"Gasland" Director Josh Fox Arrested at Congressional Hearing on Natural Gas Fracking

"Gasland" Director Josh Fox Arrested at Congressional Hearing on Natural Gas Fracking

The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Josh Fox was handcuffed and arrested Wednesday as he attempted to film a congressional hearing on the controversial natural gas drilling technique known as fracking, which the Environmental Protection Agency recently reported caused water contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming.

 Fox directed the award-winning film, "Gasland," which documents the impact of fracking on communities across the United States, and is now working on a sequel.

Fox says he was arrested after Republicans refused to allow him to film because he did not have the proper credentials. "We wanted to report on what happened [at the hearing]. I was not interested in disrupting that hearing. It was not a protest action," says Fox.

 "I was simply trying to do my job as a journalist and go in there and show to the American people what was transpiring in that hearing, so that down the line, as we know there will be a lot of challenges mounted to that [Pavillion, Wyoming] EPA report—and frankly, to the people in Pavillion, who have been sticking up for themselves and demanding an investigation into the groundwater contamination—and to make sure that people could view that in a larger forum than usually happens." [includes rush transcript]


Obama’s Support for Natural Gas Drilling "A Painful Moment" for Communities Exposed to Fracking


Last week, President Obama called the United States "the Saudi Arabia of natural gas" in a speech about boosting domestic energy production.

That concerns Wyoming farmer John Fenton, who already has more than two dozen gas wells on his property. The Environmental Protection Agency ruled in December that water contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming, was a result natural gas extraction and the controversial technique known as fracking.

"Things changed pretty rapidly," Fenton says, after fracking took place on his land near Pavillion, and he now has to ship in water for drinking.

 "It didn’t take long to notice significant impacts to the water, the change to smell like diesel fuel. Methane was bubbling in the water. We had neighbors that actually had livestock die from drinking the water.

 And we also saw really huge impacts to our way of life. The farm fields are full of wellheads now that we have to work around.

We have people coming and going off our property 24 hours a day. And we’ve seen over a 50 percent devaluation in the value of our land."

We also speak with filmmaker Josh Fox, who was arrested for attempting to record a congressional hearing over the EPA report on Pavillion. Fox is producing a sequel to his award-winning film, "Gasland," about the impact of fracking across the United States. Oil Slick from Massive Spill in Nigeria Threatens Coastline, May Be Largest Spill in a Decade


Communities along Nigeria’s Niger Delta have been put on alert following a major oil spill from the oil giant, Shell. The massive oil slick is making its way to the Nigerian coast, threatening local wildlife and massive pollution along the shore.

Much of the available information about the spill comes from the company responsible for it, Royal Dutch Shell, which says less than 40,000 barrels have leaked so far. But Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency says the spill could be three times as large.

It comes just four months after the United Nations said it would take 30 years and around $1 billion for a small section of the delta to recover from environmental damage caused by Shell and other companies. We get an update from Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, which monitors spills around the country’s oil-rich southern delta.


Canadian Activists Barred from Durban Summit for Protesting Environment Minister


Canada’s Minister of Environment Peter Kent addressed the United Nations Climate Change Conference today and defended his country’s environmental record despite Canada’s support of continued tar sands oil extraction and its threat to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol. Soon after Kent began speaking, six members of the Canadian Youth Delegation stood up and turned their backs on the minister. They were taken out of the room and later stripped of their credentials to the climate change conference. "Today, six of us stood up and turned our backs on the government of Canada,

in the same way the government of Canada has turned its back on us," says activist Karen Rooney. "We are calling on the government of Canada to start putting the interests of people over the interests of polluters." [includes rush transcript]


At Durban Summit, Leading African Activist Calls U.S. Emissions Stance "A Death Sentence for Africa"


We continue our week-long coverage from the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 17, in Durban, where negotiators from more than 190 nations are in their final week of key talks on fighting climate change.

