"[Birds chirping] [crickets chirping]" "[metal clanging] [engines revving]" "[applause]" "Thank you." "Thank you." "Thank you so much." "And nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American made energy." "American oil production is the highest that it's been in eight years." "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years." "This country needs an all out, all of the above strategy that develops every available source of American energy." "[applause]" "[instrumental music]" "I am very... firm.." "...in my conviction that the country that leads the way in clean energy solar, wind, bio-diesel geothermal, uh.." "...that country is gonna win the race in the 21st century global economy." "Ending our dependence on fossil fuels represents perhaps the most difficult challenge we have ever faced." "I believe that if we're serious about meeting our energy challenge we need to operate on all cylinders." "We, it turns out are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas." "We've got a lot of it." "[music continues]" "The time has come once and for all for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future." "For the sake of our security our economy and our planet we must have the courage and commitment to change." "[music continues]" "My administration will consider potential areas for development in the mid and south Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico." "I'm directing the Department of Interior to conduct annual lease sales in Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve." "We have a record number of oil rigs operating right now." "More working oil and gas rigs than the rest of the world combined." "So do not tell me that we're not drilling." "We're drilling all over this country." "[cheering] [music continues]" "Climate change is a fact and when our children's children look us in eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer more stable world with new sources of energy" "I want us to be able to say, "Yes, we did."" "[applause]" "God bless you, and God bless the United States of America." "[cheering]" "(Mark) It's a tough job being the President of the United States." "In many respects it's an impossible job trying to keep so many different factions happy." "While at the same time guarding the security and future of the country and of the world." "[instrumental music]" "Few things have been more volatile during this President's tenure than trying to blend our energy needs and climate future." "The notion that America could become energy independent was certainly not on anyone's horizon in 2008." "As a result, the President has wrestled with his energy vision." "We've got to have a sustained all of the above strategy that develops every available source of American energy." "When President Obama took office he could not have predicted the breadth of change he'd see on the energy front." "He proposed more deep water drilling and then the BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico." "He suggested nuclear might be a part of the future." "And then the plant in Fukushima flooded, leaked, and was closed." "He approved drilling in the Arctic North but it proved too risky." "Early in his terms he championed the potential of clean coal." "But he ultimately has worked to shut down the entire coal industry." "During these same years, alternative energy options like solar and wind have grown dramatically." "Solar panels abound on rooftops and in large arrays." "Wind mills mixed with corn fields and desert landscapes." "More jobs are being created in the renewable industries than in any other energy sector." "But on President Obama's watch" ""fracking" became a household word and 80,000 new oil and gas wells were drilled across the country." "All of that cheap oil and gas wrought from the shale has filled us with false promise." "Whether it be an old style pump jack towering natural gas drilling rig or the relatively small footprint of tanks permanently stationed on a well pad." "Today, more than 17 million Americans live within a mile of at least one oil or gas well." "While shale gas and oil plays have been tapped in over 30 states the infrastructure to support distribution of all that fracked oil and gas sprawls across the country including compressors stations, pipelines, and oil trains transporting unrefined crude coast to coast." "Even states with no fossil fuel resources are forced to face the ancillary impacts of fracking often becoming the unwilling repositories for toxic by-products." "Harvested for materials like silica sand.." "...or having fresh water removed from the hydrological cycle forever." "Though the United States has a long relationship with the gas and oil industry, going back more than a century today's new extreme energy extraction gold rush may prove to be the President's most profound and possibly most damaging environmental legacy." "He came into office... 2008.." "Things were looking peachy." "Somebody on his staff some bodies on his staff his advisors, his energy advisor his science advisor said" ""Boy, are you lucky." ""You came into office at just the right time" ""because the ind-industry has figured out" ""how to get a lot of gas and oil out of shale." ""Never thought we could do it, but now we know we can do it" ""and we have a lot of it." ""Hundred years of natural gas." ""You are the luckiest president to ever come in to office because look what we gave you."" "He's trying to have it both ways." "You know, please the oil and gas industry uh, lower energy prices by producing more oil and gas." "But on the other hand, uh regulate the coal industry to reduce emissions." "It's not that simple." "Solutions to our energy quandary are available today." "But what is required is a plan." "A vision... a bold leader." "Last year, the world came together in Paris to define a new energy future and to agree on a plan to reduce climate damaging emissions nation by nation." "Urgency was given to the gathering by the common knowledge that this could be our last moment to act to save much of what we hold most precious and to pass on a planet worthy of our children." "[applause]" "What was accomplished in Paris late in 2015, was a good start but what now?" "These are the tar-balls.." "As this president shapes his environmental legacy and as the next president prepares to pick up where he's left off.." "..we want to introduce you to some of those 17 million people across the country that have paid a price for the boom in extreme energy extraction." "It is their stories that will hopefully inform and hasten our next moves toward a clean energy revolution." "Pennsylvania claims the very first commercial oil well in the US, going back over a hundred years." "More recently, it has become ground zero in the fight over fracking." "Health complaints and evidence of contaminated water and air showed up here soon after the boom began." "The negatives of fracking are causing many residents to reconsider the long held pro-drilling mentality that once reigned in the Keystone State." "I don't see any..." "problem with drilling." "I mean, I think, I think probably when they started drilling a number of years ago, they were not doing it well and the wells weren't cast in a great way and the chemicals that were going down the wells" "probably weren't healthy, and.." "I mean, I'm sure that there were some.." "...there were some issues back, years and years ago but.." "...but today, drilling today and how they do it" "I think they're doing it very responsible." "[instrumental music]" "When the first hydraulic fracturing operators came to Pennsylvania in the mid 2000's they didn't take out billboards to announce the new process." "Secrecy is one of the industry's primary tools." "That secrecy is understandable." "Fracking involves blasting millions of gallons of fresh water mixed with a toxic slurry of chemicals and sand to blow apart the shale and extract the gas trapped inside." "Every frack is like a bomb a mile or two beneath the surface." "The process gives operators a new, more invasive level of efficiency allowing them to drill horizontally for miles in all directions from a single wellhead." "Though fracking has existed for 60 years this new high-tech process high volume hydraulic fracturing was unlike any kind of drilling done before." "It's like comparing the Wright Brothers' plane to an F-15." "Mid-size companies based in Texas and Oklahoma with names like Cabot, Chesapeake, and Noble became the state's fastest growing employers." "The result.." "...close to 10,000 new gas wells drilled across the state in just a few years." "It snuck up on us." "Uh, and, uh, we weren't really paying attention." "This came on..." "in the last ten years, uh.." "...very, very quickly." "And it took a good long time for the citizens who were gonna have to live with that fracking to catch up with it." "Pennsylvania