The
third panel of the day, sponsored by BP America, was concerned with the
relevant issue of Community and Public Health in regards to Natural Gas
(NG) extraction. This panel was comprised of the moderator- Bill
Farland, CSU’s VP Advisor and Professor in the Environmental Health
Department, and the following panelists- John Adgate, Chair of the
Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Sarah Landry,
Outreach for CO Oil and Gas Association, and Rich Wobbekind, Director of
the UC Business Research Division. Farland opened the discussion by
outlining the possible risks and uncertainties versus the possible
benefits and opportunities surrounding the NG industry.
Yes,
there are going to be impacts to the communities near NG outfits. No
doubt about it! There could be potential local environmental effects to
the soil, water, and air quality; social effects due to increases in
noise, vibrations, and light; infrastructural effects to transportation
and employment; and of course, health effects to the local population.
So what is known and what is still uncertain? It was very apparent that
there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding NG and FRACKing.
Adgate
began the panel with, what I considered to be, the most important issue
of health. I also felt that most people, myself included, needed to
hear this information the most critically. Right away, the audience
finds out that there is very little public health research surrounding
NG. Most of what we do know seems like common sense to me. I think
everyone can agree that the risk is highest closest to the extraction
site (i.e. locally vs. globally). Yet, each site will have its own
unique level of risk due to changes in time and space. Since there are
so many variations it can be very difficult to care for the “overall”
public health. What the industry has done or is trying to do is to
optimize the population’s health over time through “safe” practices.
This is accomplished by standards, both technology-based and
health-based, on hazards such as chemical and industrial activities. Yet
much still needs to be developed for these safety standards, especially
in regards to health. Another area for improvement is the
standardization of community stressors such as changes in feelings about
a site during/after extraction. These psychological aspects are an
important part of a population’s overall health and shouldn’t be denied.
Indeed, in Adgate’s concluding statements a table of the communities’
opinion of the biggest stressors after being affected by NG was
presented. 79% of this population answered that it was being denied or
given false information and 61% said it was corruption within the NG
industry (Ferrar et al., 2003- University of Public Health, Pittsburgh).
When it came to discussing direct causes of harm to public health, I
felt Adgate rushed through this information. I came away feeling
short-changed on a “real” answer to this very crucial issue. Firstly, I
was quite confused because Adgate claimed that the precedent on methane
emissions was false. Indeed, this claim that methane emissions are
actually decreasing rather than increasing was supported by only one
journal article. I am sorry, but I am not convinced. Then, VOCs, or the
compounds of NG emissions known to be hazardous to human health, were
totally dismissed because they had apparently already been discussed.
Once again, this made me very frustrated due to the lack of
transparency. Overall, there was a general lack of information in this
part of the presentation. The majority of the presentation was taken up
by political jargon that I didn’t find to be all that informative. We
still don’t know what comprises the mystery soup that is pumped in and
out of the Earth’s crust time and time again. We also don’t know the
individual components’ toxicity factors or what the combined toxicity
factor may be. All in all, the data that we have is drastically limited.
Thus, much more work is necessary to investigate the short and long
term exposure effects of NG.
“To
FRACK or not to FRACK?” was not the question posed by the next
panelist. Landry believes that fracking is unstoppable and that it is
very unproductive to encourage this debate. Landry also reassured the
audience that all the negative conations surrounding fracking are just
fears and confusion about the unknown. There were a lot of pokes at the
flaming faucets and papers on “cow tails falling off” with no citations
to support her argument. Immediately, I felt discouraged due to the lack
of professional merit. Landry then took another stab at the general
audience by saying that our eyes were glazing over. I don’t know about
the rest of the crowd, but this offended me. This presentation was very
strongly in favor of NG with little to none counterarguments presented.
Factual statements were made such as 1.4 billion people across the globe
don’t have access to energy, yet they were backed by what seemed to be
Landry assumptions such as these 1.4 billion people are going to “love”
NG. A Ban is not a Plan was repeated numerous times throughout the
presentation and the fact that CO is an oil and gas state was made very
obvious. Landry also bashed the NIMBY ideology, suggesting that
Coloradoans are all for local produce, so why not local energy. I think
this is a classic case of comparing apples to oranges, it is just not
valid. There was a big push for “talking-up” infrastructure in the
state. The basis for this came from the prime example of Colorado’s
on-site before and after water testing program, which shockingly enough
happens in no other state! Having some experience in ecotoxicology I had
to ask for the details of this baseline sampling. I was not pleased
with the answer I got from Landry, so she politely gave me her card
(email-sarah@coga.org, office phone-303.861.0362) and moved on to the next person in line.
To
conclude the panel, we heard from Wobbekind on the economic health of
NG in CO. The forecast has big bucks in our future. As of now, NG jobs
earn two times the state’s average wage. Although NG only accounts for
1.3% of the state’s employment, it accounts for 3.7% of the state’s GDP.
In CO there are many rural communities that may not have the job
diversity that say we have here in Fort Collins. These communities are
largely energy-based economies, depending on this industry to survive.
This is demonstrated in national NG production rankings, where CO holds 5th.
Indeed, in 2012 energy brought in 29.6 billion dollars to the state’s
economy with NG accounting for 51%. Wobbekind used this as supporting
evidence for his final argument of energy independence and terminating
wars over energy. (UC Leeds School of Business: Business Research
Division)
The
take-home message from this panel was that there is still much
uncertainty and room for improvement on health studies. Given this
information, I didn’t feel that this presentation did justice to the
issue. There were multiple questions raised following the discussion.
One of which was in regards to my question of water testing on site and
the availability of this data. Landry replied that this data is
available to the public through the COGCC website and that there has
been no toxicity found to date. Another question surrounded exposure
effects and there was no hard answer to this due to lack of funding.
This I didn’t understand due to the grand amount of money NG brings in
annually; couldn’t a fraction of this be sequestered for this type of
research. In the end, it all comes down to the social license to operate
or in layman’s terms… legitimacy, credibility, and trust which rest in
the hands of the community. We should all think long and hard about
Ballot Issue 2A before casting our vote!
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