TV News LIES

New York is poised to make a decision on allowing natural gas development and production to expand — a decision that was just delayed because the state is still considering the health impacts of moving forward.

As state Health Commissioner Nirav Shah has said, "The time to ensure the impacts on public health are properly considered is before a state permits drilling."

Yet years after the shale gas boom began, scientific studies are just now being conducted and reported. We can only hope that the Health Department and its appointed panel of experts takes the time necessary to thoroughly analyze this critical issue before reaching any conclusions.

Even if foes of the Keystone XL pipeline block it, companies seeking to get Canada’s oil sands to U.S. and world markets could travel the old-fashioned way: by rail.

While TransCanada has been trying to obtain a U.S. permit to build the 875-mile northern leg of its Keystone XL pipeline, Canadian and U.S. railroad companies have been busy installing new track and loading facilities to carry the oil sands crude from northern Alberta to refineries in the United States and Canada.

Green activists and climate change scientists have slammed a new report from the Obama administration that raises no serious objections to building a massive and controversial oil pipeline.

The Sierra Club, one of the US's oldest and most respected environmental advocacy groups, attacked the State Department study into the proposed Keystone XL piepline – which will bring oil from Canadian tar sands deposits down to the Gulf of Mexico – as a "deeply flawed" analysis of the environmental consequences of the project.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo came as close as he ever has to approving fracking last month, laying out a limited drilling plan for as many as 40 gas wells before changing course to await the findings of a new study after discussions with environmentalist and former brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy Jr., several people familiar with his thinking told The Associated Press.

The turning point, which could delay a decision for up to a year or longer, came in a series of phone calls with Kennedy. The two discussed a new health study on the hydraulic fracturing drilling method that could be thorough enough to trump all others in a debate that has split New York for five years.

The State Department’s long-awaited environmental report on the Keystone XL pipeline leaves President Barack Obama with no real scientific reason to reject the nation’s most fiercely debated energy project.

The sprawling 2,000-page report, released late Friday afternoon, doesn’t issue a clear yea or nay on a sprawling section of pipeline that would traverse from western Canada to Oklahoma. But the report’s key takeaways — including a conclusion that the project would have “no significant impacts to most resources along the proposed Project route” — Obama may have been hemmed in by his own State Department experts.

Given the sordid environmental history of oil and gas development that has already occurred across the U.S., NRDC is extremely concerned about the additional harmful environmental, health and safety impacts that oil and gas development of this magnitude will bring in the future. Since it has been reported that more than ninety percent of oil and gas wells are fracked, there is a lot of new fracking slated for our future—tens of millions of acres of new fracking. Clean air, clean water, healthy communities, wildlands and wildlife habitat are all threatened.

These astounding numbers illustrate just how much of America’s land is already at risk from oil and gas development. In the face of this reality, clean air, clean water, healthy communities and the health of these lands across the country depend on the strongest possible state, local and federal rules, as well as the inspections, monitoring, and record-keeping needed to enforce them over such a large area.