is a perfect example of.." "They were really stampeded." "[indistinct chattering]" "(Matt) Bradford and Susquehanna County had the-the two best air qualities in the State of Pennsylvania before this started." "Now, Bradford County and Susquehanna County has got the two worst quality of air in the whole State of Pennsylvania." "We're a rural farmland area we don't have any heavy industry up here." "We don't have any big factories." "There's.." "It's just all countryside." "They're all around us really." "We have quite a few within a two or three mile radius of us about nine or ten of 'em, I think." "A year after we moved into here.." "...uh, one day all of a sudden our water turned all gray and our neighbor's water turned all gray and our well filled with methane and... it turned black and.." "...our well was actually erupting like a geyser 'cause there was so much methane in it." "And our levels it went from 38.9 milligrams per liter which.." "The saturation point of water is 25 or 28" "Twenty eight." "Twenty eight milligrams per liter, so anything beyond that water can't hold it anymore and it escapes." "So, our second test, our levels had went up to 58.9." "So.." " No, 58.4." " 58.4?" "It's a good thing you're good with all those numbers 'cause.." "It's all in here." "We haven't had any water for six years." "We live out of a buffalo, as they call it." "We-we go every week for our own water." "Take care of that ourselves." "Even though we weren't the ones that ruined the water we're the ones taking care of it." "Pennsylvania feels it's our responsibility now." "Not Cabot's anymore." "I mean, this place is spoiled now." "I can't leave it.." "Am I gonna leave it to my kids?" "For what?" "So they can keep hauling water the rest of their lives?" "The government can have it back." "They want it so God damn bad." "That's what it seems like to me." "You know, here you are, using water as the club to smash apart the bedrock to get oil or gas out of it." "On its journey down to the shale and back up again it's picked up a lot of naturally occurring toxic chemicals that are trapped in the shale." "And these can be heavy metals these can be radioactive substances and these can be other hydrocarbons things like benzene which we know with certainty is a, is a, uh, is a carcinogen." "So, all of these, um, toxic chemicals that had been safely trapped in the shale a mile or more below our feet where they're not gonna hurt anybody are now exhumed and brought to the surface." "Now, you ask about test results and chemicals, and everything else.." "Well, sonny, here you go." "'You know, three grades of uranium in my water.'" "'Three grades of thorium, strontium, manganese, arsenic..'" "The list just goes on and on and on." "(Ray) We're idiots, we're liars, we're just trying to get money out of the industry and nothing else.." "All I want is my water back." "18,000 gas well pads the size of, each one of them for a horizontal drilling, so huge, five acre pads." "And all the interconnecting pipelines and roads and, uh, truck trips, you're talking about more than several thousand truck trips per well." "We don't have 18,000 of anything over here." "[chuckling] You know, we don't have 18,000 driveways." "(Rebecca) This is rural America, it's country and because of sparse population we're a marginalized sub-population and our lives are not valued as much as, um people living in dense areas, like a city." "We're disposable, my life is disposable." "And that's really difficult to fight." "Um, because you can't go back and change.." "..to change the regulations, the frack regulations.." "You need legislators, and for this county it basically a done deal." "Natural gas has me very optimistic about the future." "optimistic about the future." "Natural gas has much less C02 than coal or oil and costs less too." "Using natural gas to support more renewable energy." "Make sense for the climate." "With the gas industries in the area the sky is the limit." "(male announcer) 'Pennsylvania's natural gas' 'ready to fuel our future, today and tomorrow.'" "It sounded so good and particularly with natural gas because, uh, everyone wanted to do something about, uh, climate change." "People are trying to figure out how they're gonna get enough carbon out of the atmosphere to make, to make the United States work and to keep the economy going." "And the idea was burning natural gas produces lower CO2 emission than burning coal." "This notion of a bridge that we'd have to continue to use natural gas as a supposedly cleaner fossil fuel to get us to the green renewable future is a ludicrous analogy." "As a civil engineer, believe me, I know bridges." "Usually, a bridge is built from a place where you are to a place where you wanna get, so you don't fall into a place you don't wanna be." "So a place you don't want to be, is using fossil fuels." "So the notion is you build a bridge out of a fossil fuel to get over the use of fossil fuels." "Excuse me, that analogy just is inept." "So, if we suddenly have an abundance of natural gas where we can switch from burning coal to burning natural gas it'll be good for the environment." "So, you get to have, uh, jobs you get to have, uh, more natural gas production and you get to paint yourself as an environmentalist all at the same time." "How good can it get?" "(Mark) How good can it get?" "For four months starting in late 2015 a broken three inch gas pipe located 8500 feet below ground in suburban Los Angeles leaked spewing an invisible to the eye cloud of methane into the air." "Thanks to special infrared images calibrated to show gas emissions we can see just how bad it was." "Before it was finally plugged the leak resulted in five billion cubic feet of methane being released into the atmosphere." "The equivalent of the yearly emissions from all of California's oil refineries combined." "Pound for pound methane over a 20 year time frame is eighty to a hundred times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a contributor to the blanket of chemicals in the atmosphere helping to heat up the planet." "[dramatic music]" "The leak at Porter Ranch garnered international press because of its magnitude." "But perhaps its most powerful impact was reminding us just how much methane leaks across the country everyday from every gas and oil field delivery truck and train pipeline, compressor station and municipality." "[music continues]" "To be clear, you cannot drill for gas without releasing methane." "[music continues]" "According to the best available analysis.." "Available in the peer-reviewed public literature.." "The use of natural gas as a substitute for coal for electricity generation only has a positive benefit for climate change, if the leak rate is less than about 2.7 percent." "But we now know that the national leak rate is far higher than 2.7 percent which means, the dirtiest fossil fuel right now, the one that's accused of being the dirtiest the one that the Obama administration literally is trying to get off the table" "with his proposed clean power plant." "Coal... is better than natural gas." "Natural gas is the dirtiest.." "...from a climate change point of view." "That's what the science is saying right now." "[instrumental music]" "Perhaps no one is as familiar with the downsides of fossil fuel extraction than the residents of West Virginia." "Coal is king here." "Recoverable beneath 43 of the states' 55 counties." "With the new coal production restrictions put into place by the Obama administration in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide pumping into the atmosphere" "West Virginia was a perfect place to frack." "The cozy relationship between the fossil fuel industry and the state's politicians extends further back than the memory of any current West Virginian as does a ferocious cycle of huge corporate profits in a decimated environment spun around by a labor force" "desperate for jobs." "Lee Raymond was once quoted the former CEO of, uh, ExxonMobil." "He said that presidents come and go." "Exxon is, is basically like a, like a country." "[machine whirring]" "(Jonathan) I love these mountains." "One of the prettiest places in the country and I've been around the world and back and, uh, West Virginia is a beautiful place." "But this..." "equitable pump station where my grandfather worked is three times the size it used to be." "It belongs to EQT now, I believe." "And it's gettin' bigger.." "...and it's gettin' noisier." "And that noise probably won't go away." "And there's not a whole lot you could do about it because.." "...I'm just a land owner." "Lot of things they do in this state makes me mad." "Uh, the rape of Appalachia ain't nothin' new." "If they just showed people a little bit more respect.." "...it could probably, we could probably swallow it a whole lot easier." "It's hard to think of a scenario where having a drilling