By Emily Ion, Dusty Horwitt, and Elaine Shannon

On a recent episode of Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show,"  Texas oil and gas executive T. Boone Pickens proudly declared, "I have fracked 3,000 wells in my life.  I have never seen anything damaged."  

Pickens, 82, was vigorously defending hydraulic fracturing (aka "fracking"), the high-pressure underground injection of chemical-laced water that releases deeply buried reserves of natural gas across the country. Stewart responded:

"I'm sure there are people who would say, 'I have, it's been on my land and I've seen the toxicity.' Is there a way to protect the health of the land and the people who are on top of these huge reserves?"

"There've been several hundred thousand wells fracked," Pickens said.  "Yes. Sure there is.  There's no question of that."

But then he changed the subject.  In other words -- Pickens ducked Stewart's question.

And no wonder.  Residents of heavily-fracked land say fracking is contaminating their drinking water.  Some say water flowing out of their kitchen taps is so polluted with natural gas that it catches fire.   For a stunning demonstration, check out the documentary Gasland, recently nominated for an Academy Award.  

In response to the growing controversy, officials of the Environmental Protection Agency have a plan for a thorough study of fracking.  They intend to test water as it goes into a gas well and as it comes out and to examine the infusion of chemicals before and after fracking.   

That's the smart approach.  Thanks in part to pressure from the oil and gas lobby, Congress has generally exempted fracking from federal environmental regulations.  Last year, we reported that many natural gas and oil drilling companies use diesel and petroleum distillates full of toxic chemicals in their fracking fluid, profiting from a convenient exemption in the 2005 energy bill and the Safe Drinking Water Act.  We found that at least some companies appeared to be injecting diesel without necessary permits - a conclusion confirmed recently by an investigation by Reps. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and Diana DeGette, D-Colo., of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.   

Can injections of diesel and related toxics contaminate water supplies? Pickens says no. EPA needs to find out.

A 2004 EPA investigation of hydraulic fracturing was cut short before the agency performed any field work or water testing.  EPA declared that in coal bed methane formations, fracking posed little or no risk to drinking water.  An EPA whistleblower contended the agency had failed to conduct a scientifically rigorous study.  This time around, with companies threatening to drill in more populated areas, including underneath New York City's drinking water supply, it's vital for EPA to do a comprehensive, credible investigation independent of political considerations.

Jon Stewart spoke for a lot of us who want to know, "Is it horribly unsafe, is that what this fracking is?  Is it that we can't do it without poisoning the country?"  Perfectly safe, T.Boone Pickens said.  Trust the gas industry to do the right thing.   

We say - not so fast.  We'd like a lot more information.  How about you? 

EWG staffers put our heads together to come up with this list of bad news environmental stories of the last decade that people might have missed. But there were plenty of big stories that hardly anyone could have missed, such as climate change. What's on your list of the biggest environmental stories of the last 10 years?

1. Secret Gas Drilling Chemical Almost Kills Colorado Nurse
Doctors ran into a medical mystery -- and a stone wall from industry -- when they tried to find what was in a gas drilling chemical that nearly killed a Colorado nurse. Aren't you glad that Congress exempted these "fracking" chemicals from regulation under the Safe Water Drinking Act?

2. Intersex Fish Turn Up All Over
Are you a boy or are you a girl? That's the question that scientists are asking as they study the organs of supposedly male fish from coast to coast and find eggs in many of them. The chief suspects: endocrine-disrupting pollutants that even in tiny amounts can mimic hormones and affect sexual development.

3. Prescription Drugs in Your Drinking Water
Take a swallow and call me in the morning. Antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones - they've all turned up in tests of drinking water around the country. Could there be health risks from decades of drinking water laced with combinations of potent drugs?

4. And Rocket Fuel, Too
Perchlorate -- the stuff is used in rocket fuel and explosives and turns up not just in water but also in milk, lettuce, other foods - and in our bodies. It's been linked to thyroid problems in pregnant women, newborns and infants. The EPA is reconsidering its earlier decision not to regulate it in water. Stand by.

5. Ethanol -- Not Just Bad Energy Policy
There are a lot of reasons to question the drive for biofuels, especially corn-based ethanol, but there has been much less attention paid to what it means for air pollution and health. For people who like to breathe clean air, the balance doesn't look promising.

6. Non-stick, No-Stain and No-Good
They were the miracle products that were supposed to make life easier - keeping spills from staining our couches and making it easy to clean our pots without scrubbing -- until it all went sour. Chemicals in the original Teflon and now off-the-market Scotchgard were linked to cancer and developmental problems. They have a way of polluting everything and they refuse to go away.

7. Monsanto Owns Corn (and also soybeans)
80% of the corn and 95% percent of the soybeans grown in America contain genes inserted by Monsanto scientists, and the company writes tough - and secret - licensing agreements to maintain control and lock out competitors. Now the Justice Department and some states are thinking these practices might violate anti-trust laws. Turnips, anyone?

