The Ethics of Fracking transcript
- We're producing more natural gas than we ever have before, with hundreds of thousands of good jobs to show for it.
- I didn't move into the country to be looking at an Industrial Revolution right up the road from me.
- I don't recall hearing about water being on fire.
- [Woman] And sometimes, it will light quite spectacularly!
- Basically, the technology is safe, as far as we can tell.
- [Woman] And the emissions that come out of that are carcinogens, and I don't want to get cancer again.
- [Narrator] Drilling for natural gas, or fracking, has been going on in the United States for 60 years. New techniques, called slick water, high pressure, horizontal drilling, introduced in the last decade, have made the extraction of natural gas cheaper, but at what cost? As this industrial process encroaches on our residential and agricultural areas, negative effects to our environment and health are becoming evident. Yet fracking continues to move forward, despite any long-term studies on the damage it may cause. This film examines the ethical and moral issues surrounding the process called fracking.
- Fracking is a technology that allows us to access natural gas at a very deep depth, typically between 5,000 and 8,000 feet. It's a way of drilling into the subsurface, and then accessing that material through a series of injections of a high pressure solution that basically cracks open this rock, and allows the gas to then come back up to the surface.
- On the one hand, you have to think about the benefits you get out of fracking. You get cheaper energy, you get jobs, you get energy independence, so that we're not held over a barrel by OPEC in the Middle East. All those things have obvious benefits.
- It's something that they've talked about it being a bridge energy, and to kind of transition us, perhaps, from some other fuels that we're running out of, things such as coal and oil.
- So when you talk about cons, you have to include the potential for damage to the environment that fracking can do.
- So if you look at the process of fracking, how first of all there is the actual fracking, injecting the poisonous cocktail of liquids into the ground that has the danger of water pollution. Then you have the process of actually the gas escaping, and then you have methane, the gas coming up, and then you have gas escaping into the atmosphere.
- Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, about 24, 28 times more powerful than carbon monoxide. So is that a concern of that now escaping into the atmosphere, if the well construction's not done properly. There's a lot of water that's required to do hydraulic fracturing, several million gallons, typically. That water is injected, and then it will come back up to the surface. Now it comes back up with a frack fluid, but with some of the other materials that have been down there, typically high dissolved solids. And that gets to be an issue, how do you dispose of this properly and not cause problems other places?
- Then you have the problem of once they take the gas out of the ground, they put them into compressor stations. And these compressor stations actually cause a great deal of air pollution. There is a county in Wyoming where the most fracking is that now has a smog problem worse than Los Angeles. And the entire process actually causes noise pollution. The people who live near fracking are complaining all the while of the horrible noise.
- Right behind me, you can see and hear two flaring gas wells. You can hear how loud it is. It sounds like a jet engine.
- So if you're living near this, what was once very pristine and quiet, it can get very noisy while some of these activities are going on.
- When they frack in forests or other pristine areas, they have to put in new roads. The new roads themselves are detrimental to the wildlife there, and putting in these drill pads is detrimental to the wildlife. So it's clear that fracking in natural forests and other areas, which is going on, is very destructive to the natural environment. Then we have the problem of the pipelines themselves. Some of these pipelines are dangerous. We have had instances in the United States and other places of pipelines exploding. And there's also the question, similarly, to creating the roads. To have the trucks come in, you have to destroy some areas to put the pipeline in. So that is another destruction of the environment.
- We've had a significant increase in the numbers of accidents happening on the roadways in rural Pennsylvania because of fracking. And there are other bad social outcomes and social problems created by fracking. It basically destroys local communities. It adds to the anonymity of the community, because only certain kinds of people know how to do that work. So it invites them in and drives others out. You've had a significant increase in rural Pennsylvania in phenomenon of sexual diseases. And that's, in part, attributed to the trafficking that takes place around various mining operations. Again, people don't know each other. They use each other. There's a culture of anonymity. And there's a culture of social decline that's brought about by fracking. So there's social impacts that take place, as well as environmental impacts. All of them are bad.
- The most important point to begin with is that there's so much uncertainty. So I think we can agree that when you read the scientific literature, it's quite difficult to know just how to assess the ethics of fracking. So you've got arguments on both sides. You have good reason to be concerned about air quality, about water quality, about methane emissions, about spoiling of the local environment. You've got reason to be concerned too about what's going to happen with the local community. So there are definite moral concerns.
- Well, there are several categories to think about whether fracking is ethical or not. One category is transparency. If something is not open and transparent, then we begin to have ethical questions. So the fracking industry, for example, has done everything it can to hide what the contents of the fracking fluid is. So using poisonous fluid, and not revealing to the public what exactly is in there, that's not an ethical practice. The fracking industry went out of its way to get an exemption from the Clean Water Act, known in the world as the Halliburton loophole. Now if they believed that what they were doing was totally safe, why would they want an exemption from the Clean Water Act? So there's some ethical questions there, looking for an exemption. Then there's the ethical questions of they know that their casings have a limited lifespan. They're made of concrete. Concrete does not last an infinite amount of time. According to all of the industry reports of the people who make the concrete pipelines, I think the best case scenario is they might last 100 years, maybe.