rig in your backyard makes for good neighbors." "But that has long been the reality for many West Virginians." "Are you ready?" "Ready?" "(Amy) Most people who stay here choose to be here and choose to be poor because this is the quality of life they wanted." "They want a creek in the backyard they want a yard for their kids to play in they want woods, they want a small community." "You don't have to have money to have those kind of things." "But you do have to have money apparently to protect them." "Uh, like, I woke up this morning and looked out my window and sat down and cried for five minutes 'cause I knew this was coming." "I tried, I tried talk to a lawyer you gonna have to pay for a lawyer." "I just, I.." "You-you just can't do anything." "You just feel like your hands are tied and you can't do anything." "I mean, when they say we shouldn't be angry but I don't understand because if you lose your quality of life and you're afraid that your water is contaminated and you're afraid to grow vegetables in your garden" "and you've already went through everything to eliminate everything that could be bad for your kids and then... it, it.." "E-everything's left is still all the big issues." "Water, air, soil, schools getting your kids back and forth to schools." "It's not, i-in five years it's went from almost heaven to fracking hell." "That's what it has." "That's what it is." "That's what it is." "That's what it's become." "(Mark) Rather than fair wages stable employment and a high quality of life" "West Virginians instead have witnessed the industrialization of their rural state." "Like other states' economies depend on the process of exhuming what nature has buried deep underground" "West Virginians are among the unhealthiest and the poorest in the nation." "Second only to Mississippi for lowest income per capita." "This is your classic resource extraction third world underdeveloped country model being wrought on America." "Companies come in and say, oh, sign on the dotted line everything's gonna be fine." "Boom!" "You're done." "Your land is theirs, they can come over they takeover, they toxify where you are and then later, they cancel your royalty payments because they decided to tax you on the pipeline to transport your gas." "You can't trust these people." "They're trying to perpetuate a system that doesn't help the planet that doesn't help our environment." "It causes us... enormous amount of problems in terms of public health and has also a huge hand in taking the democracy away from Americans." "We're not living in a democracy at the current time and the oil and gas industry has a lot to do with that." "(male #1) 'We came from Saginaw, Michigan.'" "One day I was driving on the road and trying to find a job and my grandpa called me and said, uh, "Why don't you come home?" "North Dakota, I've seen an ad on TV."" "[indistinct singing]" "So I called up all the boys and said, "Hey, let's go to North Dakota, let's go do oil." "They're making $20-30 starting out."" "[singing continues]" "Got here..." "late one night." "Crashed at a Wal-Mart parking lot." "Um, and just from there, just put out jobs and we were hired three days later." "It's unbelievable out here." "(Mark) The energy industry has always always been a boom and bust business." "For a few short years, the fracking boom turned North Dakota into the go-to state for industrial jobs." "Truck driving, construction, rig working." "And the economy went into overdrive." "(Sierra) What drew me here was my husband." "We had a hard time finding jobs and working in Las Vegas where we were from." "Like, within a week he found a job." "'I started my company called Black Gold Tees.'" "There's shirts for all the jobs here pipe-liners, roughnecks, roustabouts, riggers, whatever." "Driller's loving life is an oilfield wife because there are so many of us here and I've sold so many of these because of that." "'We've got it all.'" "It's overwhelming how many people are here 'cause you don't see them all the time but you see all the housing you see all the construction always happening here." "(Mark) Jobs are in such demand that in 2009, the cost of renting a one bedroom apartment in Williston, North Dakota was higher than in New York City or San Francisco." "Behind the flow of fossil fuel and its promise of financial freedom workers with big dreams and families in tow poured into North Dakota from every state and from around the globe all hoping to cash in." "You'll get different, different nationalities down here you'll get, like, people from Sudan" "Ethiopia, Sierra Leone" "Ghana, Kenya." "You get a lot of African people here." "I came to Williston, North Dakota to look for job." "To be able to take care of my kids." "Because it's getting tough to get a job." "And... my goal is to work enough and save enough money and go back to Liberia and start, uh, my business." "Hoping for probably, like, two-three months from now" "I can start going to the oil field." "And I already gave my application over there so.." "That's where the money is." "You can work other jobs around here." "You're not gonna make according to what you're gonna make in that oil field for two weeks." "[speaking in foreign language]" "I believe one of the, uh the number one reason for people migrating from A-Africa and to come to the United State or any part of the world to the United State is for a better life." "It's-it's for the American dream as they call it." "[indistinct chattering]" "As we all know in life.." "...everything has advantages and disadvantages." "But I just left that last Sunday.." "As much as these oil, fuel jobs are helping a lot of lives it has some disadvantages." "[intense music]" "(male #2) It is another brutal day for America's financial market." "The Dow is getting hammered as the price of oil continues to drop lower." "(female #1) 'Crude is now below $30 a barrel.'" "'The plummeting price sending shockwaves around the globe..'" "(Mark) Today so many new wells have been drilled across the US that production of oil and gas is far outstripping demand." "The result is that oil prices have dropped to new lows and oil field operators in Williston are shutting down rigs, laying off workers even declaring bankruptcy." "Once again boomtowns are going bust." "I think a lot of folks in Williston can see the writing on the wall and they know that, you know they're gonna be able to make a little more money for the next few months, but after that" "you know, it's basically all over." "Well, we see what we've often seen in the history of the oil and gas industry and that's overproduction." "And then what we see is a collapse of prices." "People whose lives depend on-on work in-in the, uh, oil and gas industry are going to have to find other work." "And the people who were benefitting.." "The hotel owners and the restaurant owners and the truck drivers and-and the day laborers and the construction crews." "All of which were indirectly benefitting from this boom." "[blows air] [whirring]" "(Mark) On top of the slowdown in production the industry is simultaneously facing another looming and immediate problem the health of its workers." "These oil field jobs are fleeting." "Often the highest paying positions are imported from out of state while only the cheapest labor is sourced locally." "Worse, it is the workers at the bottom of the ranks who are most at risk of injury." "Being around all those chemicals violent explosions and heavy machinery has taken a toll." "[whirring] [instrumental music]" "I would say that every worker that we've talked to has been.." "Has started off being very gung ho." "They've really... go into it and they love the industry." "They love what they're doing." "And then with time things start to change." "They start seeing people being injured." "So, with time at least some of the people that we have interviewed have changed their mind and-and left the industry because of that." "Some of them have left with serious illnesses." "Others have left before they got sick." "[engine revving]" "(Jason) I am, I'm a CDO driver." "I've been working in the industry for six to seven years." "I've done anything and everything you could possibly think of when it comes to driving a truck for the industry." "Production water is the water that's left over after the frack and whenever the gas comes up out of the well it brings that water up with it." "So, once the tanks get to a certain point we come out in a vacuum truck." "Hook up our hoses and pull the water out." "If you haul gasoline if you haul acid you haul anything over the road" "DOT makes you have a hazmat endorsement on your license." "You have to know what you're carrying." "You have to understand what happens if you have an accident." "Or what happens if you have a leak." "As far as the oil field they just consider it as water." "I mean, it doesn't matter." "You're okay." "I-it