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California and Hawaii Lead the Way on Chromium-6; Some States Standing in the Way
On Fracking: Now, Cracks in the Façade
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Monthly Archive
Cemeteries: The Next Drilling Frontier?
By Alex Rindler, Government Affairs Assistant
When it comes to drilling in the Marcellus Shale, the natural gas industry leaves no stone unturned.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has reported that Huntley & Huntley, Inc., a self-described "God fearing" oil and gas company, has 11 cemeteries under lease in Washington and Allegheny Counties, including 200-acre Calvary Cemetery, where the remains of three of Pittsburgh's mayors now rest.
Even the most ardent (and well-paid) industry supporters have taken exception to this kind of urban energy exploitation.
"I'd have a tough time putting a rig down next to my tomb or next to anyone I'm related to," said Tom Ridge, former Pennsylvania Governor and one-time consultant to the Marcellus Shale Coalition, whose president made headlines in April for admitting that the industry she represents was responsible for contaminating state drinking water supplies.
Meanwhile, a growing number of Americans have called for an end to the exemptions enjoyed by natural gas producers from major environmental laws that protect public health.
According to the state's Department of Environmental Protection, natural gas production has increased 60 percent in the past six months, due largely to a new method of gas extraction called high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing. There are more than 1,600 active Marcellus wells in Pennsylvania alone.
[Photo Credit to Katie Brady and Flickr]
Flame Retardants: Banned, but not gone
By Sonya Lunder, EWG Senior Scientist
Even though toxic flame retardant chemicals were banned in 2006, pregnant women in California carry high levels of the hazardous substances in their blood, according to a new study by scientists at the University of California-San Francisco's Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment.
The research team tested the blood of 25 central and northern California women in their second trimester of pregnancy for polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. The results found PBDE at several times higher levels than previous prenatal studies conducted in the U.S. and in other countries, including China, India, Japan, Korea, Sweden and Spain. The PBDE levels found in these women were similar to concentrations measured in EWG's 2003 study of breast milk from 20 U.S. mothers.
Even though PBDEs can no longer be made in the U.S., these chemicals clearly still litter our environment. They were used for years as fire retardants in foam furniture and the plastic casings of TVs and computer monitors. They accumulate in people and wildlife and disrupt brain development and hormone systems.
In the U.C.-San Francisco study, women with the highest PBDE levels were found to have altered thyroid hormone functions. Since these hormones affect fetal brain development, the findings suggest that PBDEs could have a serious impact on the child throughout his life. A recent study of pregnant women in New York City similarly found that babies exposed to more PBDEs in utero had lower IQ scores in childhood.
To get the full picture of the study, its results, and why California women are at heightened risk, read this interview with Ami Zota, the study's lead author, published in the Los Angeles Times on August 10.
[Thanks to flickr & wwarby for the flames]
DOE fracking report states obvious, little else
By Alex Rindler, EWG Government Affairs Assistant
People across the country are rightly concerned about natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing near their homes. Thanks to new technologies, the exploitation of shale gas formations has expanded rapidly and now accounts for nearly 30 percent of U.S. natural gas production. As drilling rigs pop up near populous areas, the stakes have become enormous for millions of Americans.
Shale gas extraction can mean profits for energy companies, royalties for some landowners and jobs for some.
For communities, though, it can and does translate to unsightly rigs, truck traffic, air pollution, noise and up to millions of gallons of chemical-laced wastewater, water pollution, and reports of drilling related illnesses. Property values near some drilling operations are reported to be plummeting.
Fracking exempt from most U.S. environmental laws
In a draft report issued August 11, an advisory panel on shale gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing convened by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu seems to trivialize Americans' wariness of drillers' aggressive inroads. The panel, chaired by John Deutch, a board member of Cheniere Energy, was charged with recommending ways to make fracking safer for people and the environment. But its initial report seems more concerned with making recommendations to improve the industry's public relations messaging than anything else. It makes no mention of the real issue at hand: the fact that hydraulic fracturing enjoys seven exemptions from the nation's major environmental laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The Chu-Deutch panel says the industry can undertake measures to "reduce the environmental impacts from shale gas production." Industry, the panel says, can engage in "managing short-term and cumulative impacts on communities, land use, wildlife, and ecologies."
Such pallid language seems to assume and accept a certain amount of environmental damage. In the panel's view, the only question seems to be, how much. That's no reassurance at all for people who see their air and water quality being degraded or who see the drilling industry encroaching on once pristine landscapes.
