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More about our guests
John Beard
Dr. Larysa Dyrszka and Dr. Sandra Steingraber
Transcript
Courtney Naquin: Hey, y’all. How’s it going? Welcome back to Breaking the Cycle, a podcast in conversation with frontline leaders, environmental experts, and advocates about the impacts of polluting industry in their communities from the Permian Basin all the way to the Gulf Coast, and how we can achieve a just transition from oil and gas. I’m your host, Courtney Naquin, recording in Bulbancha, also known as New Orleans, on the ancestral lands of the Houma, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Ishak, and Biloxi People.
Today’s episode is about the impacts of oil and gas and petrochemical activity on public health. For people that live in industrialized areas like the Permian Basin or the Gulf Coast, it’s really no question that pollution in any form is dangerous. Industry workers and people living in industrialized communities experience higher rates of respiratory issues and a variety of cancers. And many of the actual fenceline communities, meaning the neighborhoods that live directly near plants or refineries, are historically Black and communities of color. We spoke with our good friend, John Beard, resident and activist of Port Arthur Texas, who illuminates the reality of living in a fenceline community, and how pollution has impacted the people in his life. John, like many others living along the Permian-Gulf Coast frack cycle, has anecdotes upon anecdotes of people in their communities getting critically sick.
John Beard: I'm John Beard. I live in Port Arthur, Texas and I am the founder and CEO of the Port Arthur Community Action Network. And Port Arthur is a part of the greater oil patch of southeast texas. As a matter of fact, the oil industry was ushered in just 15 miles north of here in Beaumont with the Lucas gusher at spindletop coming in in 1901. And by 1903, some of the first refineries in the area were built, two of them in Port Arthur. One, Gulf Oil,which is now Valero refinery and Texaco, a Texas company which is now Motiva and ExxonMobil in beaumont. But for these purposes we’re going to speak specifically about Port Arthur. If you go back and look at it we have, roughly, twelve decades of environmental pollution and degradation that's been heaped upon people. I’m second generation petrochem worker. My dad worked at Gulf Oil Corporation. I worked for ExxonMobil in Beaumont 38 years. Also, we’re both union people. And I work and live in a fenceline community. Matter fact, I was born and raised right across the street across from the Texas Company’s tank farm. And we could look out our kitchen window and we could see the part of the tank farm and what is now Valero's refinery to the west. And if we’re sitting on our front porch or out in the yard somewhere, we could look for the tank farm and just beyond it, with a bit of the community in between, apartment complexes and homes and others, and you could see what’s now the largest refinery in the country. So we’re very close to all this, within half a mile of all of those facilities and in some cases just a matter of feet, not even a couple hundred feet. So, you know, we’ve been a part of that. And I remember my parents talking about it from years ago that if you had a white house and you went to bed that night, and you got up that morning, don’t be surprised to see this yellowy stain or tint on the side of your house. And it’s because something had been released during the night. They didn’t know what it was and they didn’t have the technology or capability of knowing what it was, or analyzing it, or having any kind of monitoring equipment. So, you know, usually, they try to wash it off the house. Or in some cases, it wouldn’t wash off, they would have to repaint.
But they talked about that. And the smells and the odors. And I recall those smells and odors. And what I think has happened, over the course of those twelve decades, is that it’s had a direct health effect on the people. In 2010, Port Arthur was declared a showcase community by the United States EPA. And the EPA had a great big meeting at the civic center with the entire town to talk about findings and all of that. And one of the findings they had was that Port Arthur had over twice the state and national average for not just cancer, but heart, lung, and kidney disease. I remember as a child, a lot of people here, my parents talked about so and so died of cancer. You know, our friend, church member, neighbor, had found out, you know, they’d been sick for a while and went to the doctor and found out they got cancer, they’ve got a few months if not weeks to live. Or someone was taking cancer therapy treatment. And I remember so well, my mother saying that, you know, her biggest fear was that she would have some form of cancer. Well, she didn’t die of cancer. She died of heart disease. But all of that’s related. Because there’s, you are not able to breathe properly, to respirate, because you’re aspirating or taking in these toxins that are in the air because of the close proximity to these plants. It affects your internal organs. It affects your breathing and your respiration. Matter of fact, I’ve been discovered to have diminished lung capacity. Whether it’s from all my years at the plant, living in this environment, we don’t know. Nobody’s ever done a study. And that’s what I found to be very strange, that we’ve been knowing this since 2010 and here we are in 2022, twelve years and nothing’s been done, not by the city, not by the county, not by the federal government, or the state to look into the cancer cluster that we are, and determine what’s causing it.
And, you know, going back to that same thing, I was at that meeting. I happened to ask the gentleman that was doing the presentation. And I said, well where did you promulgate the numbers? Where did you get these figures from and all of that? He looked around and pulled me to the side and said, look, it’s really worse than that, but this is all we’re allowed to say. That’s a very scary thought. And as I like to say in Port Arthur, you walk down the streets or just parachuted in, you could walk down the street and talk to any number of people, and I’d be surprised if you would find hardly anyone who does not either know of someone that’s had cancer or died from cancer or is having cancer treatment or also is currently undergoing cancer they themselves. I’ve had dear friends of mine pass away from cancer. You know, one recently, because of the strike at Exxonmobil, my old refinery. He was off because of that, but before that happened, he’d been having some health issues. He went and had tests done and all of this. By the time they got down to finding out what it was, they told him he had weeks to live. Matter of fact, go home and get your affairs in order because you may have six weeks at the most. And I think he lived four. He did not live them well. You know, he spent most of those highly sedated and in a lot of pain. And he’s not the only one.
