To: President Donald Trump, The United States House of Representatives, and The United States Senate
Establish a National Ban on Fracking
Stand with Vermont, New York and other states to ban fracking for natural gas in the United States.
Why is this important?
Fracking is a type of drilling that injects millions of gallons of hydraulic fluids — a mixture of chemicals, water and sand — into a well to create pressure that cracks open rock underground, releasing natural gas or oil. This process can deplete and contaminate local water, damage the environment and threaten public health.
The fugitive methane pollution from the hydrofracturing process is accelerating global warming. On a national scale, a growing body of scientific evidence is building that the climate benefits of switching from coal to natural gas were a total mirage, with the catastrophic Porter Ranch methane blowout the most visible and extreme example of a nationwide surge in methane leakage as a result of the domestic fracking boom promoted by the Bush and Obama administrations. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a twenty-year timespan.
Fracking threatens our air and water. The toxic results of using hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas have led to the contamination of drinking water, and disposal of wastewater from fracking causes earthquakes. Oklahoma became the number one place for earthquakes on Earth this year because gas companies inject fracking fluid back into the ground.
Toxic and carcinogenic fracking chemicals—as well as hazardous working conditions—are poisoning and killing workers in the fracking industry. Fracking is a large-scale industrial process that doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard or deserve exemption from laws that protect the health of our children and of our workers.
That’s why communities all over the country from New York to California and Texas to Colorado have stood up to the oil and gas industry and said they don’t want fracking in their backyards. We have clean energy solutions to climate change, and fracking is not one of them.
The fugitive methane pollution from the hydrofracturing process is accelerating global warming. On a national scale, a growing body of scientific evidence is building that the climate benefits of switching from coal to natural gas were a total mirage, with the catastrophic Porter Ranch methane blowout the most visible and extreme example of a nationwide surge in methane leakage as a result of the domestic fracking boom promoted by the Bush and Obama administrations. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a twenty-year timespan.
Fracking threatens our air and water. The toxic results of using hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas have led to the contamination of drinking water, and disposal of wastewater from fracking causes earthquakes. Oklahoma became the number one place for earthquakes on Earth this year because gas companies inject fracking fluid back into the ground.
Toxic and carcinogenic fracking chemicals—as well as hazardous working conditions—are poisoning and killing workers in the fracking industry. Fracking is a large-scale industrial process that doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard or deserve exemption from laws that protect the health of our children and of our workers.
That’s why communities all over the country from New York to California and Texas to Colorado have stood up to the oil and gas industry and said they don’t want fracking in their backyards. We have clean energy solutions to climate change, and fracking is not one of them.