How the oil and gas industry is exactly like the tobacco industry

How the oil and gas industry is exactly like the tobacco industry and I mean EXACTLY.

Did you ever see Thank You for Smoking?

Plot
Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is the Vice President of and the chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a tobacco lobby whose stated purpose is to research the links between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. Unsurprisingly, the group, funded by cigarette companies, does not find any link between the two.

Does that remind you of all the cases where water suddenly ends up contaminated shortly after hydraulic fracturing yet industry claims there is no connection, no link to fracking and no proof? Hey, just look at their studies if you don’t believe them.

High Court Turns Down Both Sides In Tobacco Fight

The court’s action, issued without comment Monday, leaves in place court rulings that the tobacco industry illegally concealed the dangers of smoking for decades. But it also prevents the administration from trying to extract billions of dollars from the industry either in past profits or to fund a national campaign to curb smoking.

In asking the court to hear its appeal, the administration said the industry’s half-century of deception “has cost the lives and damaged the health of untold millions of Americans.”

EXACTLY!

Hydraulic fracturing MUST be regulated by the EPA under the SWDA. Voluntary disclosure is not good enough.

State avoidance of federal oversight reveals same coziness that allowed the gulf spill disaster

“State officials have made it clear that these new rules are an attempt to avoid federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing,” says John Fenton, President of Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens. The new rules require disclosure of fracturing chemicals to the state agency only. Landowners insist they don’t have adequate access to this information, as the state’s Open Record’s Act may even protect industry’s attempt to claim this information as proprietary.

Fenton argues that if the WOGCC’s new disclosure rule were actually to benefit the public, disclosure would be to the public, not only the WOGCC. The rule should also require full disclosure of all chemicals in all fluids used in oil and gas development. “By limiting the disclosure provision to hydraulic fracturing and reporting to the state, our state officials did the bidding of industry. Same as it ever was,” says Fenton, whose water is contaminated and may have been for decades.

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