause]
FENTON:
Benzene, 50 times--
50 times the maximum
contaminant level
on benzene in
the monitoring wells.
That's insane.
That's a mad amount
of pollution.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The case
in Pavillion was the shot heard around the world.
It sounds almost absurd,
but it was the first time EPA verified
fracking chemicals were in
the water because of fracking.
And Lisa Jackson
made good on her word:
EPA moved into Dimock,
announced a full round
of testing of 60 homes,
and began delivering water
to residents that were affected.
MAN: Whoo-whoo! Whoo!
[Truck horn honks]
This is the day.
This is the day of vindication, right?
FOX: It's huge, isn't it?
SCOTT ELY: Yes, it is.
You know, it's a little
overwhelming, too. FOX: It is amazing.
I think we should be baptized
with this EPA water.
I haven't been baptized
for a really long time, but I'm ready to be baptized.
FOX: You want to get
in the water? ELY: Good. How you doing?
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
For the first time in a long time,
in Dimock, there was hope.
And then the election started.
Obama's State of the Union
address was largely seen
as the first campaign
speech of the cycle.
BARACK OBAMA:
This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy
that develops every available
source of American energy.
[Cheers and applause]
OBAMA: We have a supply
of natural gas
that can last America
nearly 100 years,
and my administration will take
every possible action to safely develop this energy
because America will
develop this resource
without putting the health and
safety of our citizens at risk.
And, by the way,
it was public research dollars
over the course of 30 years that
helped develop the technologies
to extract all this natural gas
out of shale rock.
Thank you, God bless you,
and God bless the United States of America.
[Whistles and applause]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: It was a major
election-year shift in policy.
When policy shifts,
investigations shift, too.
But we were about to find out
just how many steps could get taken backwards,
and just how much science
could get swept aside.
When the first test results
came back to Dimock,
the residents called me,
feeling vindicated.
But the tests weren't released
to the public; I had to drive out there and get them myself.
Of the 6 tests that I
could get, all 6 wells
had significant levels of both
ethane and methane;
3 of 6 wells had volatile
organic compounds;
4 of 6 wells contained
polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons,
including benzo(a)pyrene,
benzo(GHI)perylene,
dibenzofuran, dinitrotoluene,
pyrene, and hexachlorobenzene,
explosive levels of methane,
and a host of contaminants,
including uranium,
associated with drilling.
And then EPA released
a desk statement to the press,
saying Dimock's water was safe.
It was deja vu
all over again.
...in Dimock
is at the center of a national focus
on natural gas
drilling's impact on drinking water.
The EPA's first ruling
is that the water
at those homes is
safe to drink.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
Without the tests being released to the public,
the media ran with the headline
"Dimock's water was safe."
FOX:
ELY:
FOX:
ELY:
FOX:
ELY:
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
When a federal agency changes course,
it happens all across
the nation.
Just two weeks later,
the Imminent and Substantial Endangerment Order
against Range Resources
in Texas was lifted.
The Lipsky case was dropped.
The press was told
the case was settled,
but there was no settlement
for the Lipsky family.
Their water was
still flammable,
no arrangement for
water replacement was made,
and a pipe replaced the
garden hose off the head space of their water well
which spewed a flame
3 feet high.
Steve and Shyla Lipsky were
dragged through the media
in a smear report from Fox News.
And the campaign against
Al Armendariz finally succeeded;
he resigned under pressure.
With all this back and forth,
I asked retiring Congressman Maurice Hinchey,
who had originally asked EPA
to get involved, who was the sponsor
of the "Frack Act" in Congress,
what he thought was going on.
My thought is that
there are--heh heh!--
a certain amount of contests
within the Obama Administration.
There are people within
the Administration who have differences of opinion.
Some understand that, uh,
the way in which this
frack drilling operation has taken place
and is taking place right now,
is being injurious
and is costing a lot
of money, is being harmful.
And there are others
who are very much in favor
of what this situation
should be continued.
We have to find out if it's
safe for us to be here. FOX: Right.
But we also have
to find out what happened
so that we can stop it
from happening again,
because people complain
about the price of gas;
wait till you're paying
twice that for water.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: What was
more troubling was that both Scott Ely in Pennsylvania
and Steve Lipsky in Texas
were saying the same thing--
mid-level EPA would come
to their door and tell them,
"We're sorry. We're being
yanked off the case.
