♪
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We have a supply of natural gas
that can last America nearly 100 years...
[APPLAUSE]
and my administration will take every possible action
to safely develop this energy.
The development of natural gas will create jobs
and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper,
where we develop a hundred-year supply of natural gas
that's right beneath our feet.
BILL CLINTON: The boom in oil and gas production
has driven oil imports to a near-20-year low
and natural gas production to an all-time high.
HILARY CLINTON: The United States will promote the use of shale gas.
Now I know that, in some places, is controversial.
PAUL RYAN: With 21st-century drilling technology,
you can get it out of the ground in a very safe and secure way.
MITT ROMNEY: I don't recall hearing about water being on fire.
We will have North American energy.
We're going to be independent.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you, God bless you,
and God bless the United States of America.
MAN, VOICE-OVER: Hi.
♪
My name is Josh Fox.
This is my house.
It's in the middle of the woods, tucked away on a dirt road
in a small town next to the Delaware River
called Milanville, Pennsylvania.
Just past my backyard, there's a stream
that feeds the Delaware.
It's been 5 years since the first proposal
to drill thousands of gas wells in the Delaware River Basin
came knocking at my door.
Every day you wake up with it--
the fate of my backyard,
the watershed for millions of people--
up in the air.
Sometimes, you can't figure out
what's going on in your own backyard
without figuring out all the places around the world
that your backyard's connected to.
And, as we know, in sequels,
the Empire strikes back.
So let's start where we left off...
when the tide came in.
♪
It was hard to believe my eyes.
As far as I could see,
the surface of the Gulf,
streaked with oil like ghosts along the surface.
Nothing could really prepare you.
We hadn't seen pictures like this on the news.
It had been widely reported that journalists' flights
were restricted to 3,000 feet and above.
Journalists would call up the FAA to clear their flights,
and BP would answer the phone.
And I don't know why. Maybe because it was a Sunday.
Maybe because it was the Fourth of July, and everybody was off.
But somehow, we got clearance to fly at any altitude we wanted,
so this is what it really looked like.
♪
Down on the ground, we weren't so lucky--
limited access to beaches--
but we weren't the only ones hitting roadblocks.
I was getting pretty good at this.
You don't really have time to sit back
and say, "Why the hell is this happening?"
Why is BP...
Are they in the back pocket? They got a cozy deal?
Is their lobbyist in Washington controlling this?
But, um, something stinks.
We're fighting harder with the Coast Guard and BP
than we're fighting the oil.
I don't even want to start to imagine things that--
Why would this be? Why would they be protected?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: We found out that BP was spraying chemical dispersants
on surfaces of the Gulf in huge volumes.
A chemical that had been banned in Britain
actually makes the oil more toxic
and sinks it out of sight.
They weren't solving the crisis, just hiding it.
It's going to be ugly if we quit spraying dispersant.
It's going to be black oil all over the surface.
But this monster that continues to grow every day,
at least it's not invisible.
Right now, they're making it invisible, impossible to fight.
For every decision they've made throughout the catastrophe,
there's been huge negative impacts, and we--
the people of Louisiana, Mississippi,
Alabama, and Florida-- are going to have to deal
with those negative impacts for a very, very long time.
FOX: Years? Decades?
SUBRA: Decades, decades. Generations.
And that's what is so devastating
to the fishing communities.
FOX: So all the dispersant does is it makes the oil sink?
It makes it sink, and it spreads it
throughout the water column and into the sediment.
And most of the water column and the sediment
have been damaged or destroyed
as far as aquatic organisms are concerned
because it's toxic.
We lost the Gulf of Mexico
as far as an ecosystem,
as a productive ecosystem.
We didn't lose the Gulf of Mexico
as a source of fuel, fossil fuel.
And that drilling and production will continue,
even though the ecosystem has been destroyed.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: What I was learning in the Gulf
was that no matter how huge the catastrophe was,
what really mattered was who was telling the story.
Let's go catch the sunset, guys, then we'll come back in and check.
You know, if I get sick in 20 years, so be it,
but my kids' bodies are still developing.
They say, "Oh, well, everything's fine,
"but stay inside your house and keep your doors closed
and your air conditioner on recirculation."
You know, I was taught not to throw so much as a Coke can in the Bayou.
This is our home.
This is where we eat, sleep, live.
This is us. We're Bayou people.
People don't understand something. This isn't just about an income.
This is about an entire way of life in its entirety.
We'll go out here and catch 150 pounds of shrimp,
or go craw fishing in the ditches or whatever,
a couple of hundred pounds of craw fish.
5 or 6 families will get together, no alcohol,
boil seafood, barbecue whatever,
and we have family time.
You know, without that there, I mean, yeah,
we could cook other food, but what about going in the bayou
and going in the pirogue with the kids, with no video games,
no TV, no nothing?
One on one, some people go into the mountains behind their house,
and they become one with nature.
That's the bayou for us.
If it's not there, what's the point of being here?
We're going to have a dead fishery, contaminated land,
a bag full of bills, and a court date when this--
when the federal government tells BP that their cleanup has been completed.
Why stay?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: That's when it hit me
how much of this whole culture was going to have to move.
When I got home from the Gulf, there was a new surprise neighbor.
The Delaware River Basin Commission
was debating a new plan to open up the river basin
to 18,000 gas wells.
The Commission had approved
15 exploratory wells,
and one was about a mile from my house.
Wait. Stop.
I really want to start at the middle,
but I got to start at the beginning.
My parents built our house in the Upper Delaware
in the same year I was born, 1972.
It was my father's dream, and my mom filled it with furniture.
He told my mother, "I want to build a house of love."
I want to build a house of love for you."
He ended up building it out of a $2.00 diagram
out of "Popular Mechanics."
For my father--
a Holocaust survivor born in Russia, fleeing the Nazis;
and for my mother, the child of a poor Italian immigrant family from New York City--
on 19.5 acres, just a mile from the Delaware,
home was in the right place,
one of those place that maybe you might say,
"Nothing ever happens."
But then, in 2008,
just like most people in the Upper Delaware,
we got a letter in the mail.
We learned that our land was on top of a formation
called the Marcellus Shale, and that the Marcellus Shale
was the "Saudi Arabia" of natural gas.
We could lease our land to the natural gas companies.
We would receive a signing bonus in the neighborhood of $100,000
and untold thousands more if we only let them...
well...
for the first time, we heard that word.
You know the word. It's just like it sounds.
If we only let them "frack us."
Fracking. Fracking.
Fracking them.
The hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking"--
fracking-- fracking.
So-called fracking-- fracking--
Fracking--fracking.
The Marcellus. MAN: Shale gas.
The shale. [Male newscaster speaks German]
...das Marcellus Shale.
[Speaks German] ...fracking.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The "F" word isn't in the dark anymore.
It's an outright hit.
"Fracking" was Number 3 on the list of most popular words
in the English language in 2011,
right behind "occupy" and "deficit."
And with one to two million new wells projected,
America is in a fracking frenzy.
Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is a method of gas extraction
drilling deep down thousands of feet to a shale formation
and then forcing down the well millions of gallons of water
laced with toxic chemicals at such intense pressures
that it created fractures in the rock and freed up the gas.
But you never just drill one well in a shale play,
you drill thousands,
creating an industrial redefinition of the landscape.
Millions of gallons of water per well,
thousands upon thousands of truck trips,
thousands of tons
of proprietary chemicals
injected into the ground.
And because fracking explicitly is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act,
the industry doesn't have to tell the public what chemicals they're using.
The bigger picture still is that we were just in the corner
of the largest domestic natural gas drilling campaign
in history, now occupying 34 states.
The gas drilling and fracking industry
was knocking on the doors of millions.
And with thousands of cases of water contamination,
air pollution, and health problems
reported across the U.S.,
it's not just the numbers that get you dizzy.
There was only one problem.
The gas industry denied everything.
To date, we have found no verified instance
of hydraulic fracturing harming groundwater.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The war for who was going to tell this story
was on.
WOMAN, ON PHONE: We had good water.
The people in Dimock don't have good water anymore.
[Ticking]
LESLEY STAHL, VOICE-OVER: In the shale gas gold rush,
Dimock is the ghost town.
STAHL: How many of you lost your water supply?
MAN, VOICE-OVER: They said, "Dad, we got gas in the water over there.
I can actually shake the jug up and light it."
You put a match to your water and it went up in flames?
I can take my water, shake it up, turn it up,
and it will explode-like.
Scary?
FEMALE NEWS ANCHOR: All Cabot representatives say
they don't believe drilling operations caused the water problems.
WOMAN: We're not greedy people.
We just want some justice for something
that's terribly wrong that happened here.
[Equipment beeping]
[Engines chugging]
GIRL: They look like the Rovers on Mars.
WOMAN, ON PHONE: Cabot said that they were not responsible for the contamination of the wells.
It is a scary situation to accuse a large corporation
of anything like that.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: After years of trying to negotiate with Cabot, the drilling company,
the Dimock families bound together to sue.
When the lawsuit broke, so did their silence.
Bill Ely lit his water on fire on every channel on television.
And Sheila Ely, his wife,
the mysterious voice on the phone,
invited me over to look at some of her documentation.
I like my pictures on the wall.
When you have frames, you can't
get all the pictures up that you want.
FOX: Uh-huh.
So I just laminate,
and I just keep laminating and laminating.
I have a laminator.
BILL ELY: My ancestors settled this spot
right here, back in the 1800s.
I'm, like, fifth generation, and I hope there's
5 more generations after me that live here.
And I'm not selling. I'm not leaving.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Just across the road, their nephew,
Scott Ely, had worked for Cabot.
Now he was the key witness in their lawsuit.
Imagine working for a company
that destroyed your family's water...
We feel like horses being pushed to a dirty hole.
And, you know, horses won't drink bad water. They just won't do it.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Or having to tell your kids that they can't swim
or fish in the creeks and ponds you grew up in.
I like fishing. I like frog-catching.
Me, too! All I ever do for my life.
Yeah, even when we go in the pond,
we try to catch fish, we just get sick.
Cabot should just deal with us in the courtroom.
They don't want to do that. They want to street-fight all this.
♪
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The big, strong Ely family was ready for a fight.
Up and down Carter Road, Craig and Julie Sautner and Ray Kemble
had created a kind of art installation
of their well water on their front lawns...
All we want is to, you know, have some kind of normalcy here.
We want good water. That's all we want.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: And a kind of leader and spokesperson emerged from the Dimock families.
I've gone to every congressman, representative,
anyone who would listen: DEP, Cabot, anyone I could think of.
Begged for water from Cabot.
All these people begged--begged for water.
They told us there would be one well out here, one well.
And within the following year, we have 30 wells now.
I dread to imagine what's going to happen to property value out here.
How would you advertise this house: "Bring your own water"?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: There was so much noise coming out of Dimock,
it felt like the town was standing in for the whole state.
But Dimock wasn't alone.