- This bubbling is occurring in a pool of water that's accumulated around the wellhead. This is methane and perhaps other hydrocarbon gases, leaking from outside the well, and getting into the atmosphere. This occurrence is not uncommon. Data from Pennsylvania in the last three years show that this kind of leaking occurs in about one out of every 20 brand-new wells. Industry data shows over time that that kind of leakage begins to occur much more frequently as the wells age.
- So they know that in time, it's going to cause a problem. They're denying that. That's not ethical behavior.
- This is a case of uncertainty. We know precisely that we don't know whether fracking will really present significant harms, significant harms to again, human health, to the environment, and to local communities. The question then is what criteria the gas companies, and government authorities as well, need to meet before we can say that going ahead with fracking would be justified, that there would be good moral reason to frack.
- It's typical in American thinking about ethics to use a cost-benefit analysis. But a cost-benefit analysis is too narrow for the issues that are being raised by fracking. So there is another risk management principle, the precautionary principle, that evaluates activities in the light of economic, surely economic impact, but also social, environmental, human health, et cetera. And so there's another principle that is more holistic, that looks at the whole situation, and not just the cost, and not just the economic benefit over against potential harms.
- But in general, I think most professionals, we take an oath or we sign on that whatever our activity is, is to do no harm, or as an engineer, to protect human health and the environment. Could it be done better? Yes, in my opinion. Can it be more transparent? Perhaps. Should there be more oversight? There's just things we don't know. It's not like everything is a black and white thing. Do we see an immediate effect if there's a problem with this, or something? I would like to have seen a better approach to a long-term planning and a more organized approach, and how this fits in, and what we do if something does happen, more contingency plans.
- Proceeding with fracking, ethically, you have to think about a number of issues. What we need to be doing is proper accounting for everything we do. And that includes including harm to the environment. You have to include that in the cost of doing business. If you don't, you're cooking the books.
- Well, if one examines the congressional committees that make the regulations around fracking or around extractions, one then sees that the campaign contributions to the congresspeople who serve on those committees from the energy industries is rather large. So yes, the evidence is circumstantial, but when you see very large contributions from energy companies going to the congresspeople who sit on the committees that write the regulations for those industries, and the regulations for those industries are rather lax, one begins to wonder what the relationship between the contributions and the regulations is. So ethical would be that people who sit on congressional committees that make rules about the energy industry shouldn't be accepting contributions from the energy industry. That would be an ethical practice.
- A philosopher named John Rawls, who was an important 20th-century political thinker, talked about the curse of money in politics. You need money in politics. We know that. Since the '70s, since the Buckley decision, the Supreme Court really has allowed money to flood our political process. And money does really talk. So money was considered to be a form of speech. And if money is a form of speech, money talks quite loudly, and has a lot of power in forming policies, policies not always in the interest of citizens. So if I'm President Obama, this is what makes the ethics of fracking complicated. You got to assess it within your global energy policy. So different forms of energy have downsides and upsides. Take nuclear energy, I mean, gosh, why not do that instead of fracking? Well, there too, we know the dangers. There's good reason to be quite wary. You'll hear that argument made sometimes, well, we need the energy, natural gas is better than coal, gas poses threats to the local environment. When you hear that, sometimes the people act as if those threats to the local environment and threats to the people who live on farms, close to fracking, sometimes people act as if or talk as if those threats don't need to be redressed somehow or other. Well, just too bad for those people. They've got to make sacrifices for the national good. If that were the final assessment, then you'd have to take some measures to right the wrongs as best as possible that these people have suffered.
- We don't even know if we can clean up an aquifer that's been fouled by fracking wastewater, or fracking toxic chemicals or radioactive wastewater, things like that. We don't even know that we can accomplish that. So people are worried about that, and I believe President Obama is worried about that too. I don't think he has any intention of walking away from responsible environmental regulation. And I have no doubt that he would be on board with what I regard as a very important campaign, and that is for national standards for proper hydraulic fracturing, instead of a patchwork of states. The problem with just doing a patchwork of state regulations for hydraulic fracturing is that you have differing standards from state to state. And you can have differing standards. What does that lead to? The state that imposes the least restrictions, the state that taxes it the least is the one that's trying to attract more of that industry into its borders. And that's what you get. You get a race to the bottom, unless you have uniform national standards. And that's what I'd like to see.
- For a person as intelligent and well-informed as President Obama is, it would be hard to believe that he doesn't know more about fracking. He seems to be caught in a hard place between environmentalists and the energy industry. I do think that he needs to act more resolutely against fracking. Right now, the environmental issue he's most caught up on is the Keystone pipeline, where he also seems to be in a hard place and trying to make a decision. He frequently says all the right words about climate change, and he's certainly done some good things, in terms of the EPA of trying to make new regulations that cut down on pollution. But I have to say, in terms of fracking, he has not stepped up to the plate.