8. Occupational Hazard: Microwave Popcorn
This fun food turned to be no fun for people who make it. A strange lung malady that sickened workers in plants that make microwave popcorn was traced to a widely used butter flavoring. And one popcorn-crazy consumer was felled, too. It took a while, but OSHA finally took a look, and the stuff is being phased out.

9. Dead (Zone) on Arrival
In the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere, vast expanses of ocean have been turned into biological deserts as fertilizer runoff from farms washes downstream and nourish runaway algae growth, which deplete most of the oxygen when the tiny organisms die and decompose. The Gulf dead zone has more than doubled in size since the 1980s - accelerated by the boom in crops grown to make biofuels. In 2009, it was smaller than predicted, but more intense, in 2009.

10. The (Not So) Great Pacific Trash Gyre
It's hard to spot from the water or even from space, but an estimated 3.5 million tons of mostly plastic trash from all over the world floats just below the surface of the Pacific, swirling slowly around in an area of circular currents twice the size of Texas. It's devastating to birds and sea creatures that think the plastic bits are food. It's time to stop adding to the mess - and then see if there's any way to clean it up.

What stories top your list of the decade's biggest environmental news??

By Elaine Shannon

Natural gas may seem clean, but it has a dark back story.

As Environmental Working Group has reported, gas producers out West have drilled thousands of wells with hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," which involves breaking open gas-bearing formations by injecting them with water laced with toxic chemicals like benzene.

To make matters worse, gas drillers have been exempted from the federal Safe Drinking Water Act and permitted to conceal, as trade secrets, the identities of the chemicals they're forcing underground.

Now gas producers are moving in to exploit the gas-rich Marcellus Shale, which stretches from New York state to West Virginia, and New York leaders are paying heed to warnings from EWG and others that fracking threatens New York's water supply.

Last week, the New York Times editorial page called for barring gas drilling in the New York City watershed. The Times asserted:

The dangers are particularly acute in the Marcellus Shale, which, unlike the relatively shallow formations found elsewhere, lies miles underground.Getting the gas out will require far more water and heavy doses of chemicals.

While the rules would require drillers to take special precautions in the watershed, there are too many points -- from the delivery of the fluid to the drilling site to the removal of spent fluid after it surfaces -- where poisoned water could escape into the water supplies.

On Friday, EWG senior analyst Dusty Horwitt is scheduled to testify about the dangers of fracking at a hearing of the New York City Council Committee on Environmental Protection, which has been probing gas drilling activities in the watershed.

Meanwhile, National Public Radio ombudsman Alicia Shepard has faulted the organization's September series on natural gas for failing to devote more than two of its 24 minutes to gas production's environmental destruction.

"The ultimate question is: Did this series give a reasonably complete and balanced view of issues concerning domestic drilling for natural gas?" Shepard wrote. "The answer is no."

According to Shepard, Brian Duffy, then the NPR projects editor, blamed NPR's financial woes -- symptomatic of the global news industry meltdown -- for the series' shortcomings. She wrote:

"Should we have covered the issue more thoroughly? Certainly," said Duffy, who left NPR's news department in late August. "This was a situation where we couldn't get all the bases covered because we had furloughs [caused by NPR's budget cuts] and vacation issues and changes in personnel.

The story absolutely did need an environmental component. I won't disagree with that. It's a shame we just couldn't provide it."

Special to Enviroblog by Don Carr, EWG Press Secretary

Oil and gas drillers in the American West are exempt from most environmental safeguards.

You could imagine that companies engaging in hydraulic fracturing, the process by which highly toxic chemical are injected into the ground to force out natural gas, would be regulated by the Clean Water Act, at least, since ground water sources are sometimes near drilling sites.

But in fact, oil and gas drilling are exempt from the landmark 1972 statute

You might think that if a person came into contact with extremely hazardous drilling chemicals, and the person's life was at stake, emergency response personnel would know what to do.


That's not the case either.

In Colorado, a nurse nearly died after she touched the chemical-soaked clothing of a sick drilling worker. The drilling company refused to tell her physician exactly what she had encountered.


The exact composition of hydraulic fracturing, or fracing, chemicals is deemed proprietary - a trade scfret. And yet these chemicals, whose composition the public has no right to know, are pumped deep into the ground near precious water sources.

To make matters worse, the number of oil and gas wells drilled across the West has exploded by 120,000 since 2000. A recent EWG report, Free Pass for Oil and Gas, details the impact oil and gas drilling has had across the American West.


New Mexico and Colorado have passed tough new standards designed to minimize pollution from oil and gas drilling, but industry is attempting to roll back these protections. State standards often do not close the loopholes under federal law.

It's time the federal governement restored basic safeguards for people who live and work near oil and gas drilling.

Special to Enviroblog by Dusty Horwitt, EWG Analyst

Within moments of taking office, Secretary of the Interior-designate Ken Salazar (D-CO), has an opportunity with the sweep of his pen to protect the nation's most treasured national park and drinking water for 25 million Americans.

The Bush administration has spent the better part of the last 8 years giving gifts to the mining industry, including allowing a surge of uranium claims to be staked along the north and south rims of the Grand Canyon and along the banks of the Colorado River that flows through the canyon. The number of claims within five miles of the National Park has shot from 10 in 2003 to over 1,100 in 2008.