But not just cancer. Good friend of mine’s mother, a retired school teacher, you know, she has COPD, a very severe form of it. It’s because of the environmental pollution. Her own doctors have said that. And it was aggravated by the German Pellets fire and subsequent problems it had back then in 2017 as well as recently. She can’t go out in the yard to tend to her flowers or shrubs or garden as much as she’d like to because she’s either taking breathing treatments or tied to oxygen or simply just not feeling well enough to get out even.
Then you have Alcina Hardy, who has a grandson who has to keep the little nebulizer with him because, you know, he has severe asthma. Or then you have Edda Hebert, when you talk about cancer. She’s a cancer survivor but only found out recently that she’s got another form of cancer. And Edda’s daughter, Angela, is a cancer survivor. Edda’s husband, Roy, just came out about a year or two years ago in December, from hospice due to cancer. Now he weighs less than a hundred pounds. But he’s not in hospice anymore. And then you have Edda’s brother, Eddie Brown, who is the founder of the youth boxing academy here. He died two years ago, of cancer. So, it’s touched a lot of people, a lot of lives in a lot of places. And there has to be some link to the environmental issues that we have with all of the pollution. Because there are places that do not have as many petrochemicals, as many refineries, or as severe air quality problems as we have here in southeast Texas. We are borderline noncompliant for ozone and others. Matter of fact, last week I think we had two or three ozone action events. It doesn’t take but one to get you out of compliance. But yet, we hear nothing about that. Well, there’s a reason. But, I think these are all contributory to the health issues. They’re making people sick and something simply has to be done about it. We cannot afford to continue to be sacrificed, our lives, our health, our homes, our property, our families, either, so these billionaire oligarchs and their companies, stock, and shareholders can make money. And that’s what it’s really about. It’s not providing a service. You could do that and have a nonprofit organization and do that. It pays for the work that’s done and that’s fine. But, these companies want investors and others to give a return on investment. People want to make money off it. So the more they extract, the more they can refine, and the more they can sell, they make money. But the toll, the deadly toll, is on the lives and health of people that live in fenceline communities and live in cities like Port Arthur.
Courtney Naquin: While the links to pollution may seem obvious, these regions often lack institutionalized research and monitoring to draw these conclusions. So to back up these local stories, we also spoke with New York State based power duo, Dr. Sandra Steingraber, an environmental scientist, and Dr. Larysa Dyrszka, a pediatrician and environmental health advocate. Together, along with several other health professionals, they helped produce a compendium, or a collection of extensive medical research proving how fracking and other associated infrastructure and activities is incredibly dangerous for public health.
Dr. Larysa Dyrszka: My name is Larysa Dyrszka. I’m a retired pediatrician. I practiced in New Jersey and then, about 15 years ago, found myself in Sullivan County. My parents were living here and they needed care. So I moved up here. And, well, we were over the Marcellus Shale. I had no idea prior to living here what that was, but quickly informed myself because there was a process in New York state. It’s an environmental law that requires that any large land use decision be made using science. And the science is the environmental impact study. As we were looking through that, and I looked at it independently, there weren’t too many doctors involved in this at all at the time. And I certainly was not a public health expert. I was not an environmental specialist. But, when I looked at the environmental impact study, I saw that there was nothing about children. And being a pediatrician, of course, my eyes went directly to that. I did a search of the document for that. There was nothing about air pollution and also radioactivity. I knew that we were living over, well, the Marcellus Shale is known to have a radioactive component, and radon is quite high in this area to begin with. And I was just in my mind thinking, how is that going to work when they do unconventional drilling and fracking? How is that going to kick up radon and get into people’s homes? So, those were some of the very basic questions I had and I brought those up at the hearings, um, and a couple of other scientists and doctors did likewise. From there, we formed a coalition.
Dr. Steingraber: That’s a good summary, Larysa. Um, and I’m Sandra Steingraber, Larysa’s co-principal with Larysa in Concerned Health Professionals of New York. I’m a Ph.D. biologist with a specialty in systems ecology, but my, um, introduction to fracking came much the same way as Larysa’s. I also live above the Marcellus Shale, only I was taking care of two kids when I woke up one day to learn that 40% of the land in my own county here in the Finger Lakes area had already been leased for fracking, quietly by the gas industry. And suddenly, their vehicles, especially Chesapeake Energy, which had this fleet of white vans and trucks, began appearing on our main street and our coffee shops. And they kind of came into our community wearing this mantle of inevitability. The shale army had arrived and this was almost certainly going to happen. And the only thing we were going to now argue about was the rules by which they would frack us. And I looked down at the parcel of land, a field at the end of my own block and imagined a drill there.