- So as president, my first step, bring heads together, try to come to some clarity. In the meantime, sure, seems like a moratorium would be appropriate. Otherwise, you're rushing to action without really being clear on the consequences.
- [Narrator] In 2011, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett penned Act 13, a measure to collect a small impact fee, and to establish distances of gas wells and processing facilities from homes and water supplies. Along with this bill came several gifts to the gas industry. One component was the stripping of local zoning laws when permitting gas facilities like wells, pipelines, and compressor stations. The other, a physician's gag order to keep secret their chemical mixture, which hinders doctors from treating their patients to their fullest potential.
- When a patient comes in and I suspect that he may be affected by a chemical that may be in the area of a well, whether it be from a spill, whether it be that he was working on the well, particularly, I'm not allowed, after I find out about the chemicals, including the ones that are considered trade secrets, to divulge that to anybody else in particular. Ethically, I should be able to tell the patient what he or she has been exposed to. Where it becomes a problem, and the law does not state, where our responsibilities stop at that point. The patient may tell a family member, or they may tell somebody else. However, my responsibility, once I tell the patient, is also to write a note or a contract with the gas company saying that I will not divulge this information to anybody else. So it becomes privileged information, and I think that's really a mistake. And that part, it is specific. I could not divulge this to anybody else, including another physician that I may want to refer to, or poison control center, for example. They would have to also make the request, and as well, sign a waiver saying that they will not divulge this further. This creates a problem because not a lot of information is out there about how these chemicals are gonna impact a person or a community at large. And frankly, I haven't been too impressed that they, even the company itself, knows all the particular chemicals that's gone into a particular well. They do so much subcontracting that it wouldn't be unusual for me to think that if I make a call and try to get all the chemicals involved, that they would refer me to seven or eight other companies, who themselves may want to get waivers of confidentiality as well. And that just compounds the problem.
- With all the stories out there, some people were surprised that we allowed fracking on our land. But we talked with experts and learned the facts about drilling for oil and natural gas. And guess what? It's safe. Safe for our land, our water, and the air.
- Well, when the industry says fracking is safe, they are not defining the word safe. So if we mean by safe that no drinking water will be contaminated, one could say that they're not telling the truth, because the evidence on the ground is that we know, proven factual, that there are people who live near fracking who can no longer use their drinking water, who can no longer use water to feed their animals, 'cause their animals have gotten sick from the drinking water. That is a fact. If the water is harming animals, and the water is harming people, the water is not safe. That has been caused by fracking. Therefore, fracking is not safe. So the facts on the ground indicate that it's not safe.
- I've seen these commercials on, you know, safe, I mean, we could argue, how do you define safe. I mean, a lot of those people there, they were family farmers that were gonna lose their farm. They basically had no other choice to keep that. And they've not had any problems. On the other hand, we've heard stories about when there's been some terrible problems, when people had their water contaminated or other illnesses.
- When they say that fracking is safe, and they know that there are negative outcomes, and some significant negative outcomes, they're lying. But they do so in accordance with a well-established business principle. And that is, say it's good, insist that it's good, and people will believe you, if you say it often enough.
- The industry itself shows that at least 4 or 5% of the methane escapes from the wells. It isn't captured. That is significant global warming. There are other studies that seem to indicate that even more than 4 or 5% escape from the wells. So is that safe? If you're concerned about global warming and global climate change, that's not safe either.
- I think a lot of this is still very new. We don't know. Maybe it's safe in the short term, but is it safe in the long term? So that's some of the questions we have to ask. And then some of the stuff we may not get a second chance with, particularly if a water supply is affected. What do we do now to fix that? So it's concerning. On the other hand, we need the energy. Is there a way to balance this?
- [Narrator] Gas industry advertising can be deceiving in many ways. For example, it takes about 4 million gallons of fresh water to frack a well. Once it is mixed with chemicals and comes back up from the ground, it can't be cleaned enough to return to the ecosystem with current technology. Looking at this ad, it leads you to believe that they are suggesting they're attempting to recycle all of the water they use, when in fact it's just the water that comes back up from the well. The company can re-use some of it in another frack job, but it will eventually find its way into an injection well deep inside the ground, where it will remain forever. These injection wells are known to cause earthquakes around the world.
- Cabot and Water Use Committed to 100% recycling. It's probably, once again, on the border there because there's really nothing incorrect about that statement. But what are they leaving out? They don't tell you where they're doing it and how they're doing it. So I would like to have seen more specifics about that. So once again, I think people want to do the right thing. You want to believe that. Could they be doing this better? I think perhaps yes.
- There should be attached a responsibility for speaking untruth. That in itself is a significant ethical lapse. And it's better if we can attribute honesty to business interests, rather than mendacious statements such as fracking is safe. Part of the problem is that people get greedy. And some people have made a lot of money on fracking. And so to the few go the spoils. And they ignore or lie about the truth of what in fact is being done.
- I think the important point is that we know don't really know. And in cases where we know we don't really know, though we're aware there are moral risks here, it falls on the actors, the persons who want to proceed with fracking, whether they be the natural gas companies or government authorities, it falls on those people to do a lot of leg work to make it really clear that matters are safe. And misleading statements, advertising campaigns that obfuscate the fact that we don't really know, those are morally objectionable.
