TV News LIES

An anti-fracking demonstration attracted more than 2,000 activists to the eastern side of the Capitol at midday Monday. Pop singer Natalie Merchant led members of the crowd in a rewritten rendition of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land."

The chorus: "New York is your land, New York is my land/From the Southern Tier to the Catskill Mountains/From the Susquehanna to the Hudson Valley/New York was made to be frack-free."

Radioactive waste unearthed by hydraulic fracturing is becoming a serious problem in Ohio, a new report claims.

Released Thursday by the FreshWater Accountability Project Ohio, the report was authored by Marvin Resnikoff, a physicist at the University of Michigan and senior associate at Radioactive Waste Management Associates.

Resnikoff points to what he says is a failure to properly dispose of radioactive waste from fracking, saying that these wastes make their way into municipal landfills in Ohio -- costing the natural gas industry one-hundredth of what the nuclear industry pays to dispose of similar, low-level radioactive waste.

Several small ice shelves along the East Antarctic coast appear to be melting at surprisingly high rates, some at rates comparable to those of shelves in West Antarctica, long a center of concern over the impact of climate change on the region's vast ice sheet and sea-level rise.

This is an unexpected result of a new study that documents the current status of ice shelves around Antarctica's coastline and the relative influence of the factors melting them.

Much has been made of the recently announced Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD), a Pittsburgh-based partnership between 11 fracking companies and non-profit groups. The CSSD bills itself as a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for the gas industry, putting forward a set of 15 standards for fracking and certifying drillers that voluntarily comply with those standards.

Though CSSD’s materials and the news media have touted the group’s independence in certifying drillers, CSSD appears to be less a guarantor of fracking’s sustainability than a “greenwashing” campaign controlled by the natural gas industry with the cooperation of a few philanthropies and environmentalist organizations with considerable ties to the natural gas industry.

In February 2010, Tom Jiunta and a small group of residents in northeastern Pennsylvania formed the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition (GDAC), an environmental organization opposed to hydraulic fracturing in the region. The group sought to appeal to the widest possible audience, and was careful about striking a moderate tone.

All members were asked to sign a code of conduct in which they pledged to carry themselves with “professionalism, dignity and kindness” as they worked to protect the environment and their communities. GDAC’s founders acknowledged that gas drilling had become a divisive issue misrepresented by individuals on both sides and agreed to “seek out the truth.”

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use rose 1.4 percent to 31.6 gigatons in 2012, setting a record and putting the planet on course for temperature increases well above international climate goals, the International Energy Agency said in a report scheduled to be issued Monday.

The agency said continuing that pace could mean a temperature increase over pre-industrial times of as much as 5.3 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit), which IEA chief economist Fatih Birol warned “would be a disaster for all countries.”