My son had asthma. I myself had grown up in an absolutely devastated community along the banks of the Illinois River, where there were two large coal-burning power plants, and lots of strip mines. So I felt like I had already grown up in a frontline community. I had a rare environmental cancer by the time I was twenty. There’s a big cancer cluster in my hometown zip code that I had, as a biologist, I had gone back to investigate and actually wrote a book about. So to wake up in this place that I had very intentionally moved to when I became a mother to raise my children away from my family because the place I came from, I felt was too polluted for me to raise children. I didn’t want my own children to have early onset cancer. you know I looked at all the air quality and water quality data before I moved here. I know that’s not the way most people choose to buy a home, to look at maps and see where all the toxic waste sites are. But that’s how I make decisions. And so to discover that this highly polluting industry was planning to use my community as its factory floor, as a mom there was no way I was just going to agree that we were gonna talk about the rules by which they were going to do this. So, I joined together with Larysa and other health professionals to begin a sort of an independent assessment. The state of New York was doing one kind of health assessment. There was a lot of secrecy about it. It was happening behind closed doors. We didn't know how they were scoping it. We didn’t know what they were gonna include in it. We felt there was value in all of us who have some kind of health and environmental expertise to join together, compile the data on our own and then share what our conclusions were with our elected officials, you know the old fashioned speaking truth to power.
But I think, even more importantly, what we did, I call this speaking truth to powerlessness, was to, as health experts, go into all the communities that were being lined up to be fracked first. and where these public hearings were happening, and bring the science into those communities. So, it was kind of from a human rights point of view, right, prior to informed consent is a big principle. If you’re asking someone to risk their health in the name of something that you're calling a collective good, like this new form of energy, then people who are where the drill rig’s going to be located have the right to know the risks they are being compelled to assume. So we felt that we could offer something and so we, Larsya and I spent a lot of time in town halls and church basements and Rotary clubs and all kinds of public forums, teaching people the basics of fracking and what they could expect. And once people heard some of the things that we knew, public opinion began to turn against it because no amount of royalties or promise of jobs is worth it if you no longer have drinkable water and if it’s going to make your children sick. So, that was, um, sort of an amazing few years when we banned fracking (laughs) statewide in December 2014.
Courtney Naquin: Amazing. That was gonna be my follow-up question was what was the outcome of y’alls activism. That’s really incredible because that’s, like, it's just really needed because, frankly, like you said, from a human rights perspective it's really important, you know, a moral obligation to go into communities and let them know. But, you know, the way that these things are advertised to communities is usually pretty pathetic. It’s usually, like, barely, like, in accessible notices. Sometimes, it’s not accessible to people in their own language. You see that in Texas a lot where, or even in New Orleans east, for example where there’s a large Vietnamese community. There can be a lot of industry activity. Some people are able to access it but it tends to be pretty discriminatory based on the populations there. And these notices aren’t in Spanish, they’re not in Vietnamese. In addition to that, you know, there’s not enough going door-to-door and community building for education like this. Because companies aren’t going to do it and usually local governments won't, so that’s really incredible.
Dr. Steingraber: Yeah, and I should say you know, we were working in a moving stream of data. Um, I mean, science works slowly and political decisions get made quickly. So, we needed to slow down the, the decision making so that science had a chance to catch up and to speak. And, by empowering people with the science that we already had, I remember our first edition of our compendium only had 65 studies referenced in it. Now, there are, and I think we’re on our eighth edition, and there are more than 2,500 peer-reviewed published studies that are referenced in it. So, it’s moved exponentially, but we needed to use science to slow everything down. So, by giving people the science that we already had, they felt now empowered to speak at the public hearings, and submit public comments. According to our state laws, our government, when they’re making these big decisions, as Larysa explained, must not only have public hearings and allow the public participation, but have to listen to what the public says. So every unique comment that is submitted, they need to respond to. And prior to fracking, the environmental issue that had generated the most comments in the state of New York directed about a thousand comments from across the state to Albany. By the time we were all said and done with our campaign, we had directed a quarter million comments to Albany. And so, in order to respond to all that, they couldn't release their book of proposed regulations according to their legally mandated time table, which meant that the clock had to start over. And that bought us even more time to let more science come in and help inform the decisions.
Dr. Steingraber: And I guess the lesson that comes up for me is, you don’t have to wait for all of the science to be finished before you take action. If we had chosen that tack, all of the pipelines and all of the drill rigs would already be in place, and once that technology is entrenched, no amount of science is gonna get it out of the ground. Which is why I think some of our sister states, like in Pennsylvania, are in so much worse shape than we are. Actually, the science of the harm of fracking that comes out of Pennsylvania is some of the strongest science we have, it’s heartbreaking. But it doesn’t have the power to stop fracking in Pennsylvania because it was already rolled out. People are on the payroll. The state government is weak and kind of corrupted by that industry, so preventing the industry from getting entrenched is important and science by itself moves too slowly. Science really needs to dance together with powerful grassroots environmental justice activism to have a chance to make a difference.
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Courtney Naquin: I was hoping one of you could talk about what pollution is and how is it defined by our government, by industry, by health professionals, and why do these definitions and thresholds matter? From a medical perspective, Larysa, could you talk about these definitions, or Sandra as well and, like, maybe how policies on pollution affect public health and our understanding of what is good and what is acceptable?