Gas country residents don't want to hear, Well, it could be worse.
Disclosure of fracking techniques and drilling chemicals, as the panel recommends, is a good thing. But it's not enough to know how bad things are. The point is to prevent bad things from happening.
The panel acknowledges that "adverse environmental impacts need to be prevented, reduced and, where possible, eliminated as soon as possible." It says that "effective action requires both strong regulation and a shale gas industry in which all participating companies are committed to continuous improvement. "
Do we have an industry committed to environmental protection? Apparently not, in the view of the Chu-Deutch panel, which suggests, in backhanded and tortuous fashion, that the gas industry, as currently configured, cannot be trusted. Let's decode this recommendation:
The Subcommittee believes the creation of a shale gas industry production organization dedicated to continuous improvement of best practice, defined as improvements in techniques and methods that rely on measurement and field experience, is needed to improve operational and environmental outcomes.
This passage is hardly a vote of confidence in the industry. If an engineer told you that a new house must be created where your house now stands, you'd run for the door before the roof fell in. Make a whole new structure? Now? The flaws in the existing one must be pretty severe. And if that engineer said the newly-created structure would, at best, "improve...outcomes," you'd have serious second thoughts about whether it would be worth rebuilding.
Energy Department panel dominated by oil and gas interests
The panel's words are oblique and cautious, not surprising, since Deutch and five of six other panel members have current financial ties to the oil and gas industry. These individuals have extensive experience in oil and gas. They also have a direct financial interest in seeing the industry emphasize profits over protecting communities. Their call for "strong regulation" has to be taken with more than a few grains of salt.
Let's not confuse this group of people who come from the oil and gas industry with a truly independent blue-ribbon panel. If the Department of Energy does not appear to take seriously the need for this panel to be - and to be perceived as - fair, balanced, objective and representative, then the millions of people who will be impacted by shale gas development cannot count on the federal government to protect them.
Panelist labels citizens' concerns "hysteria"
At a recent public meeting at the Department of Energy's Washington headquarters, panel member Mark Zobak dismissed criticisms of shale gas drilling as "hydro-frack hysteria." Zoback is a geophysics professor at Stanford University, but that's not all. He is also a founder of GeoMechanics International, a consulting firm that advises on various oil and gas drilling problems. Baker Hughes, Inc., a $33.5 billion Houston-based oilfield services company engaged in hydraulic fracturing, acquired GeoMechanics International in 2008. As a senior advisor to Baker Hughes, Zoback can afford to be optimistic about the impact of shale gas drilling.
If the pace of natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing is to accelerate, as the energy industry and the Obama administration hope, the question is how to achieve the highest standards of safety. Balancing America's appetite for energy with people's rights to live in safety and peace is a tough challenge - and too important to be left to a favored few special interests.
Stay up to date about what EWG is doing about gas drilling and fracking.
Cancer: Belatedly, Environmental Causes Get their Due
By Justine Chow and Feifei Li, EWG Research Assistants
In discussions of the causes of cancer, environmental exposures have long been the unloved stepchild.
But that's changing.
For decades, most cancer researchers focused on genetics, diet, smoking and aging populations as the chief culprits, all but dismissing other environmental factors. As recently as 2003, a World Health Organization report featured the conventional wisdom that only 1-to-4 percent of all cancers were due to pollution.
More cancer specialists and oncologists see environmental link
A new report by Duke University researchers highlights the dramatic shift since then among cancer specialists and practicing oncologists. In a paper being published in the September issue of the Journal of Oncology Practice, the Duke team reports on a survey of young oncologists it conducted at the 2010 Australia and Asia Pacific Clinical Oncology Research and Development Workshop.
The Duke researchers found that these specialists from low- to middle-income countries consider pollution and other environmental factors one of the three top reasons for the growing burden of cancer in their countries. Close to a third (32 percent) called environmental factors important contributors, contradicting the traditional reserve that cancer researchers and physicians felt about attributing cancer to environmental causes.
Even though air, water and soil pollution became a major concern during the 20th century, only recently has compelling evidence mounted that carcinogenic chemicals are taking a significant toll on human health. Case studies of water and soil contamination are finding cancer clusters and population-wide epidemiological trends that link pollution to increases in the overall cancer burden, especially in impoverished regions where exposures are often higher than in wealthier nations.