Over the past 4 years,
a huge change had swept across Pennsylvania.
Governor Ed Rendell had rolled out the red carpet
for the gas drilling industry.
Thousands of wells drilled...
thousands of reported violations.
The "New York Times" investigated and found that
wastewater from drilling was being inadequately treated
and dumped back into water supplies
all over Pennsylvania,
and with this much evidence bubbling up across the state,
even the pro-drilling Rendell administration
had to take action.
DEP issued violations to Cabot
and stopped them from drilling in a 9-square-mile radius,
but no permanent solution for residents' water contamination
had been proposed.
What the Dimock families really wanted was permanent public water,
and someone who could make it happen finally showed up to listen.
MAN, VOICE-OVER: Lance Simmens.
I was special assistant to Governor Ed Rendell
for Intergovernmental Affairs.
My primary responsibility
was to make sure that the Governor knew, on the ground,
what was going on in local communities.
There was something obviously drastically wrong with this picture.
It's like, you know, 3 apples and a nail.
And I said point-blank to the Governor,
who was sitting within about 18 inches
from me in a meeting one day, I said,
"We have got to get the people of Dimock clean water.
"This is the United States of America, and we need to have this
as a primary right for all of our citizens."
He agreed and he asked me what we should do about it.
And I said, "Let's connect
to a public water supply."
FOX, VOICE-OVER: After Lance Simmens got to the governor,
it felt like a new day in Dimock.
Pushed by a new policy,
Department of Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger
releases videotapes of Dimock wells.
We have video of gas bubbling at those gas wells.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The DEP revealed that Dimock wells
had inadequate cement, cracked cement, or no cement.
The crucial part of the well that's supposed to keep gas
from migrating into aquifers had failed,
showing scientifically that Cabot Oil & Gas
had contaminated Dimock's water with methane.
[Drilling equipment clanging]
But PA DEP had the videos for a year and a half,
so John Hanger, Secretary of the Department, was in
the uncomfortable position of calling his own administration's policy inadequate,
while at the same time playing the hero.
HANGER: We've had people here in Pennsylvania
without safe drinking water for close to two years.
That is totally, totally unacceptable.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The new policy was startling,
although it was just common sense.
Pennsylvania would build a water line to Dimock
from Montrose, 7 miles away--
the nearest municipal water supply--
and the state would sue Cabot Oil & Gas
for the cost--$12 million.
Protestors in the crowd lifted signs of other towns in Pennsylvania
that had similar problems, saying, "We, too, need a water line,"
insisting that the Dimock water line be a precedent for the state.
Coming home from Dimock, my own situation was escalating.
The only place they hadn't managed to drill
in Pennsylvania was the Delaware River Basin.
It's the border with New York State,
and there are hundreds of streams, tributaries
to form that mighty river.
15 million people get their drinking water
out of the Delaware River Basin--
New York City, Philadelphia, and southern New Jersey.
A lot depends on nothing ever happening up here.
There's an old adage:
"You can't ever step in the same stream twice."
And from growing up running up and down a trout stream connecting
to the Delaware River, it's fairly obvious how that's true.
Every year, the snow melt carves out a slightly new bank.
Every year, the spring thaw rushes in,
takes down a few trees.
Every year, a new beach head,
a place where a swimming hole is slightly deeper.
And, depending on the rainfall and the weather,
there could be a rushing current,
or a boulder revealed by a drought that you've never seen before.
But in this case, something besides nature had changed this.
Pro-drilling landowners in my county
had leased over 80,000 acres.
The stream's always been my property line, and now, just across from me,
I could wake up and see off my front porch every day
the other side of the stream was now leased.
If drilling began,
that side would be controlled by the gas industry.
Now it didn't matter that my family never signed.
I was completely surrounded, and if they drilled,
you'd never step in the same stream again.
The River Basin is controlled by a 5-member body--
4 governors of the states that border the river
and a representative from the president--
and New York State had been paying attention to what was going on
in Pennsylvania and throughout the country.
The New York legislature passed a one-year moratorium on drilling throughout New York,
and the federal government was also taking a look.
Prompted by Maurice Hinchey, congressman from New York,
the Federal Environmental Protection Agency begins a two-year study
of the effects of hydraulic fracturing on groundwater,
and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson declares
that if states are falling down on the job enforcing regulations,
then the federal government will step in.
One such failed state was Wyoming,
and one such town was a tiny little place called Pavillion.
My backyard, New York, and national policy tied
to tiny little places like Pavillion.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: EPA moved in and did
a full groundwater study, testing for hundreds of chemicals
related to gas drilling and the gas itself.
MAN: This is the ultimate detective novel.
I mean, these people are scientists and detectives
and researchers, and they are doing an extraordinary job,
but they are absolutely moving mountains to get this done.
FOX, VOICE- OVER: Most people in the west don't own their mineral rights,
so when the gas company showed up in Pavillion, drilling over a hundred wells,
landowners had no control over where wells were drilled
and no share of the revenue.
FENTON: So, you know, they have all this "Danger," you know, "No unauthorized personnel,"
but it's in the middle of my field. I have to--
Now that we've got a big oil field location
in the middle of the field, we have to irrigate around it.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: On August 31, 2010,
the EPA released results showing contamination
in 19 out of the water wells tested.
Even though those chemicals are in fracking fluids,
Encana--the company doing the drilling-- denied responsibility,
and Wyoming's governor was openly hostile towards the EPA.
Because of the gas industry's exemption to the Safe Drinking Water Act,
they're not required to report which chemicals they're using.
The investigation was ongoing,
but EPA told Pavillion residents not to drink their water.
[Water running]
Just down the road, Louis Meeks, John Fenton's neighbor.
Want a cold drink of water? FOX: Yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: His water still smelled like turpentine.
This company come in, right in the middle of our place,
and we didn't do nothing to them.
It ain't no mansion, I know it ain't no mansion, but it's home to us.
We was happy here. We have a garden.
And we have fruit trees. You know, there ain't much we need.
Our kids were raised here. They rodeo'd and everything else, you know, and, um...
And this is the life we wanted, but look at it now.
You want me to shut my mouth?
I'm not gonna.
Do you want to see them letters I wrote to the President? FOX: Sure.
You know, I never was a tree hugger or anything,
but, you know, something needs to be done.
I mean, you know, this is terrible.
FOX: And you only got the letter in return from EPA?
Yeah. In terms of EPA, don't you think there's some hope there?
WOMAN: Yeah, I hope there is,
but the state's fighting it worse than Encana.
Yeah. Encana's not fighting them.
FOX: Wait a minute. The state is fighting EPA? Yup.
They say the Fed's trying to run the state government,
so what they're doing is trying to keep the EPA out of here.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Every day, John Fenton walks out into the field,
switches the direction of the irrigation pumps--
surface water from a canal that the dog can drink,
but that humans can't.
His own water, his groundwater, that should be pure,
he knows is contaminated.
FENTON: The chemical that's in our water, it's, uh,
something that's only been seen a couple times.
[Fox scoffs] So--I mean, ever.
If this world worked the way it should,
if the laws were designed to protect the people
and to protect the environment and not to make corporations rich,
they'd have the chemical list in front of them.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: There's a natural filtration system in the earth--
layers and layers of mycelium in the ground,
filtering out bacteria that can cause illness--
but natural filtration won't take out fracking chemicals,
and once contaminants get in the ground, they're nearly impossible to get out.
You have a whole series of rivers and streams and lakes,
basically, underground, you know,
that now have all these interconnecting faults and cracks between them.
And even if you don't count the fractures,
you have a bunch of well bores that are penetrating everywhere.
I don't know how you would ever restore that
or how you would ever right a problem in there.
The people you talk to and you ask, "Well, can you fix this?"
Heh heh! You get, "We don't know,"
but you read the look on somebody's face and it says more than their words, you know?
And I would tend to think that it's going to be this way from here on out.
FOX: So there's going to be some source of contamination
into the aquifer here that's going on...
Well, it's going to outlast me.
♪
FOX, VOICE-OVER: In 2009, an air-quality researcher
at Southern Methodist University,
Dr. Al Armendariz, figured out
that the 7,700 gas wells in the Barnett Shale
caused as much air pollution as all of the cars and trucks
in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had no idea,
the TCEQ had no idea how many gas wells were being put in
and were in the ground around the city of Fort Worth.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Now, there are 15,000 gas wells in the Barnett Shale.
Looking at it from Google Earth, the pock-marked landscape looks like an alien landing zone.
Al Armendariz was appointed by Obama to be Regional Administrator of EPA
for Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Mexico.
♪
So, do you want to talk about Barnett Shale?
Unfortunately,
because Texas wealth is built on this industry,
this industry controls state government.
But they're so busy doing the denial thing.
You can't help the alcoholic till they're willing
to recognize that they got a problem.
The industry here is not willing
to recognize that they got a problem.
They want to fight back. They don't want to--
the idea of any kind of governmental regulation is reprehensible to them
unless they're in control of writing the rules that are written.
There's really absolutely nothing new about this.
I mean, we've been doing resource extraction at the expense
of indigenous populations the entire history of this country.
Kind of unique to the situation is
you've got a lot of upper middle-class white people
with college degrees getting ticked off 'cause they're being treated
the way third-world people have always been treated by corporate America.
♪
Just because you have a nice house doesn't mean
they're not going to drill underneath it.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Steve and Shyla Lipsky weren't born with a silver spoon.
Self-made millionaires, built
a 12,000-square-foot dream home in Parker County, Texas.
The house was completed September of last year.
♪
OK, master.
Our tub, that we don't use anymore
because it takes 200 gallons and we can't afford it. Ha ha!
FOX, VOICE-OVER: I never met anyone prouder of their new house
than Steve Lipsky.
And the beach. Ha ha ha!
♪
My whole house, I can control everything on my phone.
Waterfall's on.
You want to see it now?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: But just outside of their gated community,
Range Resources drilled a horizontal well
directly underneath their house.
This is the well.
Again.
Whoa!
There you go.
FOX: So, this is going to make you sell this house?
Or walk away from it or something? What are you going to--
What are your--I mean-- We don't know. Again, we simply--
Tell me what you're going to do. Well, what--
If we have--well, who's going to buy it? You know what?
What I'll probably do is sell this
and then have the gas company sue me for selling their gas.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: So much gas venting off the headspace of their water well
that the hose never failed to light.
Steve and Shyla Lipsky went to the EPA for help, who immediately swept in
and issued an Imminent and Substantial Endangerment Order against Range Resources,
saying that if the well water continued to go into the house,
the house could explode.
You know, it's the first time the Environmental Protection Agency
has ever blamed groundwater contamination on natural gas drilling in the Barnett Shale.
ARMENDARIZ: We've ordered Range to begin an investigation
and to take all necessary steps
to stop the migration of the natural gas
into the drinking water aquifer.
We actually moved out of our house
because we knew how dangerous it was,
and then went and had the water tested.