Dr. Steingraber: Yeah, well I mean, I don't think there's, like, different definitions used by different sectors. That’s pretty simple, actually. Pollution is any substance that is either harmful or poisonous to health. So, typically, there are types of pollution that are divided up according to where they’re found. So there’s air pollution, water pollution. Then there are things like radiation, which is invisible, and that can travel through many different kinds of media. And then there’s even light pollution that, it’s not be toxic per say, because we all need light, unlike radiation or pesticide, which is by definition a poison, right? If we didn’t have light, we wouldn’t have photosynthesis, and life as we know it wouldn’t be possible, right? So we say light pollution, we mean lights typically at night which interfere with the circadian rhythms of animals, interfere with the ability of animals to migrate by the stars, but also it turns out to be a risk for breast cancer for women to have exposure to light at night. We don’t talk about, for example, carbon pollution, and by that we often mean that, we’re actually referring to two things, carbon dioxide and methane, which is carbon with four hydrogens around it. Those are two flavors of so-called carbon pollution. In that case we're concerned about, well we’re concerned about a number of things actually. If we’re talking about climate, what we’re concerned about is the ability of those two molecules to rise into the atmosphere. When they’re hit by heat radiating from the surface of the earth back into outer space, those molecules actually will start to vibrate just because of the way their chemical bonds are structured. And when they vibrate, they hold that heat in. Vibrating things hold heat. So we have all these dancing vibrating molecules made up of carbon dioxide and methane. Those actually make it possible to have life on this earth because without them, every time it got dark and the earth spun away from the sun, all the heat energy that has reached us during the day would radiate back into outer space. None of it would be trapped. Temperatures would plunge down to about -400 and we’d all turn to ice in the middle of the night. Oceans would look like skating rinks so that wouldn’t work. It’s good that we have carbon in the atmosphere to hold the heat in for us, but if we load the atmosphere with so much carbon, we’ve increased the amount of methane since the industrial revolution by about a factor of three, carbon dioxide by 40% or so. So now we’re trapping so much heat that we have this climate crisis and you know, collapsing glaciers and droughts and hurricanes and all the things that come with that. So when we’re talking about carbon pollution, that’s kind of what we mean.
Carbon dioxide, it turns out, actually is a terrible poison for us. We don't think about it as a poison because our bodies are so good at getting rid of it. We have all of these carbon dioxide detectors in our carotid arteries, on the base of our brain, monitoring really tightly. And we dump carbon dioxide, of course, through our exhaled breath. Our kidneys play a big role. But if we had a buildup of carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide turns into acid, called carbonic acid, when it’s in the presence of moisture. We’re all 65% water by weight. If carbon dioxide had built up in our bodies, we would just dissolve. And in fact, that’s what is happening in the oceans, because as carbon dioxide dissolves into the ocean, it does turn into carbonic acid. That’s what we mean by ocean acidification. And that acidification now is so great that we’re dissolving the skins of sharks. So, carbon pollution can also refer to, it can refer to the climate problem. If you’re a health person, it might refer to what happens if you’re exposed to too much carbon dioxide and your lungs start to dissolve. That almost never happens except in really rare occupational cases, for example, if somebody’s fermenting alcohol and they’re down in a wine cellar and they don’t know there’s been a leak, they can become overwhelmed by CO2 and they’ll just acidify and die and asphyxiate.
The reason I mention it now is there’s this new phenomenon that we’re starting to write about in our compendium in which carbon capture and storage is attached to fossil fuel generating pieces of equipment like coal burning power plants and even an ethanol distillery. The idea is that, instead of decarbonizing, we will try to capture the CO2, prevent carbon pollution from going into the atmosphere, and instead put it in a pipe and send it across America and then shove it in the ground somewhere, like in the Dakotas. When you do that, you’re putting the communities who live near those pipelines, and most of them are poor, non-white, so it’s an environmental justice issue. In that case, if there were a leak or a breach in that pipeline, you could get so much CO2 in the air of that community that you would overwhelm our body’s very efficient way of getting rid of it. People would just collapse and die. We actually saw that in a community called Sitartia, Mississippi. That's already happened this year to a pipeline. I’m just using this as an example because this is my current work now, is to look at the way something that sounds very benign, carbon dioxide, we know it’s a greenhouse gas so we’re all worried about parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere but we don’t really think about it as a pollutant for us, as a health risk, right? But if we’re doing carbon capture and storage and we have all of this CO2 in pipelines going through people’s communities and all of a sudden we do have to think about what happens if one of those pipelines breaks and people are being asphyxiated.
Interestingly enough, one of the problems with carbon pollution in that form is that when it’s released at the surface level, it’s heavier than air so it displaces oxygen. And that means any emergency vehicles coming in to that community to try to save people who are collapsing, the internal combustion engines need oxygen also to run, and so you see ambulances and first responder vehicles sputtering to a stop and so those folks are trapped now and they can’t, even in their cars, they can’t just jump in their cars to escape like you might with some other kind of natural disaster. So that's a kind of an example of the different ways that the word pollution is used. So it's just basically any substance that causes harm. We can talk about what sector it’s in, soil, water, or air. We can talk about whether it’s causing a health effect because it's collapsing our climate, or we can say people are directly exposed and they’re actually asphyxiating. So those are different outcomes but the word pollution is a kind of roomy word, so it can kind of hold all those different meanings.
Dr. Dyrszka: So, that was a fantastic explanation of what air pollution and other pollutants do to the body. What does our government do to protect us? There are some standards that the EPA has produced, they’re called NAAQS, National Ambient Air Quality Standards. And that includes parameters for lead, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone, particulate matter, and nitrogen oxides. So these are things that they have determined cause really, really bad things to happen to the body, like cancer. So they have standards from the federal government on how much of this pollutant is allowed to be accessed, allowed to be produced by a stationary, usually large source pollutant. The problem with that, with these air quality standards is that these are for large stationary sources. They don't take into account compressor stations, individual small fracking sites. All of this gas infrastructure produces all of these NAAQS, all of these pollutants without being assessed and without taking into account how much people are being exposed to them.
