Peter Brabeck, the Chairman of Nestle Group, has a theory about how the world should work regarding access to water and he would like to share his theory (of not sharing). Brabeck is not a fan of nature, at least not as it is understood today. Saying man can now provide “balance to nature.” Brabeck [...]

The fracking boom happened so quickly that nobody had any time to deal with the consequences. Not only did politicians not anticipate regulations, allowing the industry to operate in a kind of free-fire zone, but the industry didn’t recognize the massive amounts of limited resources they would need to continue fracking in the future. Specifically, [...]

The biggest reason for the decline in greenhouse gas emissions over the past couple years is the replacement of dirty coal with natural gas to generate electricity. But this will not last if the fracking that has unlocked so much natural gas leads to the release of underground methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Among all [...]

Marcy Wheeler alerts me to the huge economic consequences of the drought of 2012 as it relates to the Mississippi River. Since those canny Ron Paul supporters shut down the NAFTA Superhighway, the might Mississippi remains the key shipping highway connecting north and south in America. And because of the drought, the water level has [...]

The House of Representatives passed their one-year drought relief bill by a relatively thin margin yesterday, 223-197. They needed 35 votes from Democrats to get it across the line, as 46 Republicans begged off the bill. Here’s the roll call. The House passed this on the last possible day of the session before the August [...]

After weeks of apprehension, the Environmental Protection Agency will step in to supply drinking water to residents of Dimock, PA, a de facto acknowledgment that fracking led to contamination of the water supply in this town along the Delaware River Basin. On Friday, the agency announced it would bring tanks of drinking water to four [...]

I’m trying to figure out what happened in Dimock, Pennsylvania over the weekend. As you may know, Dimock, home to dozens of fracking wells and featured in the movie Gasland, experienced massive contamination with their water supply. For a time, Cabot Oil & Gas, the main fracking company in the region, provided free water to [...]

Back in 2008, after the Presidential election, I remember Rachel Maddow doing an interview with President-elect Obama and asking him about infrastructure needs, citing an American Society of Civil Engineering report giving the country a failing grade for infrastructure, with hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in projects needed for upgrades and maintenance. [...]

I’m saving my “What to Look for in 2012″ listicle for tomorrow, but one of the issues that may not make the list, but which is terribly important, is the battle in the states over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. 2011 was the year when this issue finally bubbled up to the surface (pardon the pun) [...]

For the first time, government scientists concluded that hydraulic fracturing, the process of shooting massive quantities of water and chemicals into rock to release natural gas, contaminates drinking water. The study concerns an incident in Pavillion, Wyoming, and culminates three years of research of the local aquifer. EPA constructed two deep monitoring wells to sample [...]

Here’s your daily (hourly?) outrage. The movie Gasland featured the residents of Dimock, PA. It’s one of the first cities filmmaker Josh Fox visits. He is handed a jar of putrid water and asked to have it tested. Predictably, it comes up contaminated with methane. The company that did the fracking in Dimock, Cabot Oil [...]