OIL & GAS DRILLING : DANGEROUS ? OR DONE RIGHT ?

Tell President Obama to make the right choice : reverse his decision on new offshore drilling, and support the FRAC Act

Drilling is risky. Always. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico cruelly demonstrates that drilling – even when federally regulated, even when industry employs "failsafe" technology – risks catastrophic damage to the environment and the communities that rely upon that environment.

There’s a drilling boom onshore. Thanks to a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, natural gas is newly accessible in heavily populated watersheds of New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere around the country. Accessing the gas requires drillers to bore through underground drinking water aquifers. After which they inject toxics at high pressures to fracture shale rock, which releases the gas.

When drillers decide, drilling is dangerous. But unlike other phases of drilling, hydraulic fracturing is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Furthermore, drillers are exempt from disclosing the toxics they use. So drillers are in the drivers seat : and it’s impossible to monitor their operations – because you can’t measure what they won’t tell you about.

TAKE ACTION :

Tell President Obama to "Do It Right" Using the form below, please urge President Obama to reverse his decision to lift the ban on new offshore drilling.

And urge President Obama to support the FRAC Act – which closes the Safe Drinking Water Act loophole, and requires drillers to inform the public what toxics they inject underground.

These are both steps towards "doing it right", which would require : • The most important/sensitive lands be set off limits to drilling – such as offshore, critical watersheds and sensitive and sacred lands ; and • That drillers follow best practices to prevent and minimize impacts, where drilling is allowed

Our drinking water depends on it.

Click here to take action : http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/...