Study Finds Fracking Doesn’t Harm Drinking Water in Texas

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Hydraulic fracturing hasn’t contaminated groundwater in Texas, isn’t an earthquake hazard, and has been a boon for the state’s economy, according to a study released Monday.

The new study’s conclusions on drinking water are in line with multiple other studies of hydraulic fracturing, popularly known as fracking.

Hydraulic fracturing is the process of drilling into rock and injecting a high-pressure mixture of water, sand, and chemicals to obtain shale gas and oil, which is produced from fractured rock. Some environmentalists argue that it can harm water supplies.

The report initiated by the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas, based in Austin, asserted that “direct migration of contaminants from targeted injection zones is highly unlikely to lead to contamination of potential drinking water aquifers.”

To conduct the three-year study, the Academy assembled a panel called the Task Force on the Environmental and Community Impact of Shale.

“In Texas and pretty much everywhere, hydraulic fracturing has not been proven to have an adverse impact on drinking water,” Christine Ehlig-Economides, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston who is chairwoman of the task force, told The Daily Signal.

The study examined the impact of fracking on drinking water.

“The average annual water use for hydraulic fracturing activities in 2011 and 2012 in Texas was about 20 billion gallons of water,” the report said, citing an Environmental Protection Agency study from last year. “Because this volume represents 0.2 percent of total water use in the state, and 0.7 percent of total state consumptive use, it might be considered small.”

The study also explored the impact of fracking in five other areas: geology and earthquake activity; land resources; air quality; the economy; and society. It found generally positive results for each.

However, in a sixth category, transportation, the report found that fracking produced a surge of trucks, damaging pavement at an estimated cost to state taxpayers of $1.5 billion to $2 billion per year.

Even so, the study concluded that fracking adds $473 billion to the Texas economy and created 3.8 million jobs.

“Texas has had a long history of oil and gas technology for the world,” Economides said. “Has it had environmental impacts? Yes, it has since it started in the 1850s. But over that time, the industry has learned and corrected those mistakes.”

Last year, the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency completed a five-year study that didn’t find evidence of widespread contamination as a result of fracking. The EPA said fracking can affect drinking water “under some circumstances,” but didn’t cite any confirmed instances and determined there were too many uncertainties about existing data of contamination.

The Texas Academy study cited a 2011 Groundwater Protection Council study, which found that 10 of the 211 contamination incidents examined occurred because of drilling and none was related to fracking.

The Texas Academy study asserted that direct fracking into rock affecting the state’s drinking water supply “has not been observed in Texas.”

Read more at Daily Signal

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June 20, 2017 at 07:33AM

Decarbonisation Poses Risks To Europe’s Grid Operators Says Moody’s

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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Europe’s drive to decarbonize its energy “poses long-term risks to the region’s regulated electricity and gas network operators” according to a new report from credit and risk company Moody’s Investors Service.

And the study states that Europe’s continued transition to renewables, particularly wind and solar, is prompting new business models, developing technology and evolving regulation that could all “potentially undermine the credit quality over time” of those network operators.

“The shift to renewables in Europe has thrown up different challenges for the region’s energy network operators, with the huge uptick in renewables-related investment into electricity networks posing execution risks, while the move to decarbonization casts doubt over the long-term use of natural gas and the networks that distribute it,” said Stefanie Voelz, vice-president Senior Credit Officer at Moody’s.

Moody’s report also states that large scale energy network operators “may also be slow to adapt to the changing generation and consumption landscape, with electricity users becoming partially independent from the grid as they increasingly operate their own renewable generation and/or storage units. Furthermore, the growing electrification of transport or heating could significantly change network requirements.”

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

June 20, 2017 at 07:07AM

Why the Russians Conceived the Global Warming Scam

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One of my duties at Accuracy in Media (AIM) has been to expose left-wingers in the media and Congress who were soft on the old Soviet Union and are now acting like hard-liners on Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is a fascinating topic which exposes the duplicity of the left-wing obsession with Russia.

These people, who were soft on the Soviet Union and now hard on Russia, are the worst kind of hypocrites. Their hypocrisy is further demonstrated by the abundant evidence that the global warming or climate change theory, which they now embrace, was conceived by Soviet communists as a means by which to destroy the industrial base in the United States. This disinformation theme has been embraced by the liberals now claiming to be tough on Russia.