Long-term suspect: Pesticides
It's been 49 years since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which inspired wide public concern about environmental pollution by pesticides. However, the use of some especially problematic pesticides have still not been phased out.
Globally, pesticides have led to problems such as resistance, caused harm to wildlife and ecosystems and endangered the health of farmers and anyone else who comes in direct contact with them. Cancer was not the major concern at first, but in 1989 the World Health Organization reported that the use of herbicides such as 2,4-D had contributed to a 50 percent surge in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in Americans over the previous 20 years.
Exposure levels were especially high in farming communities, especially in developing countries; sadly, those who dedicate their lives to producing food are most at risk for this deadly cancer.
Industrial air and water pollution
Power plants, oil refineries, vehicle and aircraft exhaust are the source of most air pollutants. This year, the latest national assessment of toxic air emissions by the Environmental Protection Agency reported that 80 of 177 common air pollutants have been linked to cancer. Among them, formaldehyde, benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are defined as the main cancer risk drivers.
Pollutants also routinely end up in water, contributing to cancer risk. There are many examples worldwide, including a telling episode in Crestwood, Ill., a village with an unusually high cancer rate where a well that fed into the water supply was contaminated with vinyl chloride from a dry cleaner for more than 20 years. The contamination was uncovered in 2009 and the link to cancer rates was established a year later.
Drinking contaminated water isn't the only risk. People can come into contact with water pollutants through bathing or showering or eating fish caught in contaminated water. In 2003, scientists at Hebrew University-Hadassah described in Environmental Medicine a cancer cluster among Israeli naval divers who had trained in a polluted waterway where they were exposed to industrial, ship and agricultural effluents.
Emerging contaminants: hidden chemicals in commercial products
Two classes of chemicals found in many consumer products - perfluorochemicals (PFCs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) - may pose a significant risk. Both have been found in the bodies of more than 95 percent of Americans. Research suggests that food, food packaging, carpets and dust are all primary routes of exposure.
Take, for example, the slick, oil- and water-resistant packaging coatings used for microwave popcorn and other pre-packaged fast foods. They likely contain significant levels of PFCs that migrate into the food and then into our bodies. Epidemiological studies of workers exposed to PFCs in chemical factories, as well as studies of laboratory animals, strongly suggest that this family of chemicals, and especially its most notorious member, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), is linked to cancer.
A class of chemicals used as flame- and fire-retardants, known as PBDEs, also pose serious risks. In 2007, the EPA classified Deca-BDE as a possible human carcinogen. Although some PBDEs have been banned, Deca-BDE is still used around the world in electronic devices and couches. It might even be in your mattress. PBDEs readily leak into the environment from consumer products and can lead to other health and behavioral problems, especially in children, as well as cancer.
EWG welcomes the much-needed and long-overdue attention that cancer researchers worldwide are beginning to pay to the links between environmental pollution and cancer, even as public health workers continue to fight some of the well-established factors contributing to cancer incidence - smoking and diet.
Since most of the evidence for environmental contribution to cancer risk comes from epidemiological studies, differences in study populations and other possible confounding factors require careful scrutiny. Nevertheless, both scientists and the public are increasingly aware of the prevalence of environmental pollutants, helping to drive further toxicological research to fully understand the full range of health risks - including cancer - that these pollutants pose.
[A big thanks to Flickr CC and I2CPhotography for the car exhaust]
California and Hawaii Lead the Way on Chromium-6; Some States Standing in the Way
By Rebecca Sutton, PhD, EWG Senior Scientist
On July 27, 2011, the state of California put in place a strong, first-in-the-nation, health-based safety goal for hexavalent chromium (or chromium-6), the "Erin Brockovich" chemical, in drinking water. This is an important step toward setting a long-overdue, mandatory limit for this contaminant.
Across the nation, water agencies have conducted hundreds of voluntary tests for this pollutant in response to EWG's startling discovery in 2010 that chromium-6 contamination is widespread in Americans' water supplies.
EPA calls for more testing, but some states aren't helping
When the Environmental Protection Agency, in its own response to EWG's findings, issued a guidance on chromium-6, it suggested that all public water utilities test for it. The EPA said,
"enhanced monitoring will enable public water systems to: better inform their consumers about the levels of chromium-6 in their drinking water, evaluate the degree to which other forms of chromium are transformed into chromium-6 in their drinking water and assess the degree to which existing treatment is affecting the levels of chromium-6."