- I don't believe that God would frack. God, the God that I worship, and that many people revere, is the God of justice, a God of truth and honesty, and a God of integrity. And as such, then, knowing full well the implications of fracking on human health, on the soil, on biotic life, on human communities, God wouldn't frack. There's lots of poison. There's toxicity everywhere. But you don't make the claim that it's good because it's there.
- Well, in the Jewish tradition, the one I'm most familiar with, the wisdom story that has come down that's at least a couple of thousand years old is that God said to Adam, "See the world. See how beautiful it is. It's your responsibility to take care of it because if you destroy it, there's nobody to come after it just to save it." So human beings have the responsibility of stewardship over creation. That is true in pretty much every religious tradition that I know of, including the Native American tradition, the people who cared for our land first. So human beings' responsibility towards creation is to be good stewards of it. In the Native American tradition, that's to make sure that the seventh generation has the same opportunities and resources that we have. It's looking at things way into the future. Every religious tradition says that the earth is sacred, and that we have a responsibility to respect the sacredness of the earth, and to maintain the environment in a healthy and responsible way. All of the evidence is that fracking hurts the environment. All of the forms of extreme extraction, fracking, tar sands, deepwater Arctic drilling, mountaintop removal, all of those things are like raping the earth. They are a violation of what our religious traditions tell us about the human responsibility to be good stewards over the Earth.
- Well, my own view is that we need national standards. And to do that, we need to make sure that oil and gas companies comply with national environmental standards. We're talking about statutes that have been in effect in this country for dozens of years, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, RCRA. All of these are very, very well-established and well-thought out environmental statutes to cover the entire United States that every industry in the United States has to comply with except one, and that's the oil and gas industry. Why does it have exemptions from them? Because they can. Because they've got all this money to do lobbying with. And that's the only reason. It's not because it makes sense, not because it's ethical, not because people want exemptions for the oil and gas industries because it's logical, or anything like that. It's only because it's a power play, because of the money involved in that industry. My own view is, all of those exemptions have to be repealed. Of all of the industries that can afford to treat the environment with kindness, oil and gas is right up there. They've got lots of money. They can do it the right way. They can think things through, and make sure that they do their extractions in a safe and environmentally friendly way, ways that are not gonna foul the aquifers, ways that are not gonna pollute people's wells, ways that are not gonna pollute the air. So in my view, it should be a national standard. And to do that, you repeal these loopholes for the oil and gas industry. So we've done that. We've introduced legislation in this Congress to repeal the loopholes in all four of those statutes. And I myself have introduced two bills in the 113th Congress. So the Cleaner Act removes the oil and gas company exemption from RCRA, which deals with hazardous waste. Every other company in the United States has to comply with proper disposal techniques for hazardous waste. Well, we know that wastewater from fracking is not regulated in any way right now. And it should be. Because we know that there are toxins involved. There's benzene. Benzene causes cancer. There's toluene. Toluene causes cancer. There is radioactive isotope involved. Radioactivity causes cancer. We need to worry about these things, and if we're gonna regulate them properly, the RCRA exemption for oil and gas has to be removed.
- And we as citizens need to organize first to preserve our democratic system, overturn laws that allow unlimited campaign contributions. So first we have to work on democracy, and then we have to work on trying to get the laws changed that protect the environment and make the energy companies act in responsible ways. We are all in this together. Climate change affects everybody. Water pollution affects everybody. Air pollution affects everybody. We need to come from an ethic of interconnectedness, of interbeing, realizing that something that harms our neighbor harms us. Something that harms the earth harms us. And to take responsibility for making sure that we protect each other, as we protect the Earth.
- I would like to see more information and better decisions, as well as a long-term plan. I think a lot of this is this big rush now, but how is this all coordinated? And then where do we locate things like the compressor stations? If we want to use the natural gas as a resource, how do we get it to who needs it? I heard on the news the other night, I guess New York is very excited they're starting to get natural gas in, to switch out a lot of the places where they've used heating oil to heat. So is that a good thing? I mean, that's gonna make their air quality better, but at what cost to where the natural gas is coming from? And it was an interesting interview. They were talking to people and they thought this was great. Their prices are gonna go down. But yet at what cost to where the gas is coming from? So I think we need to increase awareness about this. Who should do it? That's the tough thing. How do we get, is it the government? Is it private parties? Is it some combination of that? I think that's, hopefully we'll get this figured out.
- What I would do with regards to hydraulic fracking is look at its impact on human communities and on the earth itself, and evaluate it in the light of whether it contributes to the well-being of human beings or the earth, or takes from and harms the community and the planet.
- We are really robbing our children, grandchildren of a safe and healthy future. We have to be responsible citizens. Unfortunately, we have been trained to become consumers and passive. And the history and tradition of America is strong only when we are active citizens.
- [Narrator] In the end, the power really belongs to us, the consumer, the citizen, the voter. We need to be better informed about the consequences of our actions, to make informed decisions about our energy future, decisions that will affect ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.
