Page 58 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

Fe O + O in the atmosphere hours after chemical spraying 151 and you’ll see that the chemical
2 3
“trade secrets” of aviation fuel and hydraulic fracturing fluids are in sync. Environmentalists
have tried for decades to discover the formulae for the fracking lubricants polluting land and
water much as jet fuel and aerial chemical spraying are polluting the air and entire biosphere. 152
In 2014, North Carolina went so far as to pass the Energy Modernization Act (SB786) making
disclosure of fracking trade secrets a Class I felony. 153
Fifty-five percent of the 40,000 fracking wells drilled in the U.S. since 2011 are in areas of
prolonged drought, thanks to the billions of gallons of water fracking requires—and not counting
the billions of gallons of oilfield wastewater fluids loaded with chemicals that have to be
disposed of. Is it any wonder that fracking has been implicated in the increase of earthquakes,
sinkholes, and salt dome collapses? In Oklahoma, where there are 35,000 active wastewater
disposal wells, earthquakes measuring 3.0 or greater reached 890 in 2015 alone. In 2008—the
year before oil companies began using fracking—only two earthquakes occurred.
Then there are methane releases:

A Cornell University scientist’s claims that oil and gas development is so harmful to the climate that methane
emissions and oil and gas production in general need to be cut back immediately to avoid a “global catastrophe”. . .
[Environmental biology professor Robert Howarth]. . .concluded that the climate impact of natural gas produced from
shale—most of which involves hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—may be worse than that of coal and crude oil. That’s
because methane leaks from natural gas production have a greater effect on the climate than carbon dioxide emissions,
Howarth said. 154

Fracked gas contains radioactive radon, and venting radon means releasing methane. It takes
ten half-lives (8.3 days = 1 half-life) for radon to decay enough to be safe, and yet it’s being
pumped to market immediately for people’s homes, while radon “well brine” is spread over
roads before snow and ice storms. 155 Tons of hot radioactive waste in the “orphan” waste stream
(brine, sludge, rock, soiled equipment, etc.) ends up in landfills in trash bags. Why? Because Big
Oil has always had the privilege of self-reporting, self-regulating, and writing off taxes.
But the worst news yet may be that burying radioactive waste in the hydrocarbon-poor shale
of already-fractured deep underground rock is under consideration. The 2014 proposal by U.S.
Geological Survey hydrologist Chris Neuzi 156 is made to sound like it’s “in the future,” but the
truth is it may already be underway. And it’s been done before. In “Oilmen Help Dump
Radioactive Waste” (San Antonio Express/News of May 3, 1964), we learn that Halliburton
Company and Union Carbide Corporation

. . .combined the oil well cementing technique with the hydraulic fracturing production stimulation technique [i.e.
fracking] to entomb radioactive wastes in an impermeable shale formation a thousand feet underground. . .Union
Carbide Corporation which operates facilities at Oak Ridge [National Laboratory] for the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission, and Halliburton, which provides specialized oilfield services such as cementing and fracturing
worldwide, have collaborated on the project since 1960. 157

Radiation in hidden places synergizing with what falls from the sky to be breathed, grown as
food and imbibed as water. Evil in the guise of profit-hungry corporations stalks the land . . .

1 Col. Tamzy J. House et al. “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” Air Force 2025, “a study