Don’t take my word for it. When Natalie Grant Wraga died in 2002 at the age of 101, The Washington Post recognized her expertise as a Soviet expert, noting that she was “born in czarist Russia, saw great upheaval in her native land and became an expert in unmasking Soviet deception methods for the State Department…”

“…protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West.”

But the Post would not admit that fact in today’s political climate.

The liberal Economist magazine wrote, “She was perhaps the only person alive in the West who could claim such an intimate knowledge of Russian political thinking, from tsarist times to the collapse of the Soviet Union.” She commented, “Many people are studying the past, but very few are studying the present. Keep your eyes open and your ears open.”

This is good advice. One of the great Soviet/Russian deceptions, Wraga wrote, was the idea that humans were changing the climate and that humans could save the earth through socialism. She said, “…protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West.”

In her 1998 article, “Green Cross: Gorbachev and Enviro-Communism,” Wraga, who dropped her last name and wrote under the byline Natalie Grant, explains in detail how the Soviet deception campaign, using the climate as an organizing tool, was developed. It was launched after the so-called collapse of the Soviet state, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, embarked on an environmental crusade, using the United Nations and other international organizations.

The veteran journalist Wes Vernon wrote about Grant’s research in this area, in an article entitled, “The Marxist Roots of the Global Warming Scare.”

Talk about “collusion” with the Russians! Where was the FBI investigation?

The big event, as Grant called it, was a Moscow conference in January 1990. As Time magazine described it, “At a meeting of the Global Forum in Moscow in 1990, when he was still Soviet President, Gorbachev proposed an organization roughly analogous to the International Red Cross to contend with environmental problems that cross national boundaries.” Among the guests and speakers was then-U.S. senator and future vice president Al Gore.

Talk about “collusion” with the Russians! Where was the FBI investigation?

The collusion took place through the Global Forum and various United Nations conferences, including the Earth Summit of 1992, giving rise to the concept of “sustainable development,” another way to describe socialism.

Grant wrote, “Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values.”

Grant predicted how this campaign would proceed, using “nightmarish” pictures of floods, scorched earth, disease, and death, unless drastic action was taken at the international level to curb industrial activity in the capitalist West.

Read more at Canada Free Press

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June 20, 2017 at 07:03AM

Surprise! Despite High CO2, 2017 Accumulated Cyclone Energy “Remains At Record Low Levels”

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Global warming was supposed to inject thermal energy into the atmosphere, and thus spawn one super cyclone after another.  Yet observations refuse to cooperate with the alarmist hypothesis.

At Twitter Colorado State University research scientist Philip Klotzbach reports that 2017 global cyclone energy “remains at record low levels“:

Earlier on June 13 Klotzbach tweeted the following chart showing how this year has been running thus far:

Despite all the warnings that a warming globe would lead to harsher and wilder hurricane seasons, data show that the the opposite is more the case.

In fact the especially harsh June hurricanes occurred when CO2 were at rock bottom levels of 280 ppm, like back 131 years ago, in 1886. Klotzbach writes: “In 1886, 3 June hurricanes made U.S. landfall“. He added:

No other Atlantic season on record has had more than one June U.S. hurricane landfall.”

The following chart shows the 1886 hurricane season:

And to show that things were much worse during the cooler, low CO2 days of the past, Klotzbach tweeted on June 12 the following chart:

CSU atmospheric researcher Klotzbach: “14 Cat. 4-5 hurricanes made U.S. landfall from 1926-1969 (44 years). Only 3 Cat. 4-5 hurricanes have made U.S. landfall since (47 years).”

That 1926 – 1969 period was close to 5 times more active with powerful hurricane strikes than the recent 1970 – 2016 period.

At his Weekend Summary at Weatherbell, veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi shows us the wild hurricane activity back in the 1950s.

Bastardi: “Can you imagine if this happened again, the media would be going nuts.” Cropped from Weatherbell Weekend Summary.

But fortunately we are far from that level of activity – at least for now.

Surprisingly alarmist scientists refuse to bring up the real probability that a warmer world perhaps means milder cyclone activity, as many statistical trends indicate. Of course if the exact opposite were occurring, or even just repeating, scientists would be claiming that there’s unmistakable proof that rising global temperatures cause harsher hurricane activity.

The fact they are are not tells us that the global warming is not about science, but all about politics.

via NoTricksZone http://notrickszone.com

June 20, 2017 at 06:52AM