- I didn't move into the country to be looking at an Industrial Revolution right up the road from me.
- I don't recall hearing about water being on fire.
- [Woman] And sometimes, it will light quite spectacularly!
- Basically, the technology is safe, as far as we can tell.
- [Woman] And the emissions that come out of that are carcinogens, and I don't want to get cancer again.
- [Narrator] Drilling for natural gas, or fracking, has been going on in the United States for 60 years. New techniques, called slick water, high pressure, horizontal drilling, introduced in the last decade, have made the extraction of natural gas cheaper, but at what cost? As this industrial process encroaches on our residential and agricultural areas, negative effects to our environment and health are becoming evident. Yet fracking continues to move forward, despite any long-term studies on the damage it may cause. This film examines the ethical and moral issues surrounding the process called fracking.
- Fracking is a technology that allows us to access natural gas at a very deep depth, typically between 5,000 and 8,000 feet. It's a way of drilling into the subsurface, and then accessing that material through a series of injections of a high pressure solution that basically cracks open this rock, and allows the gas to then come back up to the surface.
- On the one hand, you have to think about the benefits you get out of fracking. You get cheaper energy, you get jobs, you get energy independence, so that we're not held over a barrel by OPEC in the Middle East. All those things have obvious benefits.
- It's something that they've talked about it being a bridge energy, and to kind of transition us, perhaps, from some other fuels that we're running out of, things such as coal and oil.
- So when you talk about cons, you have to include the potential for damage to the environment that fracking can do.
- So if you look at the process of fracking, how first of all there is the actual fracking, injecting the poisonous cocktail of liquids into the ground that has the danger of water pollution. Then you have the process of actually the gas escaping, and then you have methane, the gas coming up, and then you have gas escaping into the atmosphere.
- Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, about 24, 28 times more powerful than carbon monoxide. So is that a concern of that now escaping into the atmosphere, if the well construction's not done properly. There's a lot of water that's required to do hydraulic fracturing, several million gallons, typically. That water is injected, and then it will come back up to the surface. Now it comes back up with a frack fluid, but with some of the other materials that have been down there, typically high dissolved solids. And that gets to be an issue, how do you dispose of this properly and not cause problems other places?
- Then you have the problem of once they take the gas out of the ground, they put them into compressor stations. And these compressor stations actually cause a great deal of air pollution. There is a county in Wyoming where the most fracking is that now has a smog problem worse than Los Angeles. And the entire process actually causes noise pollution. The people who live near fracking are complaining all the while of the horrible noise.
- Right behind me, you can see and hear two flaring gas wells. You can hear how loud it is. It sounds like a jet engine.
- So if you're living near this, what was once very pristine and quiet, it can get very noisy while some of these activities are going on.
- When they frack in forests or other pristine areas, they have to put in new roads. The new roads themselves are detrimental to the wildlife there, and putting in these drill pads is detrimental to the wildlife. So it's clear that fracking in natural forests and other areas, which is going on, is very destructive to the natural environment. Then we have the problem of the pipelines themselves. Some of these pipelines are dangerous. We have had instances in the United States and other places of pipelines exploding. And there's also the question, similarly, to creating the roads. To have the trucks come in, you have to destroy some areas to put the pipeline in. So that is another destruction of the environment.
- We've had a significant increase in the numbers of accidents happening on the roadways in rural Pennsylvania because of fracking. And there are other bad social outcomes and social problems created by fracking. It basically destroys local communities. It adds to the anonymity of the community, because only certain kinds of people know how to do that work. So it invites them in and drives others out. You've had a significant increase in rural Pennsylvania in phenomenon of sexual diseases. And that's, in part, attributed to the trafficking that takes place around various mining operations. Again, people don't know each other. They use each other. There's a culture of anonymity. And there's a culture of social decline that's brought about by fracking. So there's social impacts that take place, as well as environmental impacts. All of them are bad.
- The most important point to begin with is that there's so much uncertainty. So I think we can agree that when you read the scientific literature, it's quite difficult to know just how to assess the ethics of fracking. So you've got arguments on both sides. You have good reason to be concerned about air quality, about water quality, about methane emissions, about spoiling of the local environment. You've got reason to be concerned too about what's going to happen with the local community. So there are definite moral concerns.
- Well, there are several categories to think about whether fracking is ethical or not. One category is transparency. If something is not open and transparent, then we begin to have ethical questions. So the fracking industry, for example, has done everything it can to hide what the contents of the fracking fluid is. So using poisonous fluid, and not revealing to the public what exactly is in there, that's not an ethical practice. The fracking industry went out of its way to get an exemption from the Clean Water Act, known in the world as the Halliburton loophole. Now if they believed that what they were doing was totally safe, why would they want an exemption from the Clean Water Act? So there's some ethical questions there, looking for an exemption. Then there's the ethical questions of they know that their casings have a limited lifespan. They're made of concrete. Concrete does not last an infinite amount of time. According to all of the industry reports of the people who make the concrete pipelines, I think the best case scenario is they might last 100 years, maybe.