doesn't matter if you spill it on the ground." "It doesn't matter if it blows out of the top of the tank." "You know, they're taking this water and shoving it down another hole somewhere else." "If you made a spill or if you had an accident or something else you called your supervisor, the dispatcher and told 'em what happened and they came out there and they cleaned it up." "So we wouldn't have to pay any of the fine or regulations." "If you left location after making the spill and somebody else found it that's when you got fired." "It was easier just to take a tractor out there to kinda cover it up." "You know, we were making really good money." "And you didn't wanna complain." "You didn't want to say that there is something wrong or something happened." "One of the ways that they get bonuses is to have a certain length of tunnel or have a drilling operation uh, progress without any injuries." "So, they will get a bonus if that happens." "So you could imagine there's quite a bit of pressure not to report injuries and-and we've heard that from workers that they.." "They're encouraged to keep going even though they have been injured." "(Jason) I really think the-the educational part of the industry is really lacking." "Because if I would've known most of this stuff when I first started" "I probably would've wore a mask or rubber gloves or, you know, been more careful with the stuff that I hauled around." "[instrumental music]" "(Sal) I used to work for Slumber J Fracking Wells." "I started out, uh..." "working in the shop." "The day before they went on a frack job they determined that they did not have enough people so, they took me out of the shop." "Uh, where I was assisting mechanics and the welders." "[whirring]" "They actually left me in charge of putting the chemicals into the tanker." "So, you have seven to ten chemicals that went into the machine and only four were able to go in by hose." "We had to use buckets, five gallon buckets to transport those chemicals up ten feet in the air and we had to pass them above our heads." "And the people who were on top frequently dropped those chemicals." "Unfortunately they dropped them on me." "[birds chirping]" "And the company sent a nurse uh, with me to every doctor's visit and, uh, they would never permit them to do any blood work on me." "And-and when they finally did it was five-six months later." "I was actually driving down the road when the doctor called me." "And he asked me where I was and how fast I could get to the hospital." "It kind of shook me up and I said, "What's up?"" "And he goes, "Well, does cancer run in your family?"" "I said, "Not that I'm aware of." "What's wrong?"" "He said, "You need to come to the hospital today."" "If my white blood count shot up to nearly 20,000 which is twice the normal range for a year and they.." "And they told me I'd lose my teeth." "I pulled my own." "I pulled that one two weeks ago." "Those are my teeth, man." "'Okay, I shouldn't lose all my teeth in a year.'" "They quit paying for everything." "So naturally, it's not their fault." "Because those chemicals are safe." "Ask them." "They'll tell you." "[beeping]" "(Randy) Since day one, they never told you of safety measures." "There was no safety meetings." "There was no respirators." "And I was running the vac truck." "A baby bottle... water truck." "And cleaning' up what they sprayed off these mats." "Because that was the.." "What they set around the well hat." "So, in two days" "I was standing in the stuff anywhere from 28 to 30-some hours." "'These are all the pictures' 'from the last two years.'" "Them's all burning welts." "It's like being put on.." "Someone set you on fire that nobody can put you out." "That's one of 'em days where you're contemplating whether to stay on this planet or leave it 'cause you're in so much pain." "'You realize all that stuff showing' on the outside' 'what damage is it doing on the inside.'" "Then the last two years it was twenty twenty times that what's life threatening to go to the ER." "I seen over 52 different doctors." "Uh, none of them will tell you what it is." "[instrumental music]" "Even though some of the science is still unsettled the ethical question that emerges then is what do you do in the face of scientific uncertainty?" "In the field of public health um, we want good data, but but we also.." "It's, it's by definition an advocacy science." "We-we-we protect people first and foremost and so.." "It-to my way of thinking we now have enough evidence on the harms of fracking um, and enough troubling signs to push the pause button." "The-the most important thing is to put-keep people out of harm's way while the wheels of scientific proof making keep grinding on." "[instrumental music]" "(Mark) It's not just workers who get sick." "Across the country in the states where fracking is done neighbors of drilling cite the same complaints over and over." "Headache, nausea, severe asthma and breathing problems." "Living in the gas patch.." "...whether as a worker or a neighbor of a drilling rig put you directly in harms way." "Yet amazingly, in many communities drilling is allowed next to schools churches, even hospitals." "Shall we?" "Cassie, we are entering Firestone Colorado." "'The place where I lived for two years.'" "There was 75 wells active wells, oil and gas wells around my house." "[music continues]" "Weld County is the center of fracking" "It's the epicenter of oil and gas development in the state of Colorado." "And as I understand it it's the epicenter of hydraulic fracturing in the United States." "Weld County only has about 260,000 people." "And we have over 21,000 active oil and gas wells." "So it comes out to about one oil and gas well per four homes." "'Right here we're approaching' 'um, a playground' 'that this kindergarten school uses.'" "'And there's a active well pad right here.'" "'This well pad is roughly 300 feet away from this' 'children's playground.'" "Most of the people that I talk to in this area think that these tanks hold water, when in fact they hold toxic industrial liquid waste." "Tons of hydrocarbon vapors are being released right now and go into the environment." "And the children that are playing in that playground right there are subject to this heavy industry and all of their toxic emissions that are being released." "This is not uncommon in Colorado though." "Colorado, we have roughly 52,000 active oil and gas wells." "And the state knows that roughly four thousand of these active oil and gas wells are in really close proximity to homes public playgrounds, hospitals, daycares.." "Putting the-the health and welfare of the citizens in danger." "These types of things should never happen in residential areas." "There's no moral conscious that the industry is putting these so close to our children i-in our neighborhoods." "In Colorado we've had fracking bans passed at a referendum level in many many towns including" "Boulder, Colorado Springs, um" "Broomfield, Longmont." "The people know ha-what this means to them and they ban it and it moves forward on that level." "Again, in Colorado" "Governor Hickenlooper is suing those towns for passing their own democratic referendum." "Saying that th-they can't keep the oil and gas industry out." "Oh, we now must turn our full attention to defeating these ballot measures uh, and I know that the industry uh, the business community uh, the vast majority of elected officials uh, both Republican and Democratic" "across the entire state of Colorado uh, are united in opposition." "It's outrageous." "I mean, this is a Democratic governor not the governor of Texas." "The governor of the tipping point state in Obama's election in 2012." "Um, the Democratic Party.." "...is, uh, unfortunately rallying with the gas industry." "In-in many many places." "against its, against the citizens." "In many cases against the people who voted for them." "What is a more fundamental American right than to feel safe in your own home?" "And people are, are prepared to fight for that." "Like, people are fighting for their homes." "And for-for ordinary American citizens their home is their biggest asset." "And home values across the country are being devastated by fracking events." "[instrumental music]" "(Nanner) We moved to Colorado, because it's such a beautiful state." "And a very healthy state a very healthy place to live." "At least that's what we thought until the last couple years when the fracking pretty much started taking over our lives." "Since we've lived here the fracking has grown exponentially." "And our health concerns are growing with that." "We have a neighbor whose well water is undrinkable." "Uh, but nobody seems to wanna associate these fracking wells with all of these conditions." "I'm a realtor, I've been a realtor in this area for 23 years." "I have sold, uh.." "I can't even begin to tell you how many homes." "They all