So industry went about doing what it was doing and polluting, and the only measurements that were being taken were, okay, ozone in the large metropolitan areas to determine what the quality of your breathing standard might be for that particular day, but it didn't show you the picture on a minute to minute basis. It didn’t show you what the minor mobile sources of air pollutants were doing. Until people started complaining, until people told us that they’re getting sick, that the compressor station down the road, when it vents, when it produces some of its air pollutants, sometimes they could smell them, sometimes not, sometimes they just got an overwhelming feeling of nausea. It was because people were becoming ill that we came to see them. We came to take their stories down and believed them. And they are people who sometimes have had to move away. You can’t stop breathing, you know. Not only was their water polluted at times, but you can’t provide people with a source of air because air is all around you. And then of course there is the denial that they ever produced any kind of toxin in the air. So, there were communities where all the people’s water was contaminated. There were communities where the air was very difficult to breathe. Some of these people had to move. Sometimes, there would be a lawsuit and the people would actually be awarded a settlement, but only if they signed a nondisclosure agreement. That meant that none of the information that was part of the evidence could be disclosed. And so, that’s another reason why we don’t have more information, why the government doesn’t have more information, because once these nondisclosure agreements are signed, these people move away and they can't talk about it any more.
And those were the most highly affected people. So the rest of the people had to be studied. There was a Ph.D. student who did some great work with areas around wells, distance from wells was measured and then how birth outcomes were determined. It took years for that information to come to the forefront. But, what she eventually published was that babies born to mothers who lived a certain distance away from wells, the closer to the wells, the more impacted they were. They were small for gestational age. They were low birth weight. They had other complications. These were babies who are now going to be perhaps requiring developmental testing and extra help from their teachers, from the school system. These are children who are going to be needy because their mothers lived close to a well when they were in utero.
Dr. Steingraber: These are really great points that we, Larysa and I, deal with on a daily basis as we look at the data. The problem of cumulative facts, right, so that you can compel a well, let’s say, to disclose how much methane they're releasing. We hope that the new laws will do that. They don't have to yet. But nobody’s adding up the air releases from pipelines, compressor stations, from flare stacks, from wells and some people are not living just next to one well, but maybe are surrounded by two dozen wells. That’s what we try to do is figure out what the health effects are based on the evidence we have. Larysa’s other point is something that has vexed us, nondisclosure agreements definitely are one of them because those are the folks who had so much harm that the industry was willing to pay them great sums of money for that harm. And then, the price of that was that they had to shut up and not talk about it. Their story then really forecloses our ability as scientists to make hypotheses because we start with experiences of real people and then make a hypothesis and then test it, but we can’t do that when people aren’t allowed to speak to us. And then, of course, there’s other forms of secrecy this industry enjoys too, thanks to this federal law, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which Dick Cheney got through into legislation, which means that this particular industry, the fracking industry doesn’t have to disclose the chemicals that it’s pouring into the ground in order to fracture the shale to get the bubbles of oil or gas out of it. There’s no other industry that would be allowed to pour inherently toxic chemicals through our drinking water aquifers to the other side, to the bedrock, except for the fracking industry. Not only are they allowed to do it, they don't have to tell us what it is. So that, when we scientists then see people with boils on their skin or suffering from respiratory distress, we think they might have been exposed to something. Typically what I would do as a scientist would be to go to look at what’s called a toxic release inventory data. What’s the pollution that this industry has to report to the EPA, and then oh, look at that, there’s benzene coming out of that stack. Then I might take a look at the cancer registry data and see how many kids have leukemia. We know benzene is a cause of leukemia. Then you can begin to connect the dots. But this industry is so surrounded by secrecy that we scientists kind of have one hand tied behind our back when we’re trying to make, trying to draw the links between exposures and the health effects. That being said, we know quite a lot and it’s really disturbing. And the effects on babies and infants, that study that Larysa is describing in Pennsylvania has now, we see that in multiple states, similar patterns that babies whose mothers live near drill sites during pregnancy are at a higher risk for being born too small, having problems with responsiveness, in some cases birth defects, but small for date and prematurity are the two things we see over and over again. We see that in Colorado, we see it in Texas, we see it in other states. So, when we begin to see similar results in various places then it becomes clear that there’s a pattern. So in other words, these maximum contaminant limits, we already know from previous studies that those were based on healthy adult people and that children are actually more sensitive to these things so it doesn’t surprise us that we would see the most harm with little kids. Also, as you get older, your ability to detoxify pollution goes way down, so we can also predict a higher likelihood of more harm in the elderly and that’s exactly what we see. And again, some of our best data comes out of Pennsylvania. We see links with heart failure and we see death. We see that older people who live near drill rigs have a shorter lifespan as compared to those who are not so exposed. We see higher risks of, you know, ambulance runs of older people for heart failure and so on. So cardiac effects are definitely now also on our list. This is kind of the way what we do everyday in trying to connect the dots between pollution on the one hand for fracking operations and real health risks up to and including death and sabotaging pregnancy. We can say with absolute certainty that fracking is really bad prenatal care. It damages infants.
Courtney Naquin: Right, right. It’s astounding, the secrecy as you both mentioned. Thank you so much for providing some examples of what pollution can do to the body and different types of bodies. I had a followup question to that too, though which is. You know going off whenever people are essentially bought out or have to sign these NDA’s. We know that a lot of industry corporations rely a lot on public disinformation, sometimes they pretend that they’re actually good for the environment. So, how has this come up in public health information or communication? Do you see industry in a much more of a public way campaign against like the work that you’re doing or even just campaign for themselves?