- This bubbling is occurring in a pool of water that's accumulated around the wellhead. This is methane and perhaps other hydrocarbon gases, leaking from outside the well, and getting into the atmosphere. This occurrence is not uncommon. Data from Pennsylvania in the last three years show that this kind of leaking occurs in about one out of every 20 brand-new wells. Industry data shows over time that that kind of leakage begins to occur much more frequently as the wells age.
- So they know that in time, it's going to cause a problem. They're denying that. That's not ethical behavior.
- This is a case of uncertainty. We know precisely that we don't know whether fracking will really present significant harms, significant harms to again, human health, to the environment, and to local communities. The question then is what criteria the gas companies, and government authorities as well, need to meet before we can say that going ahead with fracking would be justified, that there would be good moral reason to frack.
- It's typical in American thinking about ethics to use a cost-benefit analysis. But a cost-benefit analysis is too narrow for the issues that are being raised by fracking. So there is another risk management principle, the precautionary principle, that evaluates activities in the light of economic, surely economic impact, but also social, environmental, human health, et cetera. And so there's another principle that is more holistic, that looks at the whole situation, and not just the cost, and not just the economic benefit over against potential harms.
- But in general, I think most professionals, we take an oath or we sign on that whatever our activity is, is to do no harm, or as an engineer, to protect human health and the environment. Could it be done better? Yes, in my opinion. Can it be more transparent? Perhaps. Should there be more oversight? There's just things we don't know. It's not like everything is a black and white thing. Do we see an immediate effect if there's a problem with this, or something? I would like to have seen a better approach to a long-term planning and a more organized approach, and how this fits in, and what we do if something does happen, more contingency plans.
- Proceeding with fracking, ethically, you have to think about a number of issues. What we need to be doing is proper accounting for everything we do. And that includes including harm to the environment. You have to include that in the cost of doing business. If you don't, you're cooking the books.
- Well, if one examines the congressional committees that make the regulations around fracking or around extractions, one then sees that the campaign contributions to the congresspeople who serve on those committees from the energy industries is rather large. So yes, the evidence is circumstantial, but when you see very large contributions from energy companies going to the congresspeople who sit on the committees that write the regulations for those industries, and the regulations for those industries are rather lax, one begins to wonder what the relationship between the contributions and the regulations is. So ethical would be that people who sit on congressional committees that make rules about the energy industry shouldn't be accepting contributions from the energy industry. That would be an ethical practice.
- A philosopher named John Rawls, who was an important 20th-century political thinker, talked about the curse of money in politics. You need money in politics. We know that. Since the '70s, since the Buckley decision, the Supreme Court really has allowed money to flood our political process. And money does really talk. So money was considered to be a form of speech. And if money is a form of speech, money talks quite loudly, and has a lot of power in forming policies, policies not always in the interest of citizens. So if I'm President Obama, this is what makes the ethics of fracking complicated. You got to assess it within your global energy policy. So different forms of energy have downsides and upsides. Take nuclear energy, I mean, gosh, why not do that instead of fracking? Well, there too, we know the dangers. There's good reason to be quite wary. You'll hear that argument made sometimes, well, we need the energy, natural gas is better than coal, gas poses threats to the local environment. When you hear that, sometimes the people act as if those threats to the local environment and threats to the people who live on farms, close to fracking, sometimes people act as if or talk as if those threats don't need to be redressed somehow or other. Well, just too bad for those people. They've got to make sacrifices for the national good. If that were the final assessment, then you'd have to take some measures to right the wrongs as best as possible that these people have suffered.
- We don't even know if we can clean up an aquifer that's been fouled by fracking wastewater, or fracking toxic chemicals or radioactive wastewater, things like that. We don't even know that we can accomplish that. So people are worried about that, and I believe President Obama is worried about that too. I don't think he has any intention of walking away from responsible environmental regulation. And I have no doubt that he would be on board with what I regard as a very important campaign, and that is for national standards for proper hydraulic fracturing, instead of a patchwork of states. The problem with just doing a patchwork of state regulations for hydraulic fracturing is that you have differing standards from state to state. And you can have differing standards. What does that lead to? The state that imposes the least restrictions, the state that taxes it the least is the one that's trying to attract more of that industry into its borders. And that's what you get. You get a race to the bottom, unless you have uniform national standards. And that's what I'd like to see.
- For a person as intelligent and well-informed as President Obama is, it would be hard to believe that he doesn't know more about fracking. He seems to be caught in a hard place between environmentalists and the energy industry. I do think that he needs to act more resolutely against fracking. Right now, the environmental issue he's most caught up on is the Keystone pipeline, where he also seems to be in a hard place and trying to make a decision. He frequently says all the right words about climate change, and he's certainly done some good things, in terms of the EPA of trying to make new regulations that cut down on pollution. But I have to say, in terms of fracking, he has not stepped up to the plate.
- So as president, my first step, bring heads together, try to come to some clarity. In the meantime, sure, seems like a moratorium would be appropriate. Otherwise, you're rushing to action without really being clear on the consequences.