And I do give a lot of credit for the EPA stepping in.
Well, they tell us they can't contaminate the water wells,
but clearly they can, so can they contaminate the river or the lake?
Our kids swim in that, too.
This is the well water. Mm-hmm.
It's positive for methlylene blue active substances.
STEVE LIPSKY: Which is basically detergents that they use for drilling.
There's no reason that should be in my well.
It was positive for boron, magnesium, and strontium.
Under the volatiles,
positive for benzene and toluene.
This is the water test again,
over the reporting limit for both ethane and methane.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Despite EPA's enforcement action,
Steve and Shyla Lipsky were on their own,
paying for water deliveries a thousand dollars a month.
STEVE LIPSKY: The laboratory said it was off the charts.
They'd never seen something so high,
and they were amazed that it came out of a water well.
They said you have to tell that homeowner that he cannot use it,
not for anything, and including even watering the yard
because it just--your grass will light on fire.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: With a store-bought methane detector,
Steve Lipsky would walk in and out of his house,
gauging whether or not it might explode.
[Rapid clicking]
♪
But more sophisticated air-monitoring devices had been installed
just down the road in Dish, Texas.
Dish, Texas, changed its name in a PR deal
to receive 10 free years of Dish Network.
There's still 4 years of free Dish in Dish, and now,
with 10 pipelines crisscrossing the town and wells dappling the landscape,
there's also a lot of free gas and other volatile organic compounds
floating around in the atmosphere.
♪
And even our regulatory agencies here in Texas
didn't seem to know what was being emitted.
We did mapping of the chemicals.
For example, this is benzene, short-term.
This is probably a mile.
FOX: Wow. So that's the one hour.
If you're exposed to this for one hour, in theory,
there could be negative side effects.
And if you look at every one of these chemicals--
trimethyl sulfide.
Trimethyl benzene with sulfur compounds,
but it's a neurotoxin.
For benzene, you came over to probably here. Uh-huh.
If you looked at the sulfur compounds... Right.
you covered this map.
You still can't give up.
Together we bargain, divided we beg.
Is daddy the Mayor? Um...
I've done a lot of speeches with them sitting in the front row.
FOX: Do you guys get bored when he's talking?
Yeah!
Ha ha! You do?
WOMAN, VOICE-OVER: It really started to bother me
when my boys were having nosebleeds.
Josh, he'd wake up and then he'd be panicked
because he has blood everywhere.
Seeing my baby
in that way was kind of traumatizing.
At what point do you say-- nosebleeds are one thing,
but I don't want to see my child with leukemia
and then look back and go, "Well, if I had moved,
maybe my child would be healthy."
Knowing what I know,
it's my duty as a U.S. citizen
and a human here that we go
and share our experiences here.
You know, 3 years ago,
I was a Republican.
Now I'm an Independent.
You know, we just-- the things that they did,
they just pissed all over us, you know?
But what they're doing here is
the biggest assault
on private property rights that I've ever heard or seen.
And they're supposed to be Conservatives?
That's one of the founding principles of conservatism, is private property rights.
And you've got no private property rights, not in Texas, at least.
Now, we got married right here.
FOX: Right on the steps?
Right down there.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Bob and Lisa Parr aren't the sickly type,
and with trophy deer, elk, mountain lions,
and, yes, even a grizzly bear mounted throughout the house,
they're not your typical tree-hugging environmentalists, either.
You know you're a red neck if your taxidermy bill
is a lot larger than your mortgage.
Ha ha ha! Maybe I fit in.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Lisa and Bob Parr built their dream home
in Wise County, Texas, not far from Fort Worth in the Barnett Shale.
But now, Lisa Parr had fracking chemicals in her lungs.
Where our house is, there's 21 wells
that is around us.
So, pretty much, it doesn't matter
what wind direction we have,
it's blowing it to our house.
I come home, I have a dead chicken.
The dog's laying in the yard, I can't get her head up.
My daughter looks up, her rash is all over her face.
She has a nosebleed. Bob has a nosebleed.
Burning throat, burning eyes.
I had a rash. It covered my scalp.
It went through my entire body,
literally to the bottoms of my feet.
My throat would start swelling.
I started gasping for air.
I started stuttering.
I started stumbling.
My face drew up
on my left side like I had Bell Palsy.
They have detected,
uh...
numerous chemicals in my body tissues.
The hydrogen chloric acid is what they use before they frack,
but that was the number-one thing in my lungs.
LISA PARR, VOICE-OVER: My internal specialist told me--
[Clears throat] that if we didn't...
move...
that we would spend more time and money
in hospitalization,
chemotherapy, and morticians.
I moved here. I married this wonderful man.
[Clears throat] And...
I cannot ask him to leave his house.
I can't do it.
But now we've been forced to because we're all sick.
And they found it in our blood and in our organs,
and we have to go through treatment.
And I want to find a way to come back home.
My daughter has spent most of her time with me
in the past year picking me up off the floor.
That's her drawing.
She had just found out when she drew this
that we were going to have to move out of our house.
For two weeks, she cried all the way to school, but now she's adjusting really well.
This is the hardhats. FOX: Yeah.
Ha ha ha!
It says, "Clean Ure Mess! Okay?"
And they say "Okay?" with a question mark.
Thought that was really weird coming from a second-grader, like, "Okay?"
FOX, VOICE-OVER: While Lisa Parr's daughter was making drawings
asking the gas companies to clean up their mess,
the gas industry was making their own drawings--
not by children, for children-- sponsoring schools
and science fairs and sending out coloring books
featuring "Talisman Terry, the Friendly Fracosaurus,"
or a dog mascot for Chesapeake Energy,
dedicating several children's books to Calvin Tillman's library in Dish.
CALVIN TILLMAN: This is from Atlas Pipeline.
This is from Devon Energy.
Another one from Devon. There's the Atlas Pipeline.
"To the children of Dish in honor of Mayor Calvin Tillman from the Atlas Pipeline, Texas."
FOX: So, as far as the situation in Barnett Shale
that I've witnessed, all these families who are in deep trouble medically--
Move. Move. They need to move.
Different people have different tolerance levels.
If people are getting sick, they need to take
the losses financially and get out of where they are.
They--I mean, your personal health is more important than anything else.
Do you say that to 65% of Pennsylvania, 50% of New York--
No, I'd say fight where you can fight and make a difference,
but if I had kids with health issues because they're living in the Barnett Shale,
or if I had health issues living in the Barnett Shale, I'd move.
♪
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The gas industry hit back,
mounting a smear campaign against Al Armendariz,
Calvin Tillman, and openly challenging Lisa Parr in the media.
But possibly the most extreme reaction was to Steve and Shyla Lipsky.
Range Resources filed a $4 million defamation lawsuit against the Lipsky family,
a slap suit meant to keep them quiet.
The gas industry had defended many lawsuits extremely aggressively,
but this was the first time that I knew about
that they were actually taking a family to court.
But behind closed doors, the gas industry's strategy was even uglier.
At a Texas Oil & Gas industry conference,
reporters made tape recordings of gas-industry strategy,
recording several brainstorming and tactic-sharing conversations.
[Man on tape]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Psychological operations are employed in a war zone
to destabilize a population from insurgency against an invading army.
PSYOPS were used by the American military in Vietnam, in Iraq.
And here the gas industry was, employing former PSYOPS experts
to actually write local laws and develop techniques to be used against landowners
fighting the gas industry in Texas and in Pennsylvania.
And Chesapeake had its own plan,
characterizing people fighting the gas industry as insurgents.
MICHAEL D. KEHS, VOICE-OVER: Chesapeake has got nearly 100 people
whose sole jobs are to deal with community relations.
We have got people going out and speaking in the community every night.
Basically, my entire career has been dealing with audiences at chemical risk.
In almost every instance
where I've gone up against a strong activist insurgency,
it does not matter what the facts are
because the facts stand in the way of your ability to raise funds.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The gas industry was trading notes on their war effort.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Counterinsurgency,
strategies for managing outrage.
destabilization of communities.
These are terms of war,
but like the PowerPoint says,
you can't dramatically change global energy
without ruffling some feathers.
It didn't seem to matter that the Defense Department had ruled
that it was illegal for the military to use PSYOPS techniques against Americans.
♪
And, of course, the next logical step
would be to start looking for some terrorists.
Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania
and the former and first head of the Department of Homeland Security,
appointed right after 9/11, signs on to be the Chief Spokesman
for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group
that fights environmental regulation of gas drilling.
The very next month, the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security
begins issuing briefs that lists anti-fracking protest groups
as "possible eco-terrorists."
The bulletin said that environmental extremism
trending towards eco-terrorism and criminality
was a rising threat to the security of Pennsylvania.
Virginia Cody, a retired Air Force officer living near Dimock,
was forwarded the August 30th bulletin.
She then posted it on a gas drilling listserv.
When she did that, unbelievably,
Pennsylvania Homeland Security Chief James Powers wrote her
an email, assuming that she was a pro-gas-drilling stakeholder,
actually indicated that the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security
had communication with pro-drilling groups like the Marcellus Shale Coalition.
PA Homeland Security was showing up at protests,
spying on gas drilling activists,
but they weren't only sending the information to law enforcement;
they were sending it to the gas industry.
Lisa Baker, my state senator, a Republican,
held hearings into the misconduct.
SENATOR BAKER: Raise your right hand for me. We're going to swear in.
For the first time in my life, I do not feel secure in my home.
I worry that what I say on the phone is being recorded.
I wonder if my emails are still being monitored.
Mr. Powers, I have not had one person come forward
and say they believe these bulletins were vital.
The information that's sought by
the local municipalities was situation awareness.
Situational awareness.
It was just situational awareness.
It was just about situational awareness.
FEMALE SENATOR: None of it really makes any sense to me at all,
that we would go monitor private citizens and private groups
and they're not a threat to us, is what you were just saying.
"It's just for awareness." It makes absolutely no sense.
And it does make me think, "Where are we living?"
FOX, VOICE-OVER: As it turned out, the state of Pennsylvania had a contract
with a group called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response.
A quick web search turned up their website,
which featured pictures of a scary owl,
an Israeli SWAT Team member,
and a strange blue hand playing chess.
MALE SENATOR: So what is your payroll?
What is your employee payroll?
Is it 3? Is it a hundred?
What is it? I'm just curious.
It's more than 3 and it's less than a hundred.
You know, you're very creepy.
No, no. You're very scary.
[Laughter] No, I'm trying to be honest with you.
I don't know if you're bi-polar or you have issues.
I mean, you're a very scary individual. BAKER: Senator Ferlo,
and this is not for us-- OK, but let me ask a specific question.
to make comments about individuals personally.
I have 12 staff people. I'm just asking a question.
How many employees do you have?
We have about 15 employees...
and that doesn't include
the 70-some additional employees that--
Operatives, or whatever you call them, or--
People who, uh...