The future of the Kyoto Protocol is in doubt, as is the formation of a new Green Climate Fund. With the talks taking place in South Africa, special interest is being paid to how the continent of Africa is already being heavily impacted by the climate crisis. We speak to Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria and chair of Friends of the Earth International. He is author of the new book, "To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and Climate Crisis in Africa."

 "We’re seeing a situation where the negotiation is being carried out on a big platform of hypocrisy, a lack of seriousness, a lack of recognition that Africa is so heavily impacted," Bassey says. "For every one-degree Celsius change in temperature, Africa is impacted at a heightened level. So this is very much to be condemned."


Indigenous Activists from Canada Protest Tar Sands Oil at Durban Climate Change Summit


This morning in Durban, South Africa, a group of youth and indigenous activists from Canada gave delegates to the U.N. climate talks mock gift bags containing samples of fake tar sands along with tourism brochures for Canada and Canadian flags.

Kandi Mossett, one of the activists participating in the action, says Canada’s reliance on tar sands oil "is the largest catastrophic project that I am aware of on earth right now." Mossett, who is the Native Energy and Climate Campaign organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, notes that the tar sands extraction process is energy- and water-intensive, emits immense amounts of pollution into the air, and destroys the landscape.

 "To even get to the tar sands, they have to remove boreal forest, old-growth forest. And they call it overburden. They just scrape it off and get rid of that, and then they dig down and move so many tons of earth," Mossett says. "And then they squeeze out the last little 10 percent of oil that’s actually in the sand. And then they have to use chemicals to make it liquid enough to be able to put it through the pipelines. It’s much more toxic than any other kind of, you know, sweet crude oil." [includes rush transcript]


South Africa Arrests, Deports Greenpeace Activists After Attempted High Stakes Banner Hang


Environmental groups in Durban have staged a series of actions in recent days calling on world leaders to agree to a just climate change deal.

Democracy Now! got an inside look at one action staged by Greenpeace to hang a banner off of a Durban hotel where a meeting of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development was taking place, bringing together representatives from a number of large corporations and delegates to the U.N. Climate Change Conference.

 The banner read: "Listen to the people, not the polluters." "Our goal here today was to highlight how governments are being unduly influenced by a handful of evil corporations who are trying to adversely influence the climate negotiations that are happening here in Durban," says Michael Baillie with Greenpeace Africa. "They are holding the climate hostage."




Canadian Activists Barred from Durban Summit for Protesting Environment Minister


Canada’s Minister of Environment Peter Kent addressed the United Nations Climate Change Conference today and defended his country’s environmental record despite Canada’s support of continued tar sands oil extraction and its threat to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol. Soon after Kent began speaking, six members of the Canadian Youth Delegation stood up and turned their backs on the minister.

They were taken out of the room and later stripped of their credentials to the climate change conference. "Today, six of us stood up and turned our backs on the government of Canada, in the same way the government of Canada has turned its back on us," says activist Karen Rooney. "We are calling on the government of Canada to start putting the interests of people over the interests of polluters."


Naomi Klein on Environmental Victory: Obama Delays Keystone XL Oil Pipeline Decision Until 2013


Environmental activists are claiming victory after the Obama administration announced Thursday it will postpone any decision on the proposed 1,700-mile Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline until 2013.

The announcement was made just days after more than 10,000 people encircled the White House calling on President Obama to reject the project, the second major action against the project organized by Bill McKibben’s 350.org and Tar Sands Action

. In late August and early September, some 1,200 people were arrested in Washington, D.C., in a two-week campaign of civil disobedience.

 "We believe that this delay will kill the pipeline,” says the Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein. “If it doesn’t, if this pipeline re-emerges after the election, people have signed pledges saying they will put their bodies on the line to stop it." Klein notes that, “I don’t think we would have won without Occupy Wall Street... This is what it means to change the conversation.”

sources:http://www.democracynow.org/tags/natural_gas_and_oil

pictures:
1.Capitol Police arrest filmmaker Josh Fox who wanted to videotape a pubic hearing of the House Science, Space and Technology sub-committee, yesterday.
2.Fracking is a process that injects millions of gallons of chemical mixed water into a well in order to release gas