say where's, where's the fracking?" "Can you show me a fracking map?" "And when I show them the fracking map uh, there's a well close to pretty much every, all the rural properties." "Nobody wants to move out to the county anymore." "(Mark) Many in the US claim we're living in an over-regulated society." "When it comes to environmental laws we have lots of good ones." "But far too often they are ignored or circumvented." "When I investigate a-a potential public health problem let's say, a plastics factory has blown up near my hometown, that's a true story." "The first place I would go is, um the toxics release inventory to see what kind of emissions this, um uh, facility is putting out." "Um, I would also take a look at, you know accident reports and, and so forth." "Um, that's not available to-to us who are um, doing the research on the health impacts of fracking because uh, federal exemptions to various key provisions of our, uh, environmental laws." "Making science half operate with one hand tied behind its back." "This is not how we do things." "(Pickens) We are more fragile today from a national security standpoint than we have been since World War II." "The dangerous stems for our overwhelming 700 billion dollar dependency on foreign oil annually." "(Mark) The oil and gas industry in the US and the politicians they support with campaign dollars has itself shaped the laws intended to regulate it." "Beginning with exemptions from parts of the very first federal environmental laws including the Clean Air and Water Acts adopted in 1970." "Among many breaks the Bush administration would grant their friends in the oil and gas business was a tinkering in rules at the Securities and Exchange Commission which allowed the industry with no oversight to go to banks for financing with exaggerated estimates" "of how much gas and oil was below the ground." "Due to the change in regulatory language the companies were able to exaggerate their proven reserves by up to 400 % take on enormous debts and fool politicians and the public with false promises of a shale gas revolution." "With every passing day the evidence has been catching my attention." "I have no doubt, none at all that we are in the midst of a global warming." "Or as I prefer to call it Spring." "[audience laughing]" "(Mark) The so called Halliburton Loophole named for Dick Cheney who ran the giant oil company that developed fracking technology before he became" "Vice President is a prime example." "Just a few sentences slipped into the more than 1500 page energy policy act of 2005 permit hydraulic fracturing operators to openly violate the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act and also exempt the same companies from disclosing what chemicals they inject into the land." "That simple paragraph snuck in with little fanfare is a twisted legalese that allowed fracking to begin and boom." "It was these flawed laws that President Obama inherited when he took office." "It's a tragedy of the Obama administration." "The EPA has the authority and the mandate to solve these problems, to protect people from the oil industry and people overwhelmingly support clean air and clean water and use of laws like the Clean Air Act to protect people and reduce green house and other pollution." "Hey, girls." "(Rod) I've been told by, uh my congressman, Jared Polis." "He came out and.." "You know what he told me?" ""It's time to sell out."" "Is this what 15 million Americans should do if they don't like this, is sell out and move on?" "Sell our American dreams?" "Give up on our homes?" "Give up our property values?" "Give up our fresh air?" "Give up our American way of life." "That's what he told me." "(Matt) Not one of our state representatives or local officials or anything have came, came here to-to see what was going on here." "Not one." "Even when the EPA stepped in, we thought they were gonna come charging in like knights on white horses and save the day." "And, when they issued that order, we were like finally we're gonna get some kind of relief." "But then, the EPA settled with the gas company." "It is our elected officials, they turned their backs on us..." "that's who I blame first.." "...because they allowed it." "(Thomas) There's all kinds of attorneys that we tried to get in touch with, they just, they say, uh you know we're sorry, there's nothing we can do 'cause you're in a oil and gas state." "'But we wrote these letters and sent them to, to everybody' 'that we could, that we thought would be in some type' of a position of authority to-to help us." "(Kelly) It's very frustrating, and it's very scary because we elected these people to protect what's happening in our city." "And when they don't, when they blatantly, you know choose the side of the drilling companies then that just shows you that... you don't matter." "(Craig) Politics?" "No, this isn't about politics." "It's about people." "It's about people and if, uh, if that, if they wanna make it into politics, they need to leave office and go to work for the oil and gas industry." "But the people that represent us should be looking at this." "And sadly, not one local county state or federal elected official represents us here in Pennsylvania has ever been to visit one of these people." "(Mark) In several instances during President Obama's administration, EPA investigations have verified claims of ground water contamination caused by fracking, most notably in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Texas." "The agency has halted or terminated each of these investigations and has refused to address the continuing problems." "I think the industry is scared of science." "And, uh, I think that the science on the table is looking worse and worse for them." "You know, they were able to hide for a long time behind the claim that, uh, there is no proof that fracking ever caused drinking water contamination." "Well, they can no longer wave that flag." "Um, it's very clear now that we have confirmed cases of drinking water con-contamination in at least four states." "[thunder rumbling] [thunder rumbling]" "(male #3) The third most powerful earthquake in Oklahoma's recorded history jolted the northern part of the state this weekend." "The magnitude 5.1 quake centered near Fairview was felt in seven states overall." "(female #2) The ground keeps shaking in Oklahoma, and more violently this year already 140 quakes, 3.0 or larger an average of two and a half per day." "Before 2008, the average was one and a half per year." "(Mark) The nationwide explosion of fracking resulted in a variety of problems no one could have predicted." "One was what to do with those billions of gallons of toxic waste water pumped back out of the ground." "Some went to lined pits and landfills, some were illegally dumped straight onto the ground or into waterways." "Today, much of it is injected back deep into the ground in separate wells." "Perhaps, the most unusual and unexpected side effects of all this high-pressure injection are earthquakes." "Oklahoma is the epicenter, billions of gallons of waste water have been pumped into more than 4000 wells." "Since the fracking boom began, communities from Ohio to Texas are threatened by tremors never felt before." "The first really big one that we had, uh, my husband was asleep, I was up watching TV." "I'd just turned off the TV and the bed shook and hit the wall." "The picture was moving, the windows were rattling." "My husband woke up and thought maybe he was just having a dream and I told him no, it wasn't a dream." "And it just seemed like it's getting worse everyday now we're having a earthquake and I wouldn't be surprised if we were sitting here and had one today." "You know, during this conversation." "(Dirk) This whole study ended up being a report by Central Earthquake Research Institute in Memphis, Tennessee and our local USG rep." "'These are all earthquakes, all these dots, all the little' 'yellow ones are production wells' 'but all these circles, green, yellow, reds, those are' 'the magnitudes of the earthquakes.'" "'I lived right here, in about the middle of all the 1400' 'between the two injection wells that caused 80 % of 'em.'" "They're proud of the fact that they experimented in Arkansas." "In other states, I have friends in Pennsylvania in New York, in Ohio and where they are right now, workers from here have been taken up there and they're bragging about how they perfected their fracking and waste water and recycling in Arkansas." "'We were the guinea pigs.'" "(Mark) But the earthquake felt by politicians was that despite industry's boasts and predictions, there turned out to be far less gas and oil in the shale than they initially predicted." "Over the last seven years or so, something like 80,000 wells have been drilled and fracked, in, uh, tight oil and shale gas plays." "We know because we did the research 'cause