Because this is just too unbelievable,
too surreal, this hearing.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: After the hearings, James Powers resigned,
but there were no indictments, no charges,
no real investigation of the recipients of these Pennsylvania intelligence bulletins,
including Tom Ridge's Marcellus Shale Coalition.
The trust barrier had been broken.
And, that moment on, none of us knew
if our names appeared on lists of possible terrorists
somewhere in a strange blue filing cabinet,
and two years of hard-fought progress in Pennsylvania was about to unravel.
♪
FOX-VOICE-OVER: When the water line in Dimock was announced,
it had a ripple effect across the state.
Towns and municipalities drafted ordinances to ban drilling
outright at the local level, including the entire city of Pittsburgh.
850,000 people, and I'm one of them,
drink water out of the Monongahela River.
When it tastes funny, I get nervous,
and it tastes funny.
Really, this is about a civil rights issue.
This is about our inalienable rights.
I said, "Can you regulate my inalienable rights
"that are embodied in the Pennsylvania Constitution
"to clean air, clean water, and the preservation
"of the natural environment for generations,
"for now, and for generations to come?
Can you regulate those rights away?" "No."
FOX, VOICE-OVER: But an election was underway, and the leading candidate,
Tom Corbett, had accepted $1.6 million in campaign contributions
from the gas industry and was running on a drilling platform.
With the election just weeks away, the gas companies went all-in in Dimock,
attacking the water line and the families.
Full-page ads in local newspapers,
a YouTube video campaign declaring Dimock water safe...
I'd like to show you how dangerous this Dimock water is.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Threats to pull out jobs in rural areas.
They even riled up a start-up group called Enough Already,
saying that the water line was going to come from taxpayer money.
You want to fire up a crowd? Tell them they're going to pay higher taxes.
Their first meeting, held at the Elk Lake School,
had a gas well being drilled right behind the football field.
MAN: We're not here for any confrontations.
Cabot is trying to pit neighbor against neighbor with this whole deal,
and what it's doing is it's destroying the community.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Their main speaker, a "oil and gas expert" employed by Cabot.
MAN: I really would like to give a bit of a primer,
a "Petroleum Engineering 101."
For those of you that read the Bible, you will remember Noah's Ark.
It was caulked by bitumen that had seeped to the surface
and biogenic gas, which is generated from, uh,
I would say, neo--uh--
Neo--uh--ha ha ha! [Clicks tongue]
What is water?
Casing needs to be set to protect fresh water,
and that's not the term, 'cause "fresh water" is another definition that we don't have
unless it comes out of this bottle.
Cheers, cla-- or cheers, group. Mmm.
Has anybody ever here seen a Amish buggy?
Concluding thoughts, and, yes, I will shut up...
FOX, VOICE-OVER: In the end, he said absolutely nothing
about what actually happened to contaminate the aquifer.
It was a dog-and-pony show hiding behind a smokescreen inside a hall of mirrors.
CABOT EXPERT: So, for those of you that are looking for jobs--
not me because I'm too old-- you're looking at an industry
that's going to be around here for a hundred years.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Then it happened.
Republican Attorney General Tom Corbett
was elected Governor of Pennsylvania.
Cue the saddest newscaster in history.
Well, it turns out there will not be a pipeline connecting
Dimock, Pennsylvania to the Montrose Municipal Water System.
That word comes from the PA Department of Environmental Protection,
which has dropped its plan to force Cabot Oil & Gas
to pay for the nearly $12 million project.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Dimock residents and Lance Simmens had fought hard for a policy
that should have been a precedent for the rest of the state:
Contaminate a township's water,
and you're going to have to pay for permanent public replacement.
FOX: Was it your hope
that would have become a standard?
Absolutely.
I thought that it would have
a long-lasting and pervasive effect.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Unfortunately, didn't work out that way.
Governor Ed Rendell and John Hanger of the Department of Environmental Protection
made a deal, negotiating without the participation of the Dimock families.
Cabot Oil & Gas would pay each of the residents twice the value of their homes.
In other words, the state and the gas companies
made a deal to tell the people of Dimock to move.
Not surprisingly, the families rejected the compromise.
The water line would be canceled;
no precedent for water replacement would be set.
FOX: So you're upset with the way the situation was handled?
I am not happy with the fact that that water line was not built.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: During the same period of time,
3 of Ed Rendell's top aides,
including his Executive Deputy Chief
of Staff, went to work for the gas industry.
DEP Secretary John Hanger joined
a law firm and lobbying organization that's a member
of the Marcellus Shale Coalition and represents
Pennsylvania's Independent Oil and Gas Association.
And Governor Ed Rendell himself joined a private equity firm
with interests in the natural gas industry,
going on to advocate publicly for drilling without disclosing his industry ties.
All this switching sides led the public accountability initiative to issue a report,
concluded that the lines between government and industry had been blurred to a corrupting effect
and that the public bodies charged with regulating industry
instead had become captured by it.
SIMMENS: You know, the revolving door
between regulators and the regulated industries
is as old as bureaucracy itself.
I would never underestimate the power
to make changes
in a system that is
as influenced as it is by the power of money.
Does that mean that I could never--I would never have foreseen
forces upending it, delaying it, canceling it?
Nope, I've come to accept that
as a fact of life in this...
dysfunctional political system
that is not only true in Pennsylvania,
but, I think, on a much larger scale
throughout the country.
Is it horribly unsafe?
Is that what this fracking is?
I do not know of one well, one--they always say
it contaminates the aquifer.
I've never seen that happen.
I'm sure there are people, though, who would say, "I have.
And it's been on my land and I've seen the toxicity."
♪
[Wooden turkey call squeaking]
[Squeaking stops]
[Squeaking resumes]
[Squeaking stops]
[Squeak]
[Squeaking resumes]
[Distant thunder]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Now, I'm not much of a hunter-- you could probably tell--
but it was disappointing to both Jeremiah and I
that we found a lot more gas wells than turkeys.
JEREMIAH: This is where we are. We are right here.
This, literally, is the top of the ridge.
The elevation right here is about 2,300 feet.
FOX: So they just took the top?
Yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: One of the first things that Tom Corbett did entering office
was to repeal the drilling moratorium on state lands and state forests.
JEREMIAH: Who needed those damn trees anyway?
This is only a tiny taste of what's to come.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: In Pennsylvania, you live in the woods
just as much as you live in your house.
Jeremiah and the Gee family...
they were getting drilled on both.
JEREMIAH: Look at that one. That's my house right there. Ha ha ha!
They literally moved that thing as close as they possibly could
to our property line.
We were told they were going to put this well
quite a bit farther away, like a thousand feet farther away than they did.
I took some shots of Ada, see, like that one,
like, "I can dig a hole, too."
Hey. How you doing?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: About 200 feet from Jeremiah's mother's window,
a 6-well horizontal pad.
JEREMIAH: You know, they have all that technology and they can work 24/7 drilling,
but, doggone it, they can't stop water from going downhill
from up into-- from that earth...
FOX: Right.
Into that pond. You just can't do it.
And here's the "chocolate milk"-type water
that is coming off of the well pad.
May 2, 2011.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Contaminants were running
off the site onto his property and killing his family's pond,
and under the ground, methane had migrated into their water well.
JEREMIAH: Holy cow.
Today's date is April 6, 2011.
You know I'll get a phone call in a few minutes,
asking why I was up here with a guy with a camera.
We were told, point-blank, that
the word "freshwater" does not mean what you think it means.
"Freshwater" means "fresh to this site."
Every bit of water that will be coming here
and used in the frack tanks
has already been used at a different site,
therefore, it's "fresh" to us.
So my question was, "Could we just call it fresh enough water?"
And the answer was, "Yes."
I also asked, point-blank, "Does it have chemicals in it?"
And the answer was, "Yes."
We have methane in our water already
that we did not have before.
Our pre-drill test proved that our water
was pristine beyond anybody's standards.
They will tell you point blank there is no way
that frack fluid will migrate. Right.
And yet other hydrogeologists, who are not
on the gas company's payroll, will tell you
it's not a question of if it can migrate;
it's a question of when it will migrate.
Every single one of these gas-well guys that's come here
has said, "Wow, you guys have a really nice place."
And we say,
"Thank you, but you mean we had a really nice place."
The realtor told us it's worth zero dollars and zero cents.
Tell me about these water tanks. So...
on the day that Shell found out,
they instantly brought these water buffaloes.
This is what we call "blue water."
I mean, that's my term for it--"blue water." It's blue.
Because it's blue. Ha! We don't drink it.
Right. We drink bottled water.
We can't use it for our animals 'cause it--
I don't trust this. I don't know what this is.
The dogs have been drinking Nestle brand water.
It says "Pure Life."
"Enhanced with minerals for taste," and then
there are these happy stick-figure people here
who are about to get swept away by a tsunami of "Pure Life." Ha ha!
Well, I was thinking about the 5 cents in Oregon.
If I could get those empty water bottles 3,000 miles away,
I could get 5 cents out of each one of those.
They don't ask for those bottles back.
This is what the chickens drink now.
I don't know any other chickens in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, that drink bottled water.
Cluck, cluck, cluck. Anybody want to say hi?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: After the Gee family reported they could light their water on fire,
Shell tried several times to squeeze, or fix the cement job.
All the while, the gas industry in public continued
to deny any instances of water contamination.
This just didn't make sense.
Everywhere I had gone, whether it was Texas or PA
or Colorado, there were the same problems.
I'd seen all this on the surface, but what was actually happening under the ground?
♪
Please welcome Tom Ridge.
You are the former Governor
of the great State of Pennsylvania,
the Keystone State, first Secretary of Homeland Security.
Now, you're a lobbyist for the natural gas industry.
We've all seen the footage of flaming water.
Whoa!
Is that really happening to people's water supply, sir?
Out here is the rock.
We're looking in a cross section of a well
that's being drilled
because, ultimately, you want your gas
to come up the steel pipe.
That inch, right there, this is cement.
And what you don't want is for that cement to fail...
Mm-hmm. or to be absent,
to crack, to corrode, to crumble, to disappear.
If what's down there can get into this annulus...
Right. then it can migrate.
Yes, it is happening to some water supplies,
and it has absolutely nothing to do with hydraulic fracting.
Methane gas is naturally occurring.
They've had methane gas-- I'm speaking as a governor-- in some of our water wells
in Pennsylvania long before any wells, frack wells, were located next to them.
Those are phenomena that are very well known,
for as long as we've been drilling wells, encasing them.
Naturally occurring methane gas often ends up in water wells,
but there has not been a single proven instance
where it has been related to hydraulic fracking.
So now the shallow gas goes into an open annulus,
pressurizes the annulus, gas migrates into an underground
source of drinking water, somebody's water well.