Higher-ups are telling us
we've got to walk out on this."
It didn't make
any sense. Again--
Well, again, I got people
from inside the EPA,
'cause I don't want to get
anyone in trouble 'cause there's good people there,
I think, and said
that higher-up just yanked it away from them.
The Philadelphia office got
a call from the higher-ups from D.C., chewing them out.
He said that, uh,
that it wasn't just Range Resources,
the gas company came
after them, it was the whole coalition.
But it was from
the higher-ups, and they said there was some congressmen
that were calling, you know,
and when they first come in here,
there was congressmen
that were really harassing EPA:
"Why are you there?
Get out of there. You don't belong there."
And it's kind of scary
when your own government
is afraid of a business.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
"Don't use your water. It's not safe.
We can't do anything about it.
Orders are coming from above."
Ready to move.
FOX: You ready to move?
Yeah. I just--
Yeah?
It's...
FOX: You'd really walk out
on this if you had to-- I guess you have to, right?
Yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
As it turns out, neither Steve Lipsky
nor Barack Obama was
compelled to move.
Steve Lipsky didn't give up.
He kept pressing reporters
to look into the case,
and just after the election,
all sorts of things turned up.
It turned up that EPA had done
a full hydrogeological study
of the gas drilling
near Steve Lipsky's house,
showing a fingerprint
match between the gas in Range Resources' gas well
and the gas in
Steve Lipsky's water well.
So the EPA knew the whole time.
A letter from the
Texas Regulatory Agency to Range Resources,
stating that their cement job
had failed.
So the gas company knew
the whole time.
An email that revealed
that former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell
had actually lobbied the EPA
on behalf of Range Resources
to drop the case.
Just a few weeks after
the election, Lisa Jackson,
EPA Administrator
and lead investigator
on fracking across
the U.S., resigned.
Scott Ely hung on in Dimock,
continuing his lawsuit,
and New Yorkers didn't
give up, either.
Citizens submitted
204,000 public comments
on the last stage of the
Environmental Impact Statement,
forcing Governor Cuomo
to halt the process
and continue the de facto
moratorium.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
But for the rest of the Dimock families,
when EPA's press release seemed
to destroy their case,
their lawyers turned around
on them, saying, "You've got to settle with Cabot
"and you have to sign
non-disclosure agreements
or else we're coming
after you for our expenses,"
which the residents could
in no way afford.
So, in just the matter
of a year and a half,
the Dimock case
had exploded in the media, been reported worldwide,
had set the stage
for a precedent for water replacement
throughout PA and throughout
the world that could have cost
the gas industry trillions
of dollars to fulfill,
to being shoved in the corner,
denied the truth by the federal government, the gas industry,
and the state, and told to take
the money, shut up, and go away.
The residents started
preparing for silence.
FOX: As a last question,
if you're in a position
where Cabot would do nothing,
except if you guys signed
an agreement that said you couldn't speak anymore,
what would you like
your last statement to be?
Well, knowing me as well
as you do, and a lot of people know me,
that it's like I almost
never...stop talking.
Ha ha ha ha!
Oh, my husband says,
"You wake up talking."
And I do. I do.
You know,
I'm a communicator.
I've given this my all, Josh.
I've given this 200%.
FOX: So, there isn't one
final sentence, statement?
[Alarm beeps]
See? I'm practicing.
[Beep]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: A few weeks
after returning home from Wyoming,
a disturbing hearing was
announced in the House of Representatives.
The House Committee
on Science and Technology
was hauling EPA in
before a panel
to question their results
in Pavillion.
Clearly, it was another attack.
If Congress was going
to attack EPA in the last remaining investigation,
someone needed to be there
to tell the story.
But Representative Andy Harris,
Republican Chair of the Committee,
was barring our cameras
from the proceedings.
FOX: I just have to stay calm.
If I start getting nervous, I'm
going to say the wrong thing.
I just have to stay calm.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: There's
a protocol in Congress that if you want to tape a hearing,
you have to sign up
and register; we followed the protocol, we signed up.
