Corporate Limited Truth goes along with Limited Liability.
In Australia, we, the descendents of convicts and immigrants, were brought here to exploit its fragile natural environment, to increase the wealth of capitalist owners. We are mining, fracking, logging, and ruining the soil and water.
These power relationships continue. Coal Seam Gas mining, and its use of Fracking, is a terminally destructive process, allowed by our last decade of corrupt Labor and Liberal governments. Its a false solution to climate change. But there is more ...
Fracking uses huge amounts of our water, donated virtually for free by our government for CSG mining. The water quality is destroyed by adding toxic chemicals. These are injected with forcing pressure to shatter underlying rock layers. This allows the toxic solution to mix with other toxic minerals and gases already present underground, and spread them far and wide. Some of the toxic mix is brought back to the surface with the gas, where it is left at risk of spreading, or processed elsewhere. The original poisons are never fully recovered. They are out there, somewhere in our environment, or inside us.
I refer the reader to the inspiration for this article, "Natures Capital is a Limiting Resource", by Paul Craig Roberts. ( http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/25/natures-capital-is-the-limiting-resource/ )
". . .
Only in science fiction can humans escape the consequences of destroying their own habitat. . .
. . . Many associate ecological destruction with population pressure. However, the toxicity associated with mining, fracking, chemical fertilizer and GMO farming, and the adverse watershed effects of logging is turning even low density states such as Montana into an environment with ruined soil and water.
. . ."
AGL, and its like minded competitors, are only interested in making a profit from this dirty extraction of a finite resource. It is written into every corporate article. A CSG miner has no care for what happens elsewhere during and after the well is finished its term of profitability. All promises and assurances made, regards what happens afterwards, what happens anywhere in the environment, are unsupportable lies, to calm public concern, in support the corporate primary purpose, which has all of the morality of a rapist. The lies are both knowing, and unknowing, and extend to the political party apparatchiks who are complicit on the short term profit take.
Failure to disclose risks
The failure of the corporations to fully disclose the chemistry of the toxics injected in, is a lie. Failure to fully disclose is not just because of commercial secret The kept secret is that they are deadly toxic, worse than the many chemicals added to cigarettes. What helps dissolve and breaks rocks apart, also rips apart living biology. Some of the chemicals are volatile, they evaporate into the air, others will mix with our water systems. Other chemicals are brought up from underground minerals. Large volumes of water are used.
Burning methane gas is like smoking "lite" cigarettes
Another corporate lie involves the careless failure to monitor and reduce possible methane leakage. Measurements and research costs money, and so its left to public funding. Corporation have given their best low estimates of overall methane leakage, but actual measurements threaten their claims of global warming safety, about their "clean" product. On TV we have seen commercials of "clean" burning fuel gas. The process of getting CSG is filthy crude. It can give you cancer. Its not sustainable. It is still too harmful, to be a safe climate substitute for coal burning. http://cleantechnica.com/2013/01/23/jeffrey-sachs/#Lxkb4RM7JC6QQtZo.99
A little plug does not hold an underground monster mash of waste.
Assurances made about the long term integrity of the concrete plug collars of abandoned wells are unsupported lies. No one will check, what is underground, where no one can see. The broken layers beneath are subject to subsidence, change , shift, flows of water and dissolved, or free gas, into and out of porous rock layers. CSG miners would have us believe they have invented eternal concrete that does not shrink and crack with time, and the hard plug is the only possible escape route for the toxic waste mashed up below. Such claims cannot possibly be true. The concrete well cap is little more than a magicians misdirection of attention.
The corporate legal teams of hell
More from the Craig Roberts article. When local inhabitants report damage or poisoning of their water supplies, such claims are routinely denied by fracking corporations to be a result of their activity.
". . .
Energy spokesmen claim that methane found in ground water near fracking sites is a natural condition. However, residents say that their water was not infused with methane prior to the fracking operations. A study recently published by the National Academy of Sciences found that the type of methane gas that has appeared in water supplies is the same as the gas nearby wells are extracting with fracking operations. This indicates that the methane is moving into water supplies through underground fractures. . . .
. . . Pennsylvania, possibly the most corrupt state in the US, has passed a law that prevents health care professionals from sharing information about the health care effects of fracking. “I have never seen anything like this in my 37 years of practice,” says Dr. Helen Podgainy, pediatrician from Coraopolis, Pa
. . . "
A government of cover-up
In Australia, a impacts on lung function, from living in the dust spread region local coal mines, have to be measured and studied privately, because our government is not interesting in supporting studies on health impacts of their policies. Its well known that coal miners get "black lung" disease, but what of the health impacts of wide spread dust in communities.
( http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1208168/gloucester-residents-lung-function-tested/ )
There is no chance that our government will do additional monitoring of our health, let alone admit the potential for problems. It will not pick up early warnings, although you might. Many delayed effects in degenerative health problems many decades may never be attributed to fracking. But the long lived toxins used in fracking are deadly, will be ultimately well-mixed (pun intended) into our environment, and are likely to have long term effects.
". . .In 2012 Robert Oswald, professor of molecular medicine at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, published with a coauthor, Veterinarian Michelle Bamberger, a peer-reviewed article that indicated a link between fracking and neurological, reproductive, and gastrointestinal problems of livestock exposed via air or water to toxic chemicals used in fracking. . . ."
http://www.slopefarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Bamberger_Oswald_NS22_in_press.pdf
Known potential and future harm far exceeds public benefit
Like the tobacco industry, the Coal Seam Gas industry will vehemently deny any ill effects that are claimed to be a result of their product. Because they are corporation, taking in money within current legal constraints, they will deny all responsibility, as the law has set them up with "limited liability" and in the future companies will claim that costs were a result of regulation failure.
In short, while there is no public or environmental benefit in drilling for Coal Seam Gas, there is considerable proven, long lasting environmental harm, which will far exceed in monetary and moral terms, any one time use only of methane gas so obtained, for export income, or domestic use for chemicals or combustion.
Money is the driver, not environmental health
AGL shareholders will get some income. Its CEO, Mr Michael Fraser, will personally get millions of dollars. Nature and the rest of us will have to live and die with the costs.
AGL Leadership team
http://www.agl.com.au/about/companyoverview/Pages/LeadershipTeam.aspx
Other reading:
Jared Diamond. Collapse : How Societies chose to fail or succeed.
http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Succeed-Revised-Edition/dp/0143117009/
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The arithmetic problem.
We are failing to slow the growth of our emissions of greenhouse gases.
USA has no plan. China has no plan. India has no plan. Australia has no plan.
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