In my field, there are only 3 things that are certain:
death, taxes, and fracture.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Meet Professor Tony Ingraffea--
professor of engineering at Cornell;
a two-time winner of the National Research Council Award
for rock mechanics research;
co-winner of a NASA Group Achievement Award;
a former researcher for Schlumberger, the number-one fracking company in the world,
and for the Gas Research Institute;
proud Sicilian; accomplished turkey hunter;
and in 2011, one of "TIME" Magazine's People Who Mattered.
But I like to think of him as the godfather of cement.
Hundreds of thousands of on-shore wells and thousands of off-shore wells,
there's a probability of maybe one in 20
that a cement job will fail immediately.
FOX: One in 20? One in 20.
So 5%.
5% of all wells immediately will show
a failure of a cement job, and there will be methane migration.
Because that means that this annulus, the area
between the casing and the rock,
is now open from below to above.
You now have a migration pathway so that anything that's down there
in the way of salts, heavy metals,
other deleterious things that were stored in the rock,
now have a pathway and a vector and something to carry them upwards.
I'm using the round number of a hundred thousand Marcellus wells... FOX: Right.
in Pennsylvania alone, OK? Right.
If one out of 20 is going to immediately show a cement failure,
now we're talking 5,000 wells.
If that one water well is going bad, it means that aquifer--
as what happened in Dimock, it's the one aquifer that was servicing all those water wells.
9 square miles. Yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Professor Ingraffea was basically telling me
that a gas well is a long, steel pipe surrounded by an inch of cement,
and that that cement cracks often.
But there's one part of a gas well that he didn't mention--the PR department.
So my job, and I do have a paid job as a consultant with the industry,
is to make sure, as Pennsylvania, that we take advantage of the resources.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: I needed to talk to an expert in that part of the operation.
Naomi Oreskes, author of the book "Merchants of Doubt,"
traced disinformation campaigns
from big tobacco all the way up to climate change.
If we say, you know, "Oh, yes, oil and gas come out of people's
taps naturally," you know, a lot of people just don't know.
They think, "Oh, really? Is that true? You know-- Oh, well, I have heard
"people say that in Santa Barbara the tap water smells bad,
you know, so maybe it's true." OK, now we have a debate, right?
An ordinary person who doesn't know what to think doesn't need
to think that I'm right; they just need to think that there's a debate,
because so long as there's a debate, then there's an argument
for staving off regulation.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: In the fifties, Hill + Knowlton, PR firm,
designed the strategy to dispel that nasty little rumor
that tobacco caused lung cancer--
misinformation and supporting bogus science
that would call into doubt
the legitimate science.
America's Natural Gas Alliance
hired Hill + Knowlton in 2009 as their PR firm.
♪
All of a sudden, ads were everywhere.
They even bought my name on Google.
Oh, so there it is, so 60 years later, right,
we have the same PR firm that actually invented--
John Hill was the originator of this whole strategy,
so there they are, still doing the same thing again 56 years later.
Wow. It's-- Wow. Ha ha!
It's depressing, isn't it? Ha ha!
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Just like the tobacco industry had memos in their drawers
that said all along that they knew that nicotine was addictive
and tobacco was harmful, the gas industry also has memos
that show they've known all along.
Some of them, in fact, have been published.
Others fell off "the back of a truck,"
and they'll show you how they've been trying to solve it for decades
and how they have no way of completely fixing
or preventing the problem.
Number One, from Southwestern Energy.
The diagram clearly shows that the gas well has
a cement barrier around the sides of it that prevents gas
from lower layers migrating upwards into aquifers.
But this isn't a PowerPoint about drilling wells.
This is a PowerPoint about how cement and casings fail
and allow gas or other substances to migrate into aquifers.
It's one of their own documents about how cement fails.
Number Two comes from Schlumberger--
"Oilfield Review," published in 2003--
that showed that sustained casing pressure,
i.e. cement failure, occurs at alarming rates.
Their own documents showed that cement and casings failed
in 5% of wells drilled immediately upon drilling
and that the failure rate increased over time;
that over a 30-year period, 50% of wells failed.
Number 3.
This report--leaked out of a gas industry conference
from Archer, a well services company--
shows enormous rates of leakage in the Gulf of Mexico
and the North Sea, and high rates of what they call
"uncontrolled discharge."
And this PowerPoint slide
from the Society of Petroleum Engineers
shows that 1.8 million wells exist in the world
and that 35% of them are leaking.
It also states that the industry plans to drill more wells in the next decade
than have been drilled in the last hundred years.
Recent Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection statistics
back up Schlumberger's initial findings.
Well leakage was between 6% and 8.9%
for newly installed wells-- gas migrating into aquifers.
The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources
predicts that there will be 180,000 new gas wells drilled in Pennsylvania.
If 50% of them go bad over 30 years,
that's 90,000 leaking gas wells.
It's safe to say there's the potential
for contaminating the entire state.
Can we ever predict everything exactly? No.
But we're in much better shape now than we were generations ago
of predicting probabilistically the range of events that we expect to see.
Unconventional gas development--
it ain't your grandmother's gas well.
Longer wells, higher pressures,
higher volumes of frack fluids,
more wells per pad.
We should expect higher risk, higher accident rate,
and that's what we're seeing.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: For decades, they haven't been able to fix the problem.
There's no way to fix it; just like tobacco,
they have a problem that can't be solved.
Just as there's no safe cigarette,
there's no safe drilling, and they know it.
Kerosene, benzene, urea, toluene.
How many of those can I feed my toddler?
[Audience laughter]
'Cause it's perfectly safe, right?
It's perfectly safe.
[Cheers and applause]
[Rumbling]
[Australian accent] Right.
FOX: Oh, my God.
[Distant screaming sound]
FOX: And that's the water well?
Right.
[All chuckle]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: After drilling had taken place all around Cole Davies' farm,
methane from the coal seam migrated into the source of his water well.
For 6 months, the pipe that they pump water out
for cattle started screaming,
as if it had been tapped in to a well of souls in hell.
[Screaming sounds continue]
FOX: Have you reported this to the gas company that's around here?
Oh, yeah. They know all about it.
What do they say? They know very well all about it.
What do they say to you?
Oh, they just say that they're not responsible.
Just a natural occurrence within this area, they said.
Uh-huh.
[Crickets chirping]
[Screaming sound]
Have you had enough there? [Chuckles]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Something about Cole reminded me of American farmers--
soft-spoken, quiet.
He didn't dress up for the interview,
had no interest whatsoever in trying to impress us.
AUSTRALIAN MAN: If it's damaging our water table in Australia,
you know, we're the driest country in the world.
We've got this artesian water table underneath us.
I think they're doing huge risk to it.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Australia wasn't alone.
In April 2010, the State Department,
under Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration,
started the Global Shale Gas Initiative,
charting shale plays in over 30 countries
and pledging a government- to-government engagement
to help develop shale gas around the world.
So, in a matter of months, this map
turned into this map.
So you know that now, and to quote Calvin Tillman, mayor of Dish, Texas,
"Once you know, you can't not know," right?
[Australian accent] The first thing they--sorry, the second sentence they said
to me when they came through that gate was, "If you don't let us come on here
"to search for gas, we will force our way onto the land.
We will take you to court and you'll lose."
And I'm just like, "Pfff! Rightie-o. I'll see you in court."
Wrong group of people. The people out here are tough, they're gritty.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: I interviewed farmer after farmer,
rancher after rancher, all across Australia.
Nobody wanted this, and just like in the U.S.,
people were being told to move.
[Australian accent] They've vowed to literally lock the gate
to the big multi-nationals and are prepared to be arrested if necessary.
[Australian accent] This is going to be the biggest single ecological impact
that I think we will have seen-- been seen in 150 years.
FOX: And all this happening is the dawn of renewable energy technology, right?
Well, I describe it as the last gasp of the fossil fuel era.
And as it goes, it lashes out and destroys whole regions.
What's really at stake here, apart from the environment,
and some really strong environmental values,
is governance itself.
Democratic governance is at stake here.
♪
FOX, VOICE-OVER: But it wasn't just Australia that was rebelling.
Protests against shale gas and fracking broke out across Europe--
in the U.K., in Bulgaria and Romania,
in the south of France, in Canada...
[South African protestors chanting]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: And a country founded on protests--South Africa--
where a huge area of land, the Karoo, was leased out to Shell.
In America, hundreds of thousands of letters
and emails, thousands of citizens testifying
at EPA hearings, DOE hearings,
DEC hearings, DRBC hearings.
♪
And Sean and Yoko went on "Jimmy Fallon" and sang about it on national TV.
♪ Don't frack my mother ♪
Don't frack me! Don't frack me!
BOTH: ♪ Please ♪
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The anti-fracking movement had arrived...
SEAN LENNON AND JIMMY FALLON: ♪ Don't frack my mother ♪
[Cheers and applause]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: And we had a hammer.
The good and bad are all tangled up in this world,
and you almost laugh.
You never know what's going to happen,
and I am convinced
we are gonna stop this frackin'.
[Cheers and applause]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: But every time you looked up, fracking was spreading someplace new,
even to Tinsel Town.
♪
Not many people know this,
but there's a thousand-acre oil field in the center of Los Angeles.
But when oil prices went up and gas prices went up,
the Baldwin Hills oil field became viable again.
Fracking rigs for oil were right in the middle of L.A.
♪
FOX: Where are we, exactly?
MAN: Baldwin Hills. Baldwin Hills.
We're smack in the middle of Los Angeles.
Hollywood's that way, Beverly Hills is that way.
Venice is behind us. Right.
And there's talking about fracking here?
They already are fracking here.
On the fault line? All through the fault line.
In fact, in one of their original
injection wells, which is the way they're doing it--
There's an injection well here? Yeah.
In the middle of L.A.? Oh, yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Fracking the fault line in L.A. sounded more
like a Hollywood plotline than reality.
That kind of thing just didn't happen in California.
It happened in places like Arkansas.
CYNTHIA McFADDEN: In Arkansas, some geologists think
the disposal of wastewater from fracking may be leading
to an incredible uptick in earthquakes,
more than 1,100 since September.
What happens.
[Chuckles]
This is what I think is happening in this state.
And when something goes on and the house starts rocking,
then you'll see it start moving.
Every few minutes, we were having another quake,
another quake, another quake.
WOMAN: You see all this? FOX: Mm-hmm.
And these are all active wells.
Now, if I zoom in here on Greenbrier...
Right.
all of these little orange dots...
Right. are earthquakes.
This house was literally just rocking.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Most of the quakes were small, micro-quakes.
FOX: And how often does this happen? Usually...
Every day. Every day.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: But then a 4.7 put cracks
in the walls of the local high school,
popularizing iPhone's earthquake app
with high-schoolers
and knocked the earthquake lady's husband out of his La-Z-Boy.
And he's a big man.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Dirk DeTurck, a Vietnam veteran,
and his sons' friends, who are Iraq War veterans,
are having PTSD flashbacks from the drilling
and earthquakes.
He'd been obsessively tracking earthquakes on a notepad at home.