Dr. Steingraber: Well, I think that the industry is really good at disinformation campaigns. So, there’s almost never a new study that comes out that shows a terrible problem that industry doesn't go to work disparaging, and sometimes that can become very personal, you know, attacking the researchers themselves and threatening funding and all kinds of different things. So, I think anyone who has ever watched a cable news show knows that there are clean green natural gas ads all over the place. So, the industry has been able to capitalize on the fact that natural gas itself is invisible, so that allows them to show all sorts of images of blue sky and things like that. So, obviously, what's not revealed in those kinds of ads is that the actual instrument used to get this invisible gas out of the bedrock is our own drinking water. That’s the club that we’re using to shatter all the shale, to get these bubbles of natural gas or, in some cases, oil, to rise to the surface. That is one of my biggest concerns, because it's destroying the water cycle in a couple different ways. When it is practiced out west where water is very scarce, we’re taking a very precious commodity, water, the availability of which is getting less because of the climate crisis. Then to get a substance out of the ground that is going to make the climate crisis even worse, we’re using that water, and we’re basically making it disappear from the hydrologic cycle. So, when you shove it deep under the ground below any aquifer, it’s never coming back. So you've just made it disappear. We’ve never done that before. Before fracking, we couldn’t make water disappear, right? I mean, we talk about wasting water and usually what we're referring to is the mass transfer of groundwater through our taps or in a car wash or something, you know, a carwash in the desert or something foolish, or by watering lawns in Phoenix. And we’re causing that water to evaporate or go into a river. If it evaporates, yes, it’s going to rise into the sky and form a cloud and that cloud may drift and rain down on all the ships at sea, and now it’s unavailable to the people of Phoenix. But it’s not disappearing from the hydrologic cycle. It’s still in the world, right? Eventually it will rise into a cloud and rain down somewhere else. Um, but when you take drinking water and bury it a mile below our feet, suddenly it’s not connected any more. That's the fraction that has disappeared altogether and is never coming back. But then, in addition to that, some fraction of that water does come flowing back to the surface when you release the pressure. And now that water is completely poisoned. So, it's worthless now because you’ve added chemicals that make it slippery. You add powerful biocides which are like poisons in order to kill off all the living organisms in the shale because they would grow inside the pipe and interfere with the flow of gas. You deliberately poisoned the water. But in addition to that, the earth itself is full of a whole periodic chart of elements. All of those things we had to memorize in chemistry, especially the metals, are down there trapped in the shale too. Things like arsenic and radium and uranium and lead. Those are poisonous things that, as long as they’re locked away in rock, aren’t going to hurt any of us. But when you blow it up into shards by using water as the club, all those things get mobilized and they go into the water itself. And so, when the water comes back up out of the hole, it’s now contaminated with all of the chemicals you added to frack with in the first place, but also all of the stuff that was trapped down there. And now it’s poison. The thing that worries me the most are these radioactive substances, especially things like radium and polonium. So, the wastewater is very radioactive. It’s also full of benzene, formaldehyde. There's a lot of different hydrocarbons down there, too. So where are you going to put all this?
We looked over and over again at regulatory frameworks all around the world for where to put fracking waste, keep it away from people forevermore in great quantities and not have it contaminate anything else. We could find no regulatory framework in any nation-state that had ever figured out the problem of fracking waste. There’s just no good thing to do with it. Probably the best thing of all the bad things is to shove it back down under the ground, really deep so it can’t hurt anybody. But when you do that, you’ve already made it really slippery because you need to decrease friction in order for the gas to flow up. So when you shove it back down in the ground, it has all these slippery chemicals in it. You lubricate all the naturally occurring cracks and fissures that are already in the earth and you trigger earthquakes. So what we see now is in places like Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas, massive earthquake problems that never used to exist. Indeed, in the UK, the problem of earthquakes with fracking was so grave that fracking had been banned altogether. Now it's really interesting because within this new government that's just come in and immediately declared that it isn't a problem after all and they're gonna lift the ban. There’s no way to control earthquakes and fracking. It’s basically uncontrollable. Once again, there's no regulatory framework available to us that could predict when and where earthquakes will happen and change the way we inject the wastewater or the rate at which we inject it to prevent it. It’s just a chaotic, unpredictable process and there’s no way to regulate it to safety. We have a whole chapter in our compendium about earthquake risk. I have to say I learned a whole lot of hydrology and geology [laughs] in order to kind of get on top of all that body of data. That’s not what I’m trained to do, but once you know one part of earth science, you can kind of teach yourself some of the rest of it and what I learned really terrifies me about the way in which we are blowing up the bedrock of our nation to get greenhouse-destroying gasses out of it. The shards left over are messing with our drinking water and creating earthquake risks that can’t be mitigated. There’s no right way to do a wrong thing. [laughs] That’s what my grandfather taught me. I think that basically applies to fracking.
