TV News LIES

A new study by veterinarian Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald, a professor of veterinary medicine at Cornell University, chronicles case studies of dozens of farmers and pet owners in six states over the Marcellus Shale.

Their findings, published in “New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy,” are a harrowing account of sudden deaths of cattle, as well as reproductive and neurological problems in horses, cats, dogs and other animals.

Federal policing of oil and natural gas drilling on public lands is lax and inconsistent, with only 6 percent of violations resulting in monetary fines over 13 years, House Democrats said in a report Wednesday.

Fines over that time totaled less than $275,000, an amount that the Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee characterized as little more than “pocket change” for oil and gas companies. The report said federal regulators issued no fines in the period studied, February 1998 to February 2011, in eight of the drilling states.

Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann’s upcoming talk at the university has been the target of a coal and gas interest group that would like the university to “disinvite” him. On Facebook and a website, Common Sense Movement and the Secure Energy for America Political Action Committee urge supporters to send letters to local newspapers criticizing Mann.

Mann, professor of meteorology, will be the speaker at Thursday’s Penn State Forum, a series held over the lunch hour. Mann was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Prize in 2007.

On Jan. 31 the Associated Press released a story that should make everyone in CNY wake up in the middle of the night screaming.

So, let’s recap.  We have a federal agency that sees no potential environmental harm from installing a 39-mile pipeline through mountainous pristine waterways, forest ecosystems, and private farmland.  We have a gas company that tells landowners one thing and then does something entirely different behind their backs that will result in loss of property and environmental destruction.  And we have the federal government in the form of the House of Representatives refusing to allow the press access to public business, and even going so far as to have a journalist arrested.  In America this is happening!

BP’s 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill is still affecting the lives of many Americans, particularly the tens of thousands that have not settled lawsuits with the company.

Yet the company has bounced back from the billions it lost in the wake of the spill. BP announced today that its 2011 profit totaled $26 billion, a 114 percent jump from the year before, when the company’s “failure of supervision and accountability” caused the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Washington Governor Chris Gregoire says construction on a waste treatment plant at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation must continue. This despite serious safety concerns raised by two high-level whistleblowers. There’s also a newly leaked report that warns plutonium levels in Hanford tank waste could be much higher than previously thought.

“If there’s a good and valid reason for us to stop, to slow down, we will listen to any legitimate concern,” Gregoire says. “But in the meantime I cannot continue to allow US Department of Energy to delay and delay and delay. The Columbia River is at stake, all of that area and its vitality.”