we wanted to see whether the promises that were being made for... uh, f-for these resources were uh, genuine or if this was a-a lot of hype." "And our conclusion after doing the research is, it's mostly hype." "We've got a supply of natural gas.." "...under our feet that can last..." "America nearly a hundred years." "Nearly a hundred years." "Now when I say.." "(Mark) What happened to that notion sold to us by the gas and oil industry and supported by politicians across the country." "including President Obama, that we had a hundred years of natural gas that would power us into the future?" "Well, it turns out those prognosticators were off by about 80 or 90 years." "It also turns out that most of these new wells will exhaust 60 to 70 % of their riches in the first three years." "The result is that the shale gas fields across the US imagined to be heavily ladened are already tapped their sweet spots played out." "The most recent data on production.." "...countrywide.." "...uh, shows that there has been a slight decrease in the amount of oil being produced from shale." "Uh, and a certain flattening, certainly a flattening of the amount of gas being produced from shale." "The Marcellus keeps increasing, a little bit of the Utica and Ohio keeps increasing." "All the other major shale gas plays are in decline." "The fact is fossil fuels are, are a finite energy resource." "There's only so much coal, oil and natural gas in the ground and we extract it using the low-hanging fruit principle." "So we've got, we've already gotten all the best stuff." "So if we want more oil, it's going to be polar oil, arctic oil, uh deep water oil, uh, tar sands oil from Canada and all of those are expensive to produce and high, have high environmental risk." "[instrumental music]" "(Don) I think there's a lot of misconception about cowboys." "The ones that I've known and respected have always loved the land." "That's their number one..." "love." "You can always get the cowboys to stand up to the oil company when it impacts the grass, when the water goes away when you can't graze the animals, when you lose your wildlife." "There's no cowboys that I know that don't value those things above everything else." "There's nothing new about the modern cowboy." "All cowboys..." "love grass." "Fracking is gray, I'm glad people are concerned but I'm afraid that it's a sexy issue that gets people to overlook the hard, non-spectacular work, no flames coming out of the creek, nobody's faucet lighting" "on fire, it's just some people drawing some lines on the ground and saying, we're gonna drill here and that's what you need to stop." "When this field started there was one well every 640 acres." "That was the spacing." "Now, up to 25 wells in that same 640 acres." "Oil and gas has created a monopoly here and wiped out the ranching in this area." "No more churches, no more schools here." "No families live here, uh, for 13 miles." "Drill, baby, drill." "When do you quit?" "When it, when it's all a parking lot?" "Then, is your plan just to continue until there is no more wild land until there's no more undisturbed land?" "Until it's just a, a big North Sea platform all across the western United States?" "Much of the... problems, I think caused in mineral development and in the interface of the Federal Government with the land owners is because the estate is split." "Meaning, that we own the surface but... the Federal Government owns the minerals." "And the surface estate is subordinate to the minerals." "So when they wanna come in and access the minerals, they do it right on top of you." "And you essentially have nothing to say about it." "(Mark) The industry operates the same in Texas a state with a reputation for independence and rugged individualism." "Yet, even here, gas and oil has never hesitated to take what it wants, when it wants." "One result of the recent boom is that communities across the country have been divided." "Often pitting neighbor against neighbor." "A tiny fraction of people in the gas patch were paid and paid handsomely to lease their land for drilling." "But everyone else received only the down sides of the boom." "Industrialization, pollution property devaluation and ill health." "(Art) Now, I tell you how this came about." "My wife and I went to Middleton one day and we came home that evening and all of a sudden" "I noticed there was a stake out there." "Big tall wooden stake, with a bunch of orange ribbons on it." "When I saw that I immediately knew what it was 'because they've been drillin' all the way around us.'" "Couple days later, this guy shows up says, "We're gonna drill a well there." "You don't have a choice."" "And I didn't because I can't fight an oil company and I can't fight the US government." "Government says they can do that so they took my property they took my land, they drill an oil well on it and I don't get anything out of it." "They say here's some money for damages." "Okay, so..." "I get money for damages." "The oil company gets a tax deduction for what they give me and then I have to pay 20 percent unearned income on what they give me to take my property." "So the mineral owner got a lot of money." "And the oil company makes a lot of money." "And all the contractors that were involved in getting this thing drilled and in operation and everythin' made a lot of money." "And what did I get in comparison?" "I got the shaft." "(Kyev) Think about it, from this vantage point you worked your whole life." "You now own, a little small piece of the pie you got a home." "And natural gas companies come in." "You gettin' less amount off for your property now." "The value has gone down." "And what big business sees as valuable is that what is underneath your property." "So they take that which is most valuable to them raise your taxes and fees in order to take your property." "And then leave you holdin' the bag." "And that is what become the American dream." "But one of the main things that gas is doin' is dividing' our community." "Some are makin' money off of this gas.." "...while others are gettin' sick off of this gas." "So for those who are makin' the money it's their blessing'." "But for those who are gettin' sick.." "...it has become a curse on our community." "(Art) 'Across from the neighborhood, across from the school' 'across from the church' 'they just came in against our opposition.'" "'They just, they just put 'em, anywhere.'" "'Not what's in the best interest of the neighborhood' 'or the students..' '...but what's in the best interest of... the industry.'" "So one would ask, "Is it in our best interest to have them drillin' in our communities?"" "And those of us who've seen the impact thus forth say, "Absolutely not."" "It's profit above people." "And anytime, profit supersedes people then that's not in the best interest of our neighborhood." "[instrumental music]" "(Mark) It's not just individuals who struggle with the rights and wrongs of fossil fuel extraction." "Sometimes, entire towns can be unwillingly put at risk thanks to conflicting zoning laws." "Like here, in Abita Springs in a state typically known for being very friendly to the oil and gas industry." "Greg Lemons had a long career travelling the world as a salesman before settling down in Abita Springs where his family has lived for six generations." "A Republican." "He's been mayor for just one term." "And is taken on the oil and gas industry in a way very alien to most Louisianans." "And I heard about it on a newspaper article that saying that there would be a, um fracking wells that would be put out here on our doorstep." "It's the first time I heard about it." "And I, you know, was not notified by any government agencies or anything like that." "I'm charged with the health and welfare of our community." "And, and anything that jeopardizes it" "I-I should know about it." "Initially, I thought it as being Republican and I thought, it was gonna be a windfall for the town of Abita Springs." "So I got deep and I picked the covers open and looked at it and come to find out that, that, that economic benefit was pretty well smoke and mirrors." "You know, they talkin' about one well but there's already been 60,000 acres leased for oil and gas production." "Businesses don't go out and lease that property unless they plan on doin' a lot of drilling and lot of production." "The parish has zoning laws through their Home Rule Charter which is constitutionally protected say that they have right to control what goes in those areas." "The bad law on the books of the State of Louisiana says" "DNR, Department of Natural Resource in the case of oil and gas has a right to make that decision." "I mean it's really a crazy proposition when you think about the argument that they're making" "Then they're saying, under the law we can go absolutely anywhere we want." "You know, fill in the blank, pick your favorite beautiful