We knew the rules--if someone
was speaking in public, that meant they could be recorded,
and the First Amendment states,
"Congress shall make no law
impeding the freedom
of the press."
That meant, to me,
that no matter which representative told me
that I couldn't come in
that day, the Constitution guaranteed my rights.
FOX: Has press
already gone in?
There's no press covering.
No credentialed media
signed up to cover the hearing. Uh-huh.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Of course,
I knew what might happen. I didn't think it would.
I thought they would
actually cave and realize
that we were on the right side
of the First Amendment.
But I have to say
I wasn't surprised.
WOMAN: Sir, you are not
allowed in with a camera.
FOX, VOICE-OVER:
It had been demonstrated to me over and over again
that certain elements
within Congress and the gas industry
had gotten used to treating
the Constitution just as they had treated the fossil fuels
they extracted, as a relic
left behind from the past that they had every right to burn.
WOMAN: You cannot
have that in here.
FOX: Of course we can.
It's a public meeting. No, you cannot.
There's an appeal
to the Chair.
Several of the members are
going to make a statement.
Sir.
And we are allowed to be here, within our rights.
Are you going
to remove your camera?
I--I am not going
to remove the camera.
Sir, sir, stop.
FOX: We have
also sent emails.
We have also sent emails
and we have talked. Yes.
Do your duty,
Officer. All right.
Sir, turn around,
put your hands behind your back for me, please.
MAN: Come on, come on.
Come on, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chair, we discussed
this before.
Ahem. This is
a public hearing.
This is a public
hearing.
I'm within my First
Amendment rights,
and I am being
taken out.
MAN: Well, but before
the meeting has begun,
before we've had a chance to
discuss the issues, this guy is being led out in handcuffs.
WOMAN: Where's the transparency?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: They led me out
of the hearing room.
I was told I was the first
journalist to be arrested
in Congress simply
for doing journalism,
but we really wanted
to tape the hearing.
We really wanted to hear
what they had to say.
The great irony is that
after taping 3 1/2 years of hearings
all across the nation,
in big places and small,
the last thing I ever want
to do ever again
is tape a goddamn hearing.
You got to stand on your feet
the whole time,
most of what's said is
pretty boring.
It's a pretty arduous deal.
When they led me out
in handcuffs, I was half-relieved
that I didn't have to keep
standing there listening to these people.
I felt calm. I felt relaxed.
I felt free.
I didn't have to answer
my phone, return a text message,
make sure that the camera wasn't
running out of batteries.
I didn't have to listen to what
these people were saying,
attacking my friends
in Pavillion, Wyoming,
attacking the EPA once more.
I had done everything I needed
to do at that moment.
There wasn't any more.
After 3 1/2 years of recording,
documenting, writing notes,
traveling all over the world,
this was the most
that I could do.
When I was in
the police station,
my arresting officer hit me up
for a part in my next movie
as he was leading me over
to the fingerprint machine.
When they pressed my fingers
down on the glass,
and I saw the images
up on the screen--
the ridges, the circles
on my fingertips--
I realized
they looked just like
the inside of a tree.
Maybe there's something deep
in our DNA that doesn't want to get cut down.
Maybe there's something linked.
At least that's what I feel.
A tree doesn't move
until you cut it down,
and I'm certainly...not moving.
We can't all just move,
certainly not when there's
another way out.
I felt like I could see it--
a horizontal well bore
drilled down into the earth,
snaking underneath the Congress,
shooting money up
through the chamber at such high pressure
that it blew the top off
of our democracy,
another layer of contamination
due to fracking;
not the water, not the air,
but our government--all
those toxic dollars,
all those contaminants,
all of that influence
out-sizing the citizen's voice
in our democratic republic.
So I still don't know what's
going to happen around here.
The saying goes,
"Environmentalists only ever get temporary victories."
But the losses are
always permanent.
There's no such thing
as anyone's backyard anymore.
This wasn't about me
getting drilled
or anyone getting drilled
in any one place.
The plan is for shale gas
to be the new world energy.
If they get their way,
we're in for 50 years
of shale gas running the world.
You start to get dizzy.
I felt like I could
close my eyes
and open them anywhere
in the world.