DeTURCK: October up till December.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Looked like he hadn't played pool in months.
DeTURCK: There's, like, 630
or something like that, in here, I believe.
[Voice cracking] And these guys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan...
"Sorry if you made it through that.
Good luck in your neighborhood."
♪
FOX, VOICE-OVER: But it wasn't just in Arkansas.
Earthquakes near fracking and wastewater injection wells
were happening in Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas.
This is the magnitude-4 earthquake
which occurred very close to Youngstown, Ohio.
TV NEWSWOMAN: Before March, there had not been a recorded earthquake.
Since then, there have been 11.
♪
MAN: These earthquakes were sitting there, waiting to happen.
We have triggered these earthquakes.
TV NEWSWOMAN: Armbruster believes the trigger was this Youngstown well
that disposes of contaminated water.
The water is a by-product of oil
and natural gas extraction called "fracking."
The disposal well pumps thousands of gallons of the waste
into rock a mile or more below.
Armbruster says the fluid may have made its way
into an earthquake fault line.
♪
BRITISH NEWSMAN: Exploration digging for shale gas deep
in the rocks of Lancashire has been suspended
after two earthquakes in two months.
♪
PAINE: Just behind that truck
are some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
That's Santa Monica,
Beverly Hills, Bel Air,
West L.A.--it's all, like, there.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: FEMA did a study of what a 7.2 earthquake
would do to Los Angeles along the Newport-Inglewood fault line:
thousands of projected casualties,
trillions of dollars of damage,
comprehensive damage to buildings,
bridges, and infrastructure.
But the thousand-acre oil field in Los Angeles
is far from California's biggest emerging problem...
so I'm going to show you a little bit here on the map
where most of the produce is created in California--
the Central Valley,
central California's agricultural basin.
Dependent on irrigation, it's the stuff
of American lore--"Land's End," the promise of America.
The Central Valley is over the biggest shale play in the west, the Monterey Shale.
That could mean hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells up and down California.
But there's one other thing that's in American mythology
and American life that we know really well--
California earthquakes--
and the San Andreas Fault, probably the most famous fault line in the world,
runs straight through the Monterey Shale.
♪
I was starting to add it up...
worldwide energy,
choices about where it was going to come from.
Flying over the United States
on my way home,
seeing the pockmarks of wells
drilled all across the Rockies...
brought the choices into high relief,
right out the window of a commercial flight.
This is what it really looks like.
♪
July 1st, the year was up...
♪
and Governor Andrew Cuomo let the moratorium
on drilling and fracking in New York State expire.
♪
The decision in my backyard was now in the hands
of Governor Cuomo and President Obama.
Governor Cuomo announces that he's going to let science,
not emotion, decide his policy on hydrofracking.
In the fall of 2011, he got both--mounting protests across New York
and 67,000 public comments on their Environmental Impact Statement.
But I was about to find out that this was much bigger than my backyard.
That fall, Hurricane Irene came storming up the East Coast.
It was the first time that I could remember a hurricane
hitting upstate New York and central Pennsylvania.
The stream swelled to 9 feet above its normal level.
We lost lots of trees, but it was nothing
compared to what happened in upstate New York.
Whole towns washed away.
Hundred-year-old bridges washed away in the blink of an eye.
A freak storm supercharged by warming temperatures,
two words on everyone's mind--
climate change.
MAN: I don't think we live in times
that are particularly kind to objective information.
Well, the hypothesis here is shale gas is better for global warming
than other fossil fuels and it's a good transitional fuel.
So we tested that, and the answer is, well, no, it's not.
The White House has clearly bought into this idea
that natural gas is part of the solution
to moving us gradually off of fossil fuels.
I don't think they did that with good science.
We estimate that somewhere between
3.6% and 7.9% of the total amount of gas produced
over the lifetime of a well is emitted to the atmosphere as methane.
There's a continual leakage at the well head, there's leakage
from the storage and processing facilities,
purposeful venting, also accidental leaks.
They throw it into the pipeline systems and the distribution systems
and storage systems-- there's leakage in all of those.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Global warming is caused by greenhouse gases
emitted from fossil fuel burning.
When you burn coal, you get a lot of CO2.
When you burn natural gas, you get about half as much,
but methane is the second-most important greenhouse gas,
and it's 105 times more potent
at trapping heat in the short 20-year timeframe.
Bob Howarth's research shows
when you add up the methane escaping into the atmosphere,
the fugitive emissions, and the CO2 from fracked gas,
it makes it the worst fuel for global warming.
There's only one planet, you know.
We're doing the experiment now of how global warming is going to work.
We're sitting in this bowl, you know, this--we're down here
at the bottom, and the climate goes back and forth
within some regime, year by year.
The worry is that, in warming, it'll switch up
and go over into some other bowl over here,
and you'll have a dramatically different planet and that,
once you've switched from this stable regime
over to there, there's no easy way to get back.
You don't suddenly start reducing your greenhouse gas emissions
and go back up over this hill, back to the way things used to be.
You're over there, in a new universe.
If you believe that we might be approaching a tipping point
over the next couple of decades, then you need to be really careful
about pumping methane--that's such a potent greenhouse gas
in the short timeframe-- into the atmosphere.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Frank Finan,
a woodworker near Dimock,
surrounded by gas wells,
bought a FLIR camera-- a camera that can see methane
undetectable to the naked eye.
FOX: When I heard that for the first time, I said, "Who is this guy?
He bought a FLIR camera? Is he out of his mind?"
Yeah, I was. I was out of my mind. [Clears throat]
Things like this will put you out of your mind.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: He started to discover what Bob Howarth had calculated--
methane exploding into the air
in huge clouds out of fracking sites.
FRANK FINAN: And then it occurred to me it was like Disneyland
compared just to the world, and now it's not anymore.
For some people, it still is.
For some people, we're just a story in the news.
[Scoffs] You know, I'm a woodworker.
Why does a woodworker have all this equipment?
So don't tell me this is not your job. FOX: Yeah.
Step out of your box.
Go where you've never been before.
Yeah. The times have changed.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: One night, I went out with him,
but this time, we didn't need the FLIR camera.
[Siren blaring]
[Gas hissing]
FINAN: Yeah, going in the air.
FOX: Huh? I just don't believe it.
Look through your window on this side.
It's something, isn't it?
Whoa! That one-- did you see that one? It just went out.
Shooting methane up in the air.
[Hissing continues]
MAN: Oh, dude, it's right behind somebody's house.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: This is what Bob was talking about...
methane venting straight up into the atmosphere.
There had to be a better way.
♪
So we did a study looking at the possibility of powering the entire world
for all purposes with clean, renewable energy.
And among those that we considered beside--
was wind, concentrated solar power,
solar photovoltaics, geothermal power,
hydroelectric power, tidal power, and wave power.
And we find that there's enough wind power in fast wind locations
to power the world 5 to 10 times over.
FOX: Just the wind? Just the wind.
The red is--the more red it is, the faster the wind speed.
Wow. And the more blue, the slower, so you can see
the Great Plains of the U.S. has a lot of wind resource.
And offshore, the East Coast has a huge amount of resource, plus it's shallow.
And then we looked at can we match power demand, or supply with demand,
and found that by bundling resources together--
because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine,
but it turns out, based on physical laws of nature,
when the wind is not blowing, the sun is often shining.
And if you take those two resources and then use
hydroelectric to fill in the gaps between them,
you can match almost all supply with demand...
Uh-huh. in places that have reasonable hydroelectric resources.
FOX: We don't need to drill for natural gas is what you're saying?
No, we don't need-- there's no need
to drill for gas, for coal, for oil.
We have sufficient resources that are clean and renewable.
It's not necessary.
Natural gas is just not necessary
in solving this problem.
♪
FOX, VOICE-OVER: It occurred to me that looking at the root of the problem,
I was going to have to try to investigate something that no one wanted to talk about.
I called all 500-and-change members of Congress.
15 people answered the call.
We have no energy policy in the United States
to take us out of our energy predicament.
What we do in this country,
unfortunately, is lurch
from one golden dream to another.
So, right now, it looks, in so many people's minds
on Capitol Hill, "Well, natural gas.
Oh, that's what we've been looking for," you know,
"Why didn't we think of this before?"
All that's getting across is this new,
large reserve that's going to be so easy to tap.
The oil companies don't-- on some of these matters, don't even need to lobby.
FOX: Right. Because it's just...
not questioned.
FOX: ...interested in hearing about
is the influence of oil and gas on Congress. Oh, yeah.
Influence? Heh! Try "ownership." Ha ha ha! Really?
Would you care to elaborate?
Have we started yet already? We have started.
Oh, OK. Sorry. I was just chatting.
In Washington, I have seen...
committee meeting after committee meeting
where a great many members just read the same talking points
that are exactly the same thing that the industry witnesses are saying.
FOX: People are out there battling for their homes,
and they're trying to make their case here in Washington
for the Safe Drinking Water Act, for the Clean Water Act,
for the Clean Air Act, the Super Fund Law.
Essentially, they have a lesser voice, is that what you're saying,
on Capitol Hill, than the corporations?
I'm saying that corporations have extraordinary influence in Washington,
more than ever, and that influence
has been propelled by two Supreme Court decisions:
"Buckley vs. Valeo," and the Citizens United case.
That has given corporations the chance to influence
elections of members of Congress directly.
With the new majority that is here,
is that their decisions have been informed.
It doesn't have to be that the oil and gas people
are sitting in the audience or have been visiting.
The mind is set.
I think that's the concern, is about whether or not
contributions are influencing public policy
and where they kind of disconnect selected officials from common sense.
There have been periods of our history
when our political system has been entirely controlled
by a tiny economic elite who really just run the country for their own benefit.
Exxon could write a check-- I'm not saying they would--
for a billion dollars if they wanted to.
There's no limit. And there's no reporting.
They can do that without the same disclosures
that are required for other contributors,
and they can do that in a way that gives you
little opportunity to be able to defend yourself. FOX: Mm-hmm.
That puts, I think, all of us at risk.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: ExxonMobil didn't write a billion-dollar check in one election,
but the fossil fuel industries combined contributed $150 million
to the 2012 election, and Common Cause tracked lobbying expenditures--
$747 million to gain and keep
the exemption to the Safe Drinking Water Act, known as
"the Halliburton loophole for hydraulic fracturing."
Considering that's just one election and one exemption to one law,
a billion dollars is actually the low end.
OK, we got it. Government's bought off.
Time to go home. Thank you. Roll credits.
It just didn't seem that simple.
There had to be something else going on under the surface that I couldn't see.
The price of gas in Asia
right now, depending on the contract,
can be as much as $16,
whereas it's $2.50 here.
So, if you're in the business to extract hydrocarbons,
you're going to look for the customer that's going to pay you the most money.
And that is most decidedly Asia at the moment, and Europe.