Dr. Dyrszka: And yet you have the industry buying wings of hospitals, subsidizing county fairs, paying for softball or baseball, or you know, uniforms, so that their name is right there as doing something good. I remember when we had meetings, there was one person in my county who wanted to try to bring people together at least so that we could talk about these things. So, each company for each area had these kinds of traveling salesmen. They would be the ones attending all of these meetings. The kinds of things they would say, they would downplay anything that you would try to bring up. What’s the evidence for it? What proof do you have? Oh, it's no worse than what you have under your sink. That’s one that I will forever remember because two butoxy ethanol, he was comparing to Windex. Two butoxy ethanol, a horrible, ubiquitously used chemical through every phase of fracking.
Courtney Naquin: That’s all so absurd, just in the application of what Windex is used for. And also, I mean, like you said, one is actually much more harmful, regardless. Yeah. That’s absurd. But that’s like, you’re right, it’s really interesting to observe how industry representatives will challenge public health professionals and scientists but also, meanwhile, this is something that in a previous episode actually, where we talked with a representative from New Mexico and an activist from southwest Louisiana, where they were talking about tax abatements and how local governments will subsidize these huge companies with billion dollar tax abatements. Meanwhile, these companies will give like, maybe, two million dollars back to the community which maybe on paper seems like a big chunk of change, but really for them it’s a drop in the bucket. You can't really imagine what two billion dollars would do for a community versus the 2 million they donate back.
Dr. Dyrszka: Same thing with those lawsuits. The amount that they settle for are miniscule amounts compared to what they make.
Courtney Naquin: Yes. There’s an activist in south Texas. Her name is Diane Wilson. Diane Wilson actually settled, she was part of a case that settled, the largest citizen lawsuit under the Clean Water Act in history against Formosa plastics, which I’m sure y’all have heard of, which is a really terrible plastics company. The settlement was 50 million dollars. That sounds like a lot. It is a huge historic moment. But you think about how much profit Formosa makes, and how much damage they’ve caused to this community. It’s incomparable.
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Courtney Naquin: There are a couple more questions I have for you. For example, you actually touched on it a little, Sandra, but I wanted to mention this particular quote that I pulled from the compendium and it says here:
“Our examination uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends…The only method of mitigating its grave threats to public health and the climate is a complete and comprehensive ban on fracking. Indeed, a fracking phase-out is a requirement of any meaningful plan to prevent catastrophic climate change.”
That was paraphrased but those are still like exact quotes from there, and I’m wondering if you could expand on that, on those findings a bit, and start to, if it’s fair at all, to extrapolate that summary about fracking and how that might apply to other parts of the fracking cycle, such as the transport of it, processing it, or even the petrochemical industry if that’s appropriate. If y’all are able to touch on those subjects too.
Dr. Steingraber: Yeah, well, that is the um, you did a great job of crystallizing down into the smallest possible form our conclusion after so many years. How many pages did you say this was, Larysa, something like 577 pages, and thousands of footnotes? We looked really hard to see if there was any possible way to make fracking better and to make it leak proof and not harm people and there really isn’t. So there’s a lot of different ways I could expand on that, but maybe I'll just choose one way to kinda make a point.
We look to see if these methane leaks from every single part of this operation, from the minute the drill goes into the ground, all the way to the LNG export terminal, there’s just methane leaks everywhere. So it seems like it might just be a big plumbing problem that you could go around and tighten up various parts of the equipment and keep the methane from leaking out right? Because obviously the industry has a desire to keep natural gas in the pipeline because it’s selling it. But it turns out it’s not possible.
Leaks are built into the engineering by design and they’re actually a requirement. And just as one example, when you're fracking, you have to control pressure otherwise you have these huge blowouts. Every now and then you have to, just, release emissions into the air. The same with pushing natural gas through a pipeline with a compressor station. Every now and then, there are impurities in there that junk things up and you have to sort of clean out. It's this whole operation called a pigging operation. You have to kind of open the valves. In this case, it’s called a blowdown, where methane just is vented into the air. It’s a requirement. If you didn’t do that, stuff would blow up, and people would die. Same thing with LNG, liquified natural gas. In order to turn natural gas into a liquid, which you have to do if you want to export it across an ocean, it can’t travel in a pipeline, you can't just squish it, you have to actually use cryogenics to bring temperatures way down, like -260 degrees. And then, you put it on a ship and carry it across the sea. But to keep it cold, because if it should turn suddenly into a vapor again, it would expand explosively. So, to keep it cold, you have to rely on evaporative cooling, which means you have to release some of the methane into the air, allowing it to turn into gas, just in the same way that, you know, evaporation creates cooling. So, that's a requirement for LNG, otherwise it would, again, blow up. There's no way to get gas out of the bedrock and into our gas stoves or into our basements, into our furnace when we hear the whoosh of natural gas kicking on and igniting without putting massive amounts of methane vapor into the atmosphere. It’s just not possible to do that. So, it's inherently unsafe from a climate point of view. And, because that natural gas, raw gas, is contaminated with other pollutants that are toxic to us, like benzene, you can’t have that venting in those emissions that are baked into the engineering. You can't do that without releasing those other things too, including the radioactive stuff and not expose the people living nearby. And, you can't do fracking without exposing lots of people, because what we’re talking about is getting little tiny bubbles of gas or oil out of a vast expanse of bedrock. In other words, the old fashioned way of drilling for oil or gas would be to look for a place where there’s a giant blob of it under the ground. And once you’ve found that through some kind of sonar, you stick a straw down and up comes the bubbling crude, right, that’s traditional drilling. We pretty much burned through all those big reserves. So now, what we’re left with is tiny bubbles scattered across a vast amount of bedrock. In other words, you have to put wells everywhere across the landscape to make this work and then link it up with all kinds of pipelines. So, the infrastructure required for this is massive, so it has to be practiced in people’s backyards and in people’s communities. There’s no way to do it and make it profitable without that. There’s no way not to expose people. There’s no way not to load up the atmosphere with heat-trapping gasses. Both of those things I think make it just an inherently bad technology. So, from a public health point of view, I put it in the same category of stuff like smoking in airplanes. There is no way you can have smoking in airplanes and figure out some regulatory system to make that safe. There’s no air filtration, it’s an inherently, just a dangerous situation. So, we had to just ban it. Regulations are really important and can work to keep some things at low enough levels that most people aren’t gonna get harmed. But, fracking, there’s just kind of no way to do it. It’s just chaotic and uncontrollable.