- [Narrator] In 2011, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett penned Act 13, a measure to collect a small impact fee, and to establish distances of gas wells and processing facilities from homes and water supplies. Along with this bill came several gifts to the gas industry. One component was the stripping of local zoning laws when permitting gas facilities like wells, pipelines, and compressor stations. The other, a physician's gag order to keep secret their chemical mixture, which hinders doctors from treating their patients to their fullest potential.
- When a patient comes in and I suspect that he may be affected by a chemical that may be in the area of a well, whether it be from a spill, whether it be that he was working on the well, particularly, I'm not allowed, after I find out about the chemicals, including the ones that are considered trade secrets, to divulge that to anybody else in particular. Ethically, I should be able to tell the patient what he or she has been exposed to. Where it becomes a problem, and the law does not state, where our responsibilities stop at that point. The patient may tell a family member, or they may tell somebody else. However, my responsibility, once I tell the patient, is also to write a note or a contract with the gas company saying that I will not divulge this information to anybody else. So it becomes privileged information, and I think that's really a mistake. And that part, it is specific. I could not divulge this to anybody else, including another physician that I may want to refer to, or poison control center, for example. They would have to also make the request, and as well, sign a waiver saying that they will not divulge this further. This creates a problem because not a lot of information is out there about how these chemicals are gonna impact a person or a community at large. And frankly, I haven't been too impressed that they, even the company itself, knows all the particular chemicals that's gone into a particular well. They do so much subcontracting that it wouldn't be unusual for me to think that if I make a call and try to get all the chemicals involved, that they would refer me to seven or eight other companies, who themselves may want to get waivers of confidentiality as well. And that just compounds the problem.
- With all the stories out there, some people were surprised that we allowed fracking on our land. But we talked with experts and learned the facts about drilling for oil and natural gas. And guess what? It's safe. Safe for our land, our water, and the air.
- Well, when the industry says fracking is safe, they are not defining the word safe. So if we mean by safe that no drinking water will be contaminated, one could say that they're not telling the truth, because the evidence on the ground is that we know, proven factual, that there are people who live near fracking who can no longer use their drinking water, who can no longer use water to feed their animals, 'cause their animals have gotten sick from the drinking water. That is a fact. If the water is harming animals, and the water is harming people, the water is not safe. That has been caused by fracking. Therefore, fracking is not safe. So the facts on the ground indicate that it's not safe.
- I've seen these commercials on, you know, safe, I mean, we could argue, how do you define safe. I mean, a lot of those people there, they were family farmers that were gonna lose their farm. They basically had no other choice to keep that. And they've not had any problems. On the other hand, we've heard stories about when there's been some terrible problems, when people had their water contaminated or other illnesses.
- When they say that fracking is safe, and they know that there are negative outcomes, and some significant negative outcomes, they're lying. But they do so in accordance with a well-established business principle. And that is, say it's good, insist that it's good, and people will believe you, if you say it often enough.
- The industry itself shows that at least 4 or 5% of the methane escapes from the wells. It isn't captured. That is significant global warming. There are other studies that seem to indicate that even more than 4 or 5% escape from the wells. So is that safe? If you're concerned about global warming and global climate change, that's not safe either.
- I think a lot of this is still very new. We don't know. Maybe it's safe in the short term, but is it safe in the long term? So that's some of the questions we have to ask. And then some of the stuff we may not get a second chance with, particularly if a water supply is affected. What do we do now to fix that? So it's concerning. On the other hand, we need the energy. Is there a way to balance this?
- [Narrator] Gas industry advertising can be deceiving in many ways. For example, it takes about 4 million gallons of fresh water to frack a well. Once it is mixed with chemicals and comes back up from the ground, it can't be cleaned enough to return to the ecosystem with current technology. Looking at this ad, it leads you to believe that they are suggesting they're attempting to recycle all of the water they use, when in fact it's just the water that comes back up from the well. The company can re-use some of it in another frack job, but it will eventually find its way into an injection well deep inside the ground, where it will remain forever. These injection wells are known to cause earthquakes around the world.
- Cabot and Water Use Committed to 100% recycling. It's probably, once again, on the border there because there's really nothing incorrect about that statement. But what are they leaving out? They don't tell you where they're doing it and how they're doing it. So I would like to have seen more specifics about that. So once again, I think people want to do the right thing. You want to believe that. Could they be doing this better? I think perhaps yes.
- There should be attached a responsibility for speaking untruth. That in itself is a significant ethical lapse. And it's better if we can attribute honesty to business interests, rather than mendacious statements such as fracking is safe. Part of the problem is that people get greedy. And some people have made a lot of money on fracking. And so to the few go the spoils. And they ignore or lie about the truth of what in fact is being done.
- I think the important point is that we know don't really know. And in cases where we know we don't really know, though we're aware there are moral risks here, it falls on the actors, the persons who want to proceed with fracking, whether they be the natural gas companies or government authorities, it falls on those people to do a lot of leg work to make it really clear that matters are safe. And misleading statements, advertising campaigns that obfuscate the fact that we don't really know, those are morally objectionable.
