Tag Archives: fight-the-oil

Folk music icon Pete Seeger and actor Mark Ruffalo joined elected officials and environmental advocates in Albany, NY on Tuesday to warn that a new method of gas extraction is destructive, unpredictable, and a threat to public health. Ruffalo, a Sullivan County resident who recently appeared in the film The Kids Are Alright, held up a jar of water from a Pennsylvania town where the method of hydraulic fracturing (or hydro-fracking, for short) has contaminated the water supply. He warned that New Yorkers could suffer the same fate unless the state legislature takes action in the coming days. Seeger, a longtime environmental activist, composed a song about fracking for the event highlighting the similarities between natural gas extraction and oil drilling: “And when 'drill baby drill' turns to 'spill baby spill,' God’s counting on me – God's counting on you.” Hydro-fracking is a dirty, dangerous method of extracting gas from underground rock by drilling a well in the rock and then pumping thousands of gallons of a toxic soup of chemicals into the rock to create fissures that release the gas trapped inside. Many companies are seeking to ramp up gas production by starting hydro-fracking operations in NY state this year. Hydro-fracking has contaminated water across the country from Pennsylvania to Colorado and its effects are the subject of the new documentary GASLAND. NY's Dept of Environmental Conservation holds the authority to grant permits to oil and gas companies. The Dept has stated that it plans to allow hydro-fracking to begin despite pressure from a massive grassroots campaign has been waged across the state to “kill the drill.” One grassroots organization that has decided to fight the oil and gas industry on hydro-fracking on the national level is Frack Action. www.FrackAction.org added by: captainplanet71