The Colorado River provides drinking water for residents of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego and other areas. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves Las Vegas, and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves Los Angeles, San Diego and other Southern California communities, have written to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, expressing concern about the impact such mining might have on Colorado River water quality. .

Even Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano wrote Kempthorne expressing her own concern and requested that the Secretary withdraw land around the Canyon from new mining claims. And the House Natural Resources Committee passed a legally binding resolution last summer calling on Kempthorne to withdraw the land. Yet Kempthorne and Bush ignored them all.

The Secretary of the Interior has the power to withdraw the land on a temporary, emergency basis under federal law (43 USCS 1714(e)).

Given the toxic legacy of uranium mining in the southwestern United States and a report just last month by Abram Lustgarten and David Hasemyer in the San Diego Union Tribune that scientists believe that uranium mining would inevitably contaminate the Colorado, Secretary-designate Salazar should bar new mining activity on about one million acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon. The action would be quick - applying pen to paper - but the results would be far reaching, helping to protect one of the 7 natural wonders of the world and the Colorado River from the environmental destruction of further mining operations.

Our new year's resolution: build on the accomplishments of 2008 to make 2009 the year we turn the corner on crucial environmental issues facing our society. We scored breakthroughs on a range of problems last year. Among them:

Advancing the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act.
EWG's work on toxic chemicals spurred the reintroduction of the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act and its requirement of mandatory biomonitoring of industrial chemicals in people. EWG briefed Congressional staff members on the legislation, that aims to replace the weak Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. In the next Congress, EWG plans to organize briefings and push for hearings and passage of the bill.

Progressing toward a ban of toxic plastic chemical BPA.
On October 31, the Science Board of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a stinging rebuke to the agency and embraced EWG arguments that bisphenol-A (BPA), a synthetic estrogen used to make polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resin may be a threat to human health. The panel forced FDA to retreat from its stance that trace levels of BPA are safe in food packaging, including infant formula cans and baby bottles. EWG scientists testified, wrote comments and served on the expert panel for the Science Board.

In September, the National Institutes of Health's National Toxicology Program (NTP)declared that BPA, shown in laboratory tests to disrupt the endocrine system, may alter brain development, cause behavioral problems and damage the prostate glands in fetuses, infants and young children.

In 2009, EWG will work with Congressional leaders and the Obama administration to press for a federal ban of BPA in food packaging and other products that expose children and pregnant women to the chemical.

With strong advocacy by EWG's California office, the California assembly office came close to passing the first state-level BPA ban. In 2009, 13 state legislatures are expected to consider similar measures.

Blowing the whistle on FDA plan to push mercury-laced seafood.
On December 12, the Environmental Working Group made public internal government documents disclosing the Food and Drug Administration's secret plans to reverse federal warnings that pregnant women and children limit their fish intake to avoid mercury, a neurotoxin especially dangerous to the fetus and infants. EWG obtained both the FDA plan, stamped "CLOSE HOLD," and memos by senior Environmental Protection Agency scientists attacking FDA's rationale. The Washington Post broke the story, and other national stories followed.

Reaction from Capitol Hill was swift and sharp. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., denounced FDA: "Now, in the administration's 11th hour, they are quietly trying to water down advisories for women and children about the dangers of mercury in fish, disregarding sound science on this issue....This backroom bouquet for special interests should be stopped in its tracks. If they slip this through, I will work with the incoming Obama Administration to restore science-based decisions on mercury."

Gold mining is far from a golden industry. In fact, gold mining poses serious environmental and human rights concerns. Modern mining for gold is a massive operation which causes massive environmental damage with the potential for devastating the landscape for thousands of years. Research shows that the industry produces 79 tons of waste for every ounce of gold.

As if that weren't enough, human rights atrocities are very common in the gold rich regions. The deals that benefit local warlords and international gold companies often leave the deadly traces in the local community.

But that's not all, unfortunately. A recent investigation by the Associated Press finds thousands of child gold miners in West Africa, some as young as 4 years old.

These children work in mines with less than rich ore. Industrial, environmentally damaging mining takes care of the rich ore mining. Poor people and children take care of sifting the earth.

According to the AP investigation:

"The spike in gold prices during the past seven years has lured increasing numbers of poor people, including child recruits, to bush mines. The United Nations labor agency estimates that there are now 100,000 to 250,000 child gold miners in West Africa alone.

They steer wheelbarrows of dirt over rutted paths. They pound the dirt with wooden posts for hours until it is as fine as flour. They wash the dirt in a large sieve-like box. Then they squat next to a plastic tub, pour mercury into their bare hands and rub it into the mud like a woman scrubbing laundry on rocks.

Mercury attracts gold like a magnet.

But it also attacks the brain and can cause tremors, speech impediments, retardation, kidney damage and blindness."

Next time when you think of buying something gold, think of those miners -- or rather, those kids. Since, if you own anything gold, there are big chances you are already connected to them.