Europe's paying about, what, $9.50, $10, something like that.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: As of December 5, 2012,
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
had received over 20 applications to build
liquefied natural gas ports
to ship American gas overseas.
The EIA--Energy Information Administration--reported that, as a result of export,
domestic natural gas prices would rise by more than 50%,
and that developing 20 LNG ports--
at costs of billions of dollars each--
made fracking the U.S. at a large scale a foregone conclusion.
And despite the nationwide shift towards exporting gas,
the DOE refused to look at environmental impacts from LNG.
FOX: So what is happening here?
Well, I think there's a longer-term thing going on with this.
I personally think that this is tied to crude oil prices.
This populist argument that industries used about, you know,
"American gas, by Americans, for Americans,"
while, in the background, they're working very hard
to be able to export this gas out to grow other economies.
It doesn't really play with the, you know, that populist argument that's been so--
that's worked so well in this current political environment.
But, you know, again, is that what we want?
And if we begin to export, the price of gas is going to move up.
I mean, international pricing pressures are just going to dictate
that the domestic price is going to go up.
And wouldn't it be great for industry
if they get us to be much more dependent upon natural gas,
and then suddenly the gas price starts rising?
To me, that's a classic consumer squeeze,
and we will have done it to ourselves
and put ourselves right back in the same boat
that we're in with crude oil right now.
We'll be much more dependent upon natural gas, and it will no longer be cheap.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Thousands of miles of pipelines
proposed to connect shale plays to LNG ports.
Thousands of miles to connect shale plays
to natural gas-fired power plants.
WOMAN: Now, what's the...
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Pennsylvania's woods crisscrossed,
fragmented with clear-cut swaths of pipeline
that could never be built upon.
Well these trees have been here forever, you know?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Meanwhile, the water buffalo was becoming
the fastest-growing species in the state.
Duke University released a study that showed that you were
17 times more likely to have elevated levels of methane
in your water if you were within 3,000 feet of a gas well.
5,000 environmental violations across the state,
and in one county, Bradford,
close to a hundred reported cases of water contamination
in the first year of drilling.
That fall, everyone was moving.
TV NEWSWOMAN: That's part of the reason why the Hallowich family
that lives about 600 yards from the fire scene this morning wants to move.
Out of frustration, they carved the words "GAS LAND" in their yard.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Jeremiah Gee's family moved.
All of Jeremiah's meticulous documentation sealed away,
the way that Shell had destroyed 4 generations of being on the same land.
If you ask the family, they're not allowed to tell you.
Lisa Parr--moved;
dozens of other families-- pushed out;
their court cases settled, their stories sealed away,
non-disclosure agreements keeping them silent.
When he was going into radio silence, Jeremiah sent me a note.
It said, "Matthew 6:20." I looked it up.
"Do not store for yourselves treasure on earth.
"Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,
"where moths and rust do not corrupt
"and where thieves do not break in and steal,
for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
As a storyteller, there was something inhuman
about forcing people into silence.
If you take away a person's home, their connection to where they live,
and you take away their ability to tell their story,
seems to me you've taken away
two of the most fundamental things about who they are.
And there was one other person that was being forced out.
[Vacuum cleaner humming]
Calvin and Tiffiney had to make a painful decision.
With Clay's asthma and Josh's nosebleeds, and with Calvin knowing full well--
from the air-monitoring stations that he had fought to get installed--
exactly what was in the air in Dish,
they decided to pick up and leave.
You know things are bad when the mayor moves out of town.
TILLMAN: This won't do me any good anymore.
No more free Dish Network.
When we signed up, we're going to get cable installed,
and it reminded me how much that stuff actually costs,
so I'm going to miss free Dish Network.
So these people are coming out here, spending their life savings on a house,
and then you're stuck.
Nothing you can do.
This is the view where you have to ask yourself, "My God,
would I really want that in my backyard?"
Because it's in this guy's backyard.
He's in litigation with them.
You know, they ruined this guy.
His horses started having health problems,
started dying, started having miscarriages;
started having neurological problems.
Strangely enough, there's a bunch of neurotoxins in the air.
Funny how that works, isn't it?
This guy had his house for sale for years, couldn't sell it.
These people got their house on the market; they're not going to be able to sell it.
This guy lost a hundred thousand dollars in property value in his house.
About half of the people that are on this road right now
just filed suit against those companies,
so about every other house, you could say.
I hope that these people... get enough money
out of their suit that they can move out of here.
They come in here and they just got 3 pipelines going
across here, going in all different directions,
and it's just completely destroyed this guy's property.
Realistically could have been a multi-millionaire.
That's just gone.
Just absolutely gone.
So, that house right there,
that 3-story house,
that's my old house.
It's been almost a week.
After we moved out, I drove back by the house and, you know,
at that point, I knew that, you know, it's really starting to sink in that this is real
and that...you know, I'm out of here.
I'm not going to live here anymore.
You don't know what this is all about.
You don't know how it feels to be run out of your house until you're run out of your house,
so...
TILLMAN, VOICE-OVER: It's with mixed emotions, but it's what I have to do.
You owe it to your kids to get them out of harm's way,
and it was the right thing to do,
but it's not always the easy thing to do.
Yeah, so...
♪
WOMAN: The scale of drilling has gone up astronomically.
A thousand wells a year in the Fort Worth Area.
FOX: Your stated position was, if the states are not doing
their job, EPA will come in and do it? Absolutely.
Remember, oil and gas drilling and development is
primarily, in this country, regulated at the state level.
States like Texas, states like Wyoming,
states like Pennsylvania are going to have to step up.
We do have cases where we believe we see,
many cases, of groundwater contamination
and drinking-water contamination that are, if not brought on
entirely by natural gas production, were exacerbated by it;
not just methane, which is natural gas, but other contaminants as well.
FOX: So the whole process has been proven to contaminate, but you can't separate
that one part of the process from the whole rest of the process?
I can't separate the part of the process.
That's why we're doing a two-year study.
So, from that perspective, we'll have something to say.
In the meantime, though, citizens should be very vocal
with their local-- heh!--elected officials.
It'll still be up to Congress to step forward and legislate
to make a law, to ensure that we do have a national--
FOX: So the real enforcement is still-- is with the electorate?
It's always with the--listen, in the environmental movement,
the real power has always been with the people,
whether that's from the first Earth Day,
when people got tired of their air polluted
or their water catching on fire, all the way up to today.
Inside this beltway, you often hear people say,
"Well, we should just get rid of the EPA.
The two don't go together." Mm-hmm.
And I feel, as head of the EPA, my job is to do my job:
enforce the Clean Water Act; enforce the Clean Air Act;
enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act.
FOX: What can I do to interact with this agency and say,
"These are the cases where the states are doing nothing"?
Josh, if you have concerns, plea--
Let me start again. Right.
Josh--ha ha!-- if you have concerns, please bring them to us.
Remember, we have said, and I have said, we are not walking away
from enforcing the law while this study is going on.
We're going to ensure that you steward the water resources.
We're going to ensure that you stew--you take care of the air resources.
We don't want you to pack up and leave a problem
that we or the taxpayers are going to have to fix years from now.
[Paper rips]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: When we were leaving the interview, we noticed
that the grand room that we were in was actually the "Rachel Carson Great Hall."
And then I noticed that just under the "Rachel Carson" plaque
was a fake plastic plant.
Lisa Jackson, with all the attacks on the EPA,
had her work cut out for her.
[Truck door closes]
JOHN FENTON: This is a good time of year to work.
It's kind of brisk and cold in the morning and it's usually nice and warm in the afternoon,
and this is my favorite time of year, I think, sometimes.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: 3 years since the painstaking investigation in Pavillion, Wyoming began,
the EPA was about to release its results,
but the burden of proof was weighing everybody down.
FENTON: They said, "We've moved up the test results date.
"We're going to release it now on the ninth
of November," which is day after tomorrow.
To hustle around and move that test results date up by over a month and a half?
FOX: Mm-hmm. There's something there.
I'm freaking out a little bit.
I'll have to be honest with you. I, uh...
[Sighs]
[Stammers, chuckles]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Can you imagine waiting 3 years
just to find out if you had a case?
John, Louis, and the rest of the Pavillion families--
I was amazed at their endurance.
But from the moment we stepped in the door, it was clear
the man with the Purple Heart from Vietnam
was about to cost us our "G" rating.
It's bullshit.
Somebody better grow some fucking balls
and know what they're doing.
We're living in a cesspool out here.
When the DEQ had come out here and they said, "Well,
"you know, we could talk Encana, you know, to...
see if they can't sell-- buy you out,"
I said, "Fuck you." And they said, "Why?"
I said, "Do you think I'm going to leave all my fucking neighbors here?"
I said, "What kind of asshole do you think I am?"
I'm so fed up. The sons of bitches.
FOX: Well, but this could be the moment where you actually win.
I mean, it's got to be emotionally driving you insane.
Oh, you're goddamn right it is.
♪
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Two days before the EPA results would be released,
we went out to the gas fields just south of Pavillion.
Wyoming, Colorado, and the west
play host to bands of wild mustangs,
roaming around on the BLM
and often in conflict with gas production in the fields.
Well, we turned around.
We're just trying to find some wild horses.
You guys haven't seen any, have you?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The Department of the Interior rounds up wild horses by helicopter,
pens them in for relocation, sterilization,
and sometimes they end up in the slaughterhouse.
The helicopters had been through the day before.
If there ever was a symbol of oil and gas production competing with the old ways,
wild horse roundups would have to be it.
Far in the distance, up on the ridge...
a single mustang on the plains,
by himself.
Had he escaped?
I'm always--have kind of a knot in my stomach before these go.
Once it gets going, it seems to--I forget about it pretty quick.
Uh...it's a--
you never know what you're going to hear.
WOMAN OFFICIAL: The drinking water well results.
We did find methane in 10 of the 28 wells.
They were isotopically very similar to the gas
from the production reservoir.
We found synthetic organic compounds,
including a couple of gycols,
some alcohols, and 2-butoxyethanol.
We found several petroleum-related compounds,
including benzene at 50 times the safe number
for maximum contaminant level.
We also found diesel and gasoline range organics on a fairly widespread basis.
[Applause]
FENTON: Benzene, 50 times--
50 times the maximum contaminant level
on benzene in the monitoring wells.
That's insane.
That's a mad amount of pollution.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: The case in Pavillion was the shot heard around the world.
It sounds almost absurd, but it was the first time EPA verified
fracking chemicals were in the water because of fracking.
And Lisa Jackson made good on her word:
EPA moved into Dimock,
announced a full round of testing of 60 homes,
and began delivering water to residents that were affected.
MAN: Whoo-whoo! Whoo! [Truck horn honks]
This is the day. This is the day of vindication, right?
FOX: It's huge, isn't it?
SCOTT ELY: Yes, it is.
You know, it's a little overwhelming, too. FOX: It is amazing.
I think we should be baptized with this EPA water.
I haven't been baptized for a really long time, but I'm ready to be baptized.
