Earth Protect Blog

Clare Donohue, founder of an anti-fracking group called Sane Energy Project, said that out of the eight million people living in New York City, "You can walk up to anyone on the street and they haven’t heard about fracking yet." But if New Yorkers knew more about what fracking could do to their...

New rules governing oil and gas extraction in Colorado may increase the review period for permits and add to a backlog of well applications as energy exploration proceeds at a pace to eclipse last year’s record. The new regulations by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which went int...

Injecting fluids into the Earth, whether to recover natural gas or to obtain thermal energy from the planet, can cause earthquakes. New reports that look at American fracking, deep waste-water injection and geothermal activities suggest there are big risks and thus a need to develop strong regulator...

Hydraulic fracturing has been occurring off the coast of California for about 15 years, in the same sensitive waters where all new oil leases were banned since the 1969 Union Oil Santa Barbara spill, the third worst spill in American history. The California Coastal Commission wasn’t even aware the ...

SPICEWOOD, Texas — In this browning patch of land in central Texas, C.J. Teare could be fined for using fresh water to keep her decades-old oak trees alive so she relies on soapy water left over from washing clothes. "I've never seen it like this before," says Teare, a grandmother who has lived in ...

Is it safe? That’s what most people — brought up on Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and The Simpsons — want to know about nuclear power. And for the most part, the answer is yes. Accidents are rare, and those that have occurred — including the partial meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 — h...

Hydraulic fracturing, known colloquially as fracking, is a contentious issue, and Hollywood has not overlooked it. “Promised Land,” directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Matt Damon, takes on fracking, which involves blasting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals into rock, often shale, i...

By Dominic Frongillo of syracuse.com Gas from fracking is mostly methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas that is up to 105 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. As this record-breaking summer continues to heat up, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is purportedly nea...

By DAN FROSCH It has been more than four decades since the first well was drilled in the natural gas field beneath this stretch of slow rolling alfalfa and sugar beet farms. But for some who live here, in the shadows of the Wind River Mountains, the drilling rigs have brought more than jobs and ind...

  The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.  Recently, North America has been repeatedly ...

  In today’s Washington Post, it was revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been investigating peaceful climate and anti-fracking activists as a threat. In response to anonymous complaints Rising Tide North Texas, a part of the Rising Tide North America ...

Four remarkably brave activists eluded the barricades and put their bodies between enormous Alberta tar sands upgrader parts and the ecological and climate devastation they will visit on us all.  As three of the last five of 78 ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil megaloads moved through downtown Moscow, Id...

An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study has linked a contaminated Wyoming aquifer to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. This is the process required to make natural gas extraction profitable, as it opens up cracks and pores in rock formations to make the gas flow. Scientists for the EPA state...

Houston based Anadarko Petroleum recently drilled 11 horizontal wells in the Wattenberg Formation, which sits below portions of Colorado’s Front Range. The wells are expected to bring in an estimated $4 billion per year to Colorado’s economy. The reserves are estimated to contain between 500 million...

Given the twin concerns of peak oil and climate change, it's no surprise that natural gas (with its lower carbon intensity than coal) has been hailed by many as the salvation of our modern way of life, at least for now. And with the discovery of enormous deposits under Marcellus Shale in the Eastern...

Inflammable tap water, cancer threats and earthquakes: probably coming soon, near you. Sebastian Doggart reports from New York on the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking'. Go to your nearest tap. Light a match, and place it next to the running water. If it catches fire, as it has in many ...

The Bureau of Land Management says there are 1,800 oil wells on public and tribal land in North Dakota and asked for public opinion Wednesday on the industry’s method of hydraulic fracturing those wells. Hydraulic fracturing is coming under increased public and government scrutiny and about 250 peo...