Dr. Dyrszka: And the more we learn about the other parts of fracking, as Sandra mentioned, from the moment a drill bit hits the ground to its transport out, the power plants that generate the electricity that use fossil fuels, the compressor stations, the pipelines, all of these we’ve included in the studies that show the harms and risks of of this industry throughout its lifecycle. None of it can be done safely and without some harm to health.
Courtney Naquin: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. That was, it’s very clear to me from speaking with y’all that there is just nothing about it that can’t be impactful every step of the way, at every point of the fracking cycle. So, I actually only have one remaining question for y’all. You’ve touched on it a little bit already. I would love to hear more about, we have this, we have the information. We know oil and gas production, fracking, transportation, processing, and the use of it, harms people and harms the environment. We know that climate change is here and it’s harming communities. So, in my opinion, we’re at a point, more information won’t save us. With the information you’ve compiled, how can frontline communities and health professionals use this information together and how do we translate this into a movement that results in real political change? Like the change, the ban, the fracking ban in New York that y’all were able to see through.
Dr. Steingraber: Hmm. Well, every community is different, so I would never say that there's some blueprint that we could just offer, like here’s how you win. Right? Strategies and tactics are going to be different in different places. We see ourselves as a public servant to different frontline communities. Like, tell us what you need. At first we just wrote about fracking per se, and then communities came to us and said, what about pipelines, what about compressor stations, what about flare stacks, what about LNG facilities, what about gas fired power plants, because that is what they were fighting in their communities. So it’s part of the whole fracking infrastructure. Most recently, the request we’ve gotten is, what about carbon capture and storage, which has been added on to fracking like this kind of sidecar onto the motorcycle, right. And so, we respond to those requests from communities by providing, adding that science to our compendium, which is this fully searchable document up on our website at Concerned Health Professionals of New York. At some point, this work became so all encompassing. It started off as a labor of love and we just did it as volunteers. Now it’s my full time job. So, it’s now my day job to compile this science and make it available to communities. So, that means that we’ve been able to translate the compendium into Spanish so that it is in a language that people, especially in Texas and California and New Mexico, Arizona, can use. I have been able to travel with it to Mexico and Argentina and Indigenous communities of North Dakota. So, it’s not just a document that sits on a website. We’re able to be in ongoing conversation with frontline communities. We were asked, one of the things we were asked was to explore the environmental justice aspects of fracking, so we added a whole big section near the front of the document on Trend Number 15, fracking violates principles of environmental justice and human rights. So there’s a way that we were able to slice the pie in a different way and do a section where we looked at, like, what’s the data on Black and Latina and Indigenous communities exposed to flare stacks? How many well sites are located in nonwhite communities in California? What you see when you do that is that not only is the infrastructure of fracking disproportionately located in Black, Indigenous, and Brown communities, but also that in those places, people have less political power and less ability to influence permits. Permits and enforcement are much more relaxed.
So we have a whole analysis of the racial patterns of gas and oil development across, for example, 18 counties in North Texas that sit at the top of the Barnett Shale and so on. You can see that pregnant women who are not white are hurt first and worst when they live close to, for example, flare stacks in, in Texas. So we try to be really responsive to the communities that we work with, so that it’s really a science for the people project. The whole point is we know that science doesn’t change the world. It certainly doesn’t change the minds of elected officials. But if you empower communities with good science and help them understand what risks they are being compelled to endure, then they can remove their consent. It begins to denormalize fracking and takes away the social license for this industry to operate in their communities. The real heroic work, of course, is done by the people in those communities and they know best what tactics and strategies work. We’re working closely with a lot of communities in Iowa right now to prevent this buildout of these carbon dioxide pipelines. The issues there on the ground in those communities are very different as you could imagine than where I’ve traveled, let’s say, to Arlington, Texas. The science is the same but the demographics are different. Working in impoverished rural white communities is a whole different way of organizing than on Native American reservation for example. So, I assume that the community is the subject matter expert on how to make change. Larysa and I are just providing resources.
Courtney Naquin: Now take all of what you just heard and put that into context to America’s criminally unaffordable and inaccessible health care system and imagine how that might impact people in these regions. That could be a whole other podcast in itself. But what we can say, at least, is that all systemic injustice, from fracking to sacrifice zones to inadequate access to healthcare, is connected.
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Courtney Naquin: Thank you so much for tuning in to our fourth episode of Breaking the Cycle, and be sure to check out our previous episodes if you haven’t already. Thanks so much Roddy Hughes, the producer of this podcast, Thomas Walsh, our editor, Natalie McLendon, our project manager, and of course, our friendly musical cowpoke, Pearly Gates, for her music. See y’all next time.