FOX: You want to get in the water? ELY: Good. How you doing?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: For the first time in a long time,
in Dimock, there was hope.
And then the election started.
Obama's State of the Union address was largely seen
as the first campaign speech of the cycle.
BARACK OBAMA: This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy
that develops every available source of American energy.
[Cheers and applause]
OBAMA: We have a supply of natural gas
that can last America nearly 100 years,
and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy
because America will develop this resource
without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.
And, by the way,
it was public research dollars
over the course of 30 years that helped develop the technologies
to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.
[Whistles and applause]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: It was a major election-year shift in policy.
When policy shifts, investigations shift, too.
But we were about to find out just how many steps could get taken backwards,
and just how much science could get swept aside.
When the first test results came back to Dimock,
the residents called me, feeling vindicated.
But the tests weren't released to the public; I had to drive out there and get them myself.
Of the 6 tests that I could get, all 6 wells
had significant levels of both ethane and methane;
3 of 6 wells had volatile organic compounds;
4 of 6 wells contained polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons,
including benzo(a)pyrene, benzo(GHI)perylene,
dibenzofuran, dinitrotoluene,
pyrene, and hexachlorobenzene,
explosive levels of methane, and a host of contaminants,
including uranium, associated with drilling.
And then EPA released a desk statement to the press,
saying Dimock's water was safe.
It was deja vu all over again.
...in Dimock is at the center of a national focus
on natural gas drilling's impact on drinking water.
The EPA's first ruling is that the water
at those homes is safe to drink.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Without the tests being released to the public,
the media ran with the headline "Dimock's water was safe."
FOX:
ELY:
FOX:
ELY:
FOX:
ELY:
FOX, VOICE-OVER: When a federal agency changes course,
it happens all across the nation.
Just two weeks later, the Imminent and Substantial Endangerment Order
against Range Resources in Texas was lifted.
The Lipsky case was dropped.
The press was told the case was settled,
but there was no settlement for the Lipsky family.
Their water was still flammable,
no arrangement for water replacement was made,
and a pipe replaced the garden hose off the head space of their water well
which spewed a flame 3 feet high.
Steve and Shyla Lipsky were dragged through the media
in a smear report from Fox News.
And the campaign against Al Armendariz finally succeeded;
he resigned under pressure.
With all this back and forth, I asked retiring Congressman Maurice Hinchey,
who had originally asked EPA to get involved, who was the sponsor
of the "Frack Act" in Congress, what he thought was going on.
My thought is that there are--heh heh!--
a certain amount of contests within the Obama Administration.
There are people within the Administration who have differences of opinion.
Some understand that, uh,
the way in which this frack drilling operation has taken place
and is taking place right now, is being injurious
and is costing a lot of money, is being harmful.
And there are others who are very much in favor
of what this situation should be continued.
We have to find out if it's safe for us to be here. FOX: Right.
But we also have to find out what happened
so that we can stop it from happening again,
because people complain about the price of gas;
wait till you're paying twice that for water.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: What was more troubling was that both Scott Ely in Pennsylvania
and Steve Lipsky in Texas were saying the same thing--
mid-level EPA would come to their door and tell them,
"We're sorry. We're being yanked off the case.
Higher-ups are telling us we've got to walk out on this."
It didn't make any sense. Again--
Well, again, I got people from inside the EPA,
'cause I don't want to get anyone in trouble 'cause there's good people there,
I think, and said that higher-up just yanked it away from them.
The Philadelphia office got a call from the higher-ups from D.C., chewing them out.
He said that, uh, that it wasn't just Range Resources,
the gas company came after them, it was the whole coalition.
But it was from the higher-ups, and they said there was some congressmen
that were calling, you know, and when they first come in here,
there was congressmen that were really harassing EPA:
"Why are you there? Get out of there. You don't belong there."
And it's kind of scary
when your own government is afraid of a business.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: "Don't use your water. It's not safe.
We can't do anything about it. Orders are coming from above."
Ready to move.
FOX: You ready to move?
Yeah. I just-- Yeah?
It's...
FOX: You'd really walk out on this if you had to-- I guess you have to, right?
Yeah.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: As it turns out, neither Steve Lipsky
nor Barack Obama was compelled to move.
Steve Lipsky didn't give up.
He kept pressing reporters to look into the case,
and just after the election, all sorts of things turned up.
It turned up that EPA had done a full hydrogeological study
of the gas drilling near Steve Lipsky's house,
showing a fingerprint match between the gas in Range Resources' gas well
and the gas in Steve Lipsky's water well.
So the EPA knew the whole time.
A letter from the Texas Regulatory Agency to Range Resources,
stating that their cement job had failed.
So the gas company knew the whole time.
An email that revealed that former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell
had actually lobbied the EPA
on behalf of Range Resources
to drop the case.
Just a few weeks after the election, Lisa Jackson,
EPA Administrator and lead investigator
on fracking across the U.S., resigned.
Scott Ely hung on in Dimock, continuing his lawsuit,
and New Yorkers didn't give up, either.
Citizens submitted 204,000 public comments
on the last stage of the Environmental Impact Statement,
forcing Governor Cuomo to halt the process
and continue the de facto moratorium.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: But for the rest of the Dimock families,
when EPA's press release seemed to destroy their case,
their lawyers turned around on them, saying, "You've got to settle with Cabot
"and you have to sign non-disclosure agreements
or else we're coming after you for our expenses,"
which the residents could in no way afford.
So, in just the matter of a year and a half,
the Dimock case had exploded in the media, been reported worldwide,
had set the stage for a precedent for water replacement
throughout PA and throughout the world that could have cost
the gas industry trillions of dollars to fulfill,
to being shoved in the corner, denied the truth by the federal government, the gas industry,
and the state, and told to take the money, shut up, and go away.
The residents started preparing for silence.
FOX: As a last question,
if you're in a position where Cabot would do nothing,
except if you guys signed an agreement that said you couldn't speak anymore,
what would you like your last statement to be?
Well, knowing me as well as you do, and a lot of people know me,
that it's like I almost never...stop talking.
Ha ha ha ha!
Oh, my husband says, "You wake up talking."
And I do. I do.
You know, I'm a communicator.
I've given this my all, Josh. I've given this 200%.
FOX: So, there isn't one final sentence, statement?
[Alarm beeps]
See? I'm practicing.
[Beep]
FOX, VOICE-OVER: A few weeks after returning home from Wyoming,
a disturbing hearing was announced in the House of Representatives.
The House Committee on Science and Technology
was hauling EPA in before a panel
to question their results in Pavillion.
Clearly, it was another attack.
If Congress was going to attack EPA in the last remaining investigation,
someone needed to be there to tell the story.
But Representative Andy Harris, Republican Chair of the Committee,
was barring our cameras from the proceedings.
FOX: I just have to stay calm.
If I start getting nervous, I'm going to say the wrong thing.
I just have to stay calm.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: There's a protocol in Congress that if you want to tape a hearing,
you have to sign up and register; we followed the protocol, we signed up.
We knew the rules--if someone was speaking in public, that meant they could be recorded,
and the First Amendment states, "Congress shall make no law
impeding the freedom of the press."
That meant, to me, that no matter which representative told me
that I couldn't come in that day, the Constitution guaranteed my rights.
FOX: Has press already gone in?
There's no press covering.
No credentialed media signed up to cover the hearing. Uh-huh.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: Of course, I knew what might happen. I didn't think it would.
I thought they would actually cave and realize
that we were on the right side of the First Amendment.
But I have to say I wasn't surprised.
WOMAN: Sir, you are not allowed in with a camera.
FOX, VOICE-OVER: It had been demonstrated to me over and over again
that certain elements within Congress and the gas industry
had gotten used to treating the Constitution just as they had treated the fossil fuels
they extracted, as a relic left behind from the past that they had every right to burn.
WOMAN: You cannot have that in here.
FOX: Of course we can. It's a public meeting. No, you cannot.
There's an appeal to the Chair.
Several of the members are going to make a statement.
Sir. And we are allowed to be here, within our rights.
Are you going to remove your camera?
I--I am not going to remove the camera.
Sir, sir, stop.
FOX: We have also sent emails.
We have also sent emails and we have talked. Yes.
Do your duty, Officer. All right.
Sir, turn around, put your hands behind your back for me, please.
MAN: Come on, come on. Come on, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chair, we discussed this before.
Ahem. This is a public hearing.
This is a public hearing.
I'm within my First Amendment rights,
and I am being taken out.
MAN: Well, but before the meeting has begun,
before we've had a chance to discuss the issues, this guy is being led out in handcuffs.
WOMAN: Where's the transparency?
FOX, VOICE-OVER: They led me out of the hearing room.
I was told I was the first journalist to be arrested
in Congress simply for doing journalism,
but we really wanted to tape the hearing.
We really wanted to hear what they had to say.
The great irony is that after taping 3 1/2 years of hearings
all across the nation, in big places and small,
the last thing I ever want to do ever again
is tape a goddamn hearing.
You got to stand on your feet the whole time,
most of what's said is pretty boring.
It's a pretty arduous deal.
When they led me out in handcuffs, I was half-relieved
that I didn't have to keep standing there listening to these people.
I felt calm. I felt relaxed. I felt free.
I didn't have to answer my phone, return a text message,
make sure that the camera wasn't running out of batteries.
I didn't have to listen to what these people were saying,
attacking my friends in Pavillion, Wyoming,
attacking the EPA once more.
I had done everything I needed to do at that moment.
There wasn't any more.
After 3 1/2 years of recording,
documenting, writing notes, traveling all over the world,
this was the most that I could do.
When I was in the police station,
my arresting officer hit me up for a part in my next movie
as he was leading me over to the fingerprint machine.
When they pressed my fingers down on the glass,
and I saw the images up on the screen--
the ridges, the circles
on my fingertips-- I realized
they looked just like the inside of a tree.
Maybe there's something deep in our DNA that doesn't want to get cut down.
Maybe there's something linked. At least that's what I feel.
A tree doesn't move until you cut it down,
and I'm certainly...not moving.
We can't all just move,
certainly not when there's another way out.
I felt like I could see it-- a horizontal well bore
drilled down into the earth, snaking underneath the Congress,
shooting money up through the chamber at such high pressure
that it blew the top off of our democracy,
another layer of contamination due to fracking;
not the water, not the air,
but our government--all those toxic dollars,
all those contaminants, all of that influence
out-sizing the citizen's voice
in our democratic republic.
So I still don't know what's going to happen around here.
The saying goes, "Environmentalists only ever get temporary victories."
But the losses are always permanent.
There's no such thing as anyone's backyard anymore.
This wasn't about me getting drilled
or anyone getting drilled in any one place.
The plan is for shale gas
to be the new world energy.
If they get their way,
we're in for 50 years of shale gas running the world.
You start to get dizzy.
I felt like I could close my eyes
and open them anywhere in the world.
♪