place, quiet, next to your house." "Next to you.." "Anywhere." "Nothing is... not you know, nothing is sacrosanct." "They can go anywhere they want according to their argument." "If the parishes' zoning laws mean nothin' guess what?" "Town of Abita zoning laws mean nothin'." "So that, that was really frightening to people." "I remember sitting at the public meeting they had in Abita Springs early on and just lookin' around the room and listening to the people just shocked beyond belief that this could happen in America." "People say, "How could that happen?"" "Well, we have ground leases in Louisiana." "We have mineral leases." "You may own the property on top of it but you may not own the mineral resources and if somebody has property next door to you with that fracking method, they could go for miles underneath your property, and there's nothin'" "you can do about it." "I-I think that was a big part of the motivation to get involved and get involved quick is that, basically they were being told" ""You have no say in this, no matter where it goes."" "[instrumental music]" "(Mark) When we think of California, the first images that pop into our heads are the ocean beaches, mountains organic farming green living beautiful people" "Hollywood." "Often overlooked is California's starring role as the third largest producer of gas and oil in the US." "In a state, racked by record drought and still America's bread basket, producing more than fifty percent of the country's fruits and vegetables clean water is almost as valuable a commodity as oil." "Almost." "With the overlap of the drought and the boom in new extreme energy extraction processes" "California drills 300 new wells a month." "One of the most insidious meet-ups of oil and water is that some of the highly toxic waste water resulting from fracking is being used to irrigate California's crops." "(Scott) One thing people need to remember all waterways are connected whether below ground, above ground, aquifers, rivers one way or another, everything's connected by water." "As I looked into this" "I-I realized there was no testing." "(Mark) In 2015, Scott made independent tests of the water the oil company said had been filtered of toxins before being given to farmers, often for free." "(Scott) We tested the whole ten-miles canal system." "Results came back and we started seeing solvents, chemicals of concern that were matching up with oil that was coming out of the ground in Kern County." "I was shocked." "When I came out here, I ended up in the middle of an almond field with the smell of oil worse than it was when I was on the ground at BP." "Water Department, that is taking produced water that has oil and other contamination and then using it to irrigate." "'This is just like in Venice, Louisiana' 'when I was out with fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico.'" "It's the same thing." "It's the exact same thing." "You shouldn't have oil you shouldn't have volatile chemicals in the water." "It's that simple." "(Tom) Both my grandfathers were farming on either side of me." "I'm living here, and one grandfather's two miles that way and the other one's three miles this way." "Both my parents were raised here." "And I was raised here." "So farming, of course, is in my blood that way." "The fact that the oil has moved into this area is a new thing." "Never saw an oil well in this area when I was young not where the intensive farming was going on." "They were separate." "So we pretty much could ignore each other." "Now, there's conflicts between the oil companies and the farmers." "Yeah, we kinda have a nice system here of-of water coming from the mountains and very good soil, deep nice soil." "If our ground water is contaminated it puts a real dent in how much farming we can do." "Can you irrigate..." "crops like grapes and oranges that are full of water themselves and guarantee that chemicals in your irrigation water don't now get into those-those crops?" "It's a big unknown because no-nobody has ever taken the precautionary approach and say" ""This water has dangerous chemicals in it." "So you shouldn't be irrigating with it until we know more."" "Nobody's even thought about whether they're contaminating the food that humans eat." "(Mark) It's not just clean water that suffers from all this extreme energy extraction in California." "For many years, highly industrialized drilling utilizing acids, steam and hydraulic fracturing has taken place in the heart of urban Los Angeles." "Mostly, in working class neighborhoods." "Tankers filled with tens of thousands of gallons of acids and other chemicals pull behind these walls." "Just three feet from where people sleep, play cook and study." "Workers pull on hazmat suits pump chemicals into the ground and oil and gas back out." "During the process, toxic chemicals including carcinogens and endocrine disruptors escape into the air." "No notice is given to neighbors." "No warnings." "You're just taking a walk, you would immediately be hit by the strong smell of, you know, of gas." "Or sometimes there was mask, you know." "It was also found that they had masking agents." "That would then somehow smell like you know, like fruity smells" "Yeah, it would be like an artificial smell." "Yeah." "And so even that was uncomfortable 'cause I... well, why does it smell like that?" "In our family there was a lot of nausea, there's, you know.." " Yeah.." " Do you wanna share some" "Yeah, I would get like a lot of nosebleeds and I would be, um, really nauseous all the time and get a lot of headaches." "The odors for this facility make our community sick." "And it's not... fair." "(Rose) I have to say that we've done a lot to lead um, in reducing emissions um, reducing green house gas emissions across..." "California." "I think we've set a great example for a lot of states." "And at the same time we're the third largest oil producing state in the country." "And while there seems to be this focus on you know, changing your light bulbs and driving electric cars and putting solar on your house all of which are really great things we continue to pump California dry of every last drop of oil we can muster." "Until you address that half of the equation you really can't lead on climate and I think that's what's been uh, most dis-disappointing about Governor Brown's tenure here." "(Mark) California Governor, Jerry Brown is in his fourth term." "He never hesitates to remind us of his leading man reputation as a green politician." "Going back to his first terms in the 1970's when he was nicknamed Moonbeam Brown." "And our planets, spaceship Earth we're all going through the universe together 'taking out of the same well' same ozone layer and we gotta protect it." "(Rose) He really, um, understands the impacts of climate change and sees himself as a leader on climate and yet, at the same time, uh, you can't lead on climate and frack your state dry of every last drop of oil." "(Mark) For all of his green efforts to cut emissions promote renewable energy, paint himself as a climate champion" "Governor Brown's unwillingness to slow the expansion of gas and oil in his state has proved a huge gamble." "Reducing an entire state's climate footprint is a game of inches." "One serious accident can turn back years of progress proved by the catastrophic well failure and leak at Porter Ranch." "During the leak, more than 7000 suburban residents fled the community or were relocated." "Many suffering from a litany of two familiar maladies." "Nose bleeds, vomiting, headaches and respiratory problems." "Sadly, no one in those working class neighborhoods of downtown Los Angeles, suffering and complaining for years of the same maladies due to the chemicals in their air, has ever been offered to be relocated." "[chanting] Ban fracking now!" "Ban fracking now!" "Ban fracking now!" "Ban fracking now!" "Ban fracking now!" "Ban fracking now!" "Ban fracking now!" "[cheering]" "Two years ago, I stood in this beautiful state building and participated in our rite of democracy." "And we're asking for a moratorium on hydro-fracking." "'Our thinking on this has evolved' and we're here to ask our governor to evolve along with us and use the science, and use what has been taught to us by the victims, and what have been taught to us" "'by the medical community' and evolve to ban fracking now." "[chanting] Ban fracking now!" "Ban fracking now!" "Ban fracking now!" "This is really a grassroots campaign." "What started around people's kitchen tables grew into the largest social movement in New York state's history." "(Mark) New York State sits over the largest shale gas reserve in the US and industry was desperate to start drilling." "But it ran into an unexpected patch work coalition of citizen's groups that did not want to see the mostly agricultural state industrialized" "Governor Andrew Cuomo was caught in the middle." "Pushed