- I don't believe that God would frack. God, the God that I worship, and that many people revere, is the God of justice, a God of truth and honesty, and a God of integrity. And as such, then, knowing full well the implications of fracking on human health, on the soil, on biotic life, on human communities, God wouldn't frack. There's lots of poison. There's toxicity everywhere. But you don't make the claim that it's good because it's there.
- Well, in the Jewish tradition, the one I'm most familiar with, the wisdom story that has come down that's at least a couple of thousand years old is that God said to Adam, "See the world. See how beautiful it is. It's your responsibility to take care of it because if you destroy it, there's nobody to come after it just to save it." So human beings have the responsibility of stewardship over creation. That is true in pretty much every religious tradition that I know of, including the Native American tradition, the people who cared for our land first. So human beings' responsibility towards creation is to be good stewards of it. In the Native American tradition, that's to make sure that the seventh generation has the same opportunities and resources that we have. It's looking at things way into the future. Every religious tradition says that the earth is sacred, and that we have a responsibility to respect the sacredness of the earth, and to maintain the environment in a healthy and responsible way. All of the evidence is that fracking hurts the environment. All of the forms of extreme extraction, fracking, tar sands, deepwater Arctic drilling, mountaintop removal, all of those things are like raping the earth. They are a violation of what our religious traditions tell us about the human responsibility to be good stewards over the Earth.
- Well, my own view is that we need national standards. And to do that, we need to make sure that oil and gas companies comply with national environmental standards. We're talking about statutes that have been in effect in this country for dozens of years, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, RCRA. All of these are very, very well-established and well-thought out environmental statutes to cover the entire United States that every industry in the United States has to comply with except one, and that's the oil and gas industry. Why does it have exemptions from them? Because they can. Because they've got all this money to do lobbying with. And that's the only reason. It's not because it makes sense, not because it's ethical, not because people want exemptions for the oil and gas industries because it's logical, or anything like that. It's only because it's a power play, because of the money involved in that industry. My own view is, all of those exemptions have to be repealed. Of all of the industries that can afford to treat the environment with kindness, oil and gas is right up there. They've got lots of money. They can do it the right way. They can think things through, and make sure that they do their extractions in a safe and environmentally friendly way, ways that are not gonna foul the aquifers, ways that are not gonna pollute people's wells, ways that are not gonna pollute the air. So in my view, it should be a national standard. And to do that, you repeal these loopholes for the oil and gas industry. So we've done that. We've introduced legislation in this Congress to repeal the loopholes in all four of those statutes. And I myself have introduced two bills in the 113th Congress. So the Cleaner Act removes the oil and gas company exemption from RCRA, which deals with hazardous waste. Every other company in the United States has to comply with proper disposal techniques for hazardous waste. Well, we know that wastewater from fracking is not regulated in any way right now. And it should be. Because we know that there are toxins involved. There's benzene. Benzene causes cancer. There's toluene. Toluene causes cancer. There is radioactive isotope involved. Radioactivity causes cancer. We need to worry about these things, and if we're gonna regulate them properly, the RCRA exemption for oil and gas has to be removed.
- And we as citizens need to organize first to preserve our democratic system, overturn laws that allow unlimited campaign contributions. So first we have to work on democracy, and then we have to work on trying to get the laws changed that protect the environment and make the energy companies act in responsible ways. We are all in this together. Climate change affects everybody. Water pollution affects everybody. Air pollution affects everybody. We need to come from an ethic of interconnectedness, of interbeing, realizing that something that harms our neighbor harms us. Something that harms the earth harms us. And to take responsibility for making sure that we protect each other, as we protect the Earth.
- I would like to see more information and better decisions, as well as a long-term plan. I think a lot of this is this big rush now, but how is this all coordinated? And then where do we locate things like the compressor stations? If we want to use the natural gas as a resource, how do we get it to who needs it? I heard on the news the other night, I guess New York is very excited they're starting to get natural gas in, to switch out a lot of the places where they've used heating oil to heat. So is that a good thing? I mean, that's gonna make their air quality better, but at what cost to where the natural gas is coming from? And it was an interesting interview. They were talking to people and they thought this was great. Their prices are gonna go down. But yet at what cost to where the gas is coming from? So I think we need to increase awareness about this. Who should do it? That's the tough thing. How do we get, is it the government? Is it private parties? Is it some combination of that? I think that's, hopefully we'll get this figured out.
- What I would do with regards to hydraulic fracking is look at its impact on human communities and on the earth itself, and evaluate it in the light of whether it contributes to the well-being of human beings or the earth, or takes from and harms the community and the planet.
- We are really robbing our children, grandchildren of a safe and healthy future. We have to be responsible citizens. Unfortunately, we have been trained to become consumers and passive. And the history and tradition of America is strong only when we are active citizens.
- [Narrator] In the end, the power really belongs to us, the consumer, the citizen, the voter. We need to be better informed about the consequences of our actions, to make informed decisions about our energy future, decisions that will affect ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.