Oddly, environmental agencies in some states have been an unexpected stumbling block in gathering information about the prevalence of this contaminant in U.S. tap water. Charged with enforcing the Safe Drinking Water Act, these agencies have the option to collect and make public voluntary measurements of chromium-6 taken by local water utilities, but the agencies can also refuse the data altogether. Some have an open and transparent attitude that puts consumer information and safety first.
Others, however, have made a decision to deliberately ignore any information on chromium-6. By rejecting a role in the national effort to assess this threat to tap water quality, some state agencies may delay federal regulation of this cancer-causing contaminant. This is, to state the obvious, disheartening.
Some states are part of the solution
A few forward-looking states are dealing with chromium-6 concerns directly:
- California - The Drinking Water Program of California's Department of Public Health provides a summary of results from its long-standing chromium-6 testing program. In the past, water utilities in California used a test that couldn't measure chromium-6 levels below 1 part per billion, but they can now choose to use the more sensitive methodology outlined by the EPA. The information already collected in California will help the state set a reasonable, health-protective limit for chromium-6.
- Hawaii - A leader in transparency and consumer information, the Safe Drinking Water Branch of Hawaii's Department of Health provides online results of drinking water tests conducted on the Big Island as well as Kauai, Maui and Oahu.
- Illinois - The Drinking Water Division of Illinois' Environmental Protection Agency has crafted a statewide strategy for chromium-6 and encourages all community water supplies to test for the contaminant.
- Wisconsin - The Bureau of Drinking Water and Ground Water of Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources reports that any data provided by utilities will be included in its public database.
Some states turn their backs
The Drinking Water Branch of Georgia's Environmental Protection Division and the Division of Water of Kentucky's Department for Environmental Protection told EWG they do not collect information on chromium-6 from utilities.
The Water Quality Division of Oklahoma's Department of Environmental Quality and the Drinking Water Protection Program of Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality have no policies on what to do with chromium-6 data, though testing is underway in both states.
Each state's environmental agency is responsible for monitoring and enforcing tap water standards established by the EPA. Those states that do not collect the voluntary chromium-6 measurements by local water utilities, as suggested by EPA, may prevent federal regulators from obtaining an accurate picture of just how widespread this contaminant is. This information is crucial to establishing a sound, mandatory standard that protects all Americans - not just Californians - from the risks posed by this cancer-causing pollutant.
What's your state doing about chromium-6?
If only four states step up to the plate, there won't be enough data to support a national standard. So go ahead, call or email your state environmental agency (they're easy to find by searching for "state departments of natural resources" online) and ask them to join California, Hawaii, Illinois and Wisconsin in collecting this important information and making it available to consumers, scientists and regulators.
Leave a comment to let us know what you've learned.
On Fracking: Now, Cracks in the Façade
By LeeAnn Brown, EWG Press Secretary
Imagine, if you can: Nearly overnight, your water well begins producing slimy, off-color foul smelling and worse tasting water. It's unusable. You can't drink it. You can't bathe in it. You can't wash dishes or rinse produce.
Your only option is to get clean water trucked in. That's not cheap, and to get those responsible for the contamination to pay for it, you have to sign away your rights to talk to anyone - neighbors, the media, government officials and scientists - about what happened to your well. Ever.
Industry Talking Points
Through these confidentiality agreements, the natural gas industry has essentially bought the silence of an unknown number of landowners whose water was fouled by drilling activity, allowing it to keep repeating the false incantation: There is not one proven case of hydraulic fracturing contaminating an underground drinking water source.
Repeat that a few times and you've got the industry's talking points down pat, which it has used with great success to fend off the many anecdotal complaints of water contamination by hydraulic fracturing, also called "fracking."
Until now.
EWG Uncovered Evidence of Contamination
EWG senior counsel Dusty Horwitt tracked down a long-forgotten report by the Environmental Protection Agency that specifically identified hydraulic fracturing as the cause of a case of water well contamination in West Virginia, and suggested it was typical of other cases that had been shrouded in secrecy under confidentiality agreements. The EPA report said the documented case was "illustrative" of a broader problem.
EWG's new report, Cracks in the Facade, is online, illustrated with graphics that help you to visualize what may have happened in this case.
Also, take a look at this year's "Drilling Down" series in the New York Times, which has done extensive reporting on natural gas drilling.
New to gas drilling issues, or need a refresher? Take a look at EWG's gas drilling site and its research on the issue.
Stay informed by following EWG's Twitter feed on fracking, @EWGfracking.