hard by both sides." "Especially the well-funded oil and gas lobbies." "The fight was waged for several years while a grassroots revolution was taking hold." "I'm overjoyed, overjoyed today to join such an enormous crowd of New Yorkers who've come out today because we don't want fracking in New York." "And on a day when all eyes in the state turn to Albany and turn to Governor Cuomo and his state of the state we're here to remind him that we won't accept fracking and that the movement to ban fracking will never stop." "We won't stop until Governor Cuomo protects our health and our environment by keeping fracking out of the state." "The movement to ban fracking and embrace renewable energy is one of the fastest growing movements in the nation." "And the whole nation is watching what happens here in New York." "So, why are all these people here?" "Because we love New York!" "We love our communities." "'We love our farms and our forests.'" "And we do not want that destroyed by fracking and a greedy industry." "[crowd cheering] [indistinct chanting]" "I can remember well organizing the first rally uh, outside of our state capitol to ban fracking when we had a few hundred people." "You can literally see the numbers grow from just a few hundred to a thousand, to three thousand and-and on." "And so, over the course of time we just continued to see the more the people learned about fracking the more people were opposed to fracking." "(Cuomo) Uh, last issue is fracking." "Uh, I've been asked about fracking about 14,600 times." "I am not a scientist." "Uh, I'm not an environmental expert." "I'm not a health expert." "So, let's bring the emotion down and let's ask the qualified experts what their opinion is." "Would I live in a community with HVHF based on the facts I have now?" "Would I let my child play in the school field near by?" "Or my family drink the water from the tap or grow their vegetables in the soil after looking at the plethora of reports as you see behind me and others that I have in my office?" "My answer in no." "♪ This land is your land ♪" "♪ This land is my land ♪" "♪ From California ♪" "♪ To the New York Island ♪" "♪ From the Redwood Forest ♪" "♪ To the Gulf Stream Waters ♪" "♪ This land was made to be frack free ♪♪" "New York is frack free!" "[cheering]" "Today is a great day for New Yorkers and people across this country because today, New York has a ban on fracking." "[cheering]" "I woke up this morning proud to be a New Yorker." "A state in which we speak and government listens." "They listened to the science 'and they made a decision based on the facts.'" "So, thank you, Governor Cuomo, for being such a leader." "My son was eight years old when I decided to take all of my skill set as a scientist and throw it into this fight um, he's now going into high school." "And every time I came to Albany and came home, he would ask me the same question" ""Mom, did you ban fracking yet?"" "'So, yesterday when I heard this announcement'" "'I called my son in school' and I said, "Elijah, ask me that question." "You always ask me when I come home from Albany." "Just ask me."" "And then he asked me and I said, "Yeah, we did it." "We did it today."" "Speaking personally, proud to have worked with everyone here." "We were here in 2009 with Mark Ruffalo and Pete Seeger which was really the kind of kickoff of that campaign and that infused the spirit of the grassroots part of this whole campaign and this whole coalition." "And without that energy, grit, determination, and guts we wouldn't be here today at all." "'This is a momentous victory.'" "'Don't forget that.'" "And we beat an extraordinarily rich extraordinarily powerful adversary." "'They're right now, the same adversaries' 'they're gonna try to fight us' 'as we move forward on renewables.'" "They're trying to kill wind in Washington." "They're trying to kill solar in Washington." "They tried to kill solar in this state but they failed." "But you know somethin'?" "We beat them then, we beat them yesterday we'll beat them tomorrow as well." "[cheering]" "(Mark) Though it didn't come easily" "New York is currently the only shale gas bearing state with a ban on fracking." "Looking back decades from now the battle fought here maybe remembered as the first great victory in the clean energy revolution." "We all need and use energy." "And options to fossil fuels are growing fast." "Including wind, solar, geo-thermal and hydro." "Iowa for example, produces 27 percent of its energy from wind." "California's electric car fleet is powered by energy from the sun." "Towns from Texas to New York have gone off the grid often because it makes economic sense as well as being good for the environment." "More jobs are being created in renewable energy industries than in oil and gas extraction." "There'll be so much growth in clean and renewable energy and the cost will come down as a result." "There'll be a natural transition and elimination of the use of coal, oil, and gas." "We do you think that we can have a transition to a hundred percent renewable energy for all purposes by 2050." "Renewables have been ready since the 1990s." "I worked on the renewables program in the 1990s and we called places like the Midwest the Saudi Arabia of wind power." "There's still a lot of basic research." "Fundamental physics." "Quantum mechanics going on in the solar area." "Physics is on our side." "(Sandra) It's really time to come up with an economy that is the equivalent of the iPhone for our energy system rather than keep relying on the old coal, oil and gas which is like the rotary dial phone." "I think there's nothing sacred." "It's all gonna change." "What's the process whereby we get from, uh an economy that's 85 % dependent on fossil fuels to an economy that's 85 % dependent on solar and wind?" "See, right now it actually takes coal, oil, and natural gas to build solar panels and wind turbines." "If we have the research and development then over the course of a decade or two decades we could build the industrial capacity to produce renewable energy without fossil fuels." "[instrumental music]" "Fossil fuels have become the basis for our entire way of life." "And you don't make an overall energy transition without time and thought and investment." "We never had a major change in technology in this country without some government participation." "Whether you're talking about the railroads nuclear power, electrification the internet all of these things took massive government spending." "And the only way you can get that to happen is by working right on down from the top level to the bottom level." "People have to become involved and people have to become invested." "It's almost like a test for us as American citizens." "(Mark) How do we pass this test?" "And is there still time?" "Humans are frankly a rapacious species." "Without the willpower to restrain our consumption and without the wisdom to recognize that we are just one link in a global ecosystem we may fail our greatest test to survive." "On September 21, 2014 up to 400,000 people took to the streets of New York City to demand that our nation address climate change and lead with renewable energy solutions." "What they took away from the ban on fracking in New York state was that when people organize they can win." "I was at that climate change march." "And it opened my eyes, mind and heart to see that incredible out pouring of human energy." "The goal of the march was to draw global attention to the need to shift from a fossil fuel-driven economy to one that harnesses renewable energy sources." "President Obama, you've done a lot during your time in office to influence our energy future." "I know you understand that if we are to preserve the planet's climate for generations to come the only path is to keep fossil fuels in the ground." "You've tried to rain in carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants and stood up the climate deniers." "At the same time, under your watch, fossil fuel extraction has grown increasingly extreme." "Companies are drilling deeper." "Accidents more frequent." "Danger's constant." "Vast acres of public lands and the deep sea are being drilled at all-time highs." "In order to try and put coal out of business you sided with natural gas." "But the shale gas boom that many said would be a bridge to a new energy future has turned out to be nothing more than a dead end." "By trying to please everyone I'm afraid that your all of the above energy policy has left many millions of Americans in harm's way." "If we wanna keep moving toward a future free of fossil fuels then real change must come from ourselves and from our leaders." "We must join together to shift the power and change our energy system." "The time is now to re-power our country with energy from the sun, the wind and the water." "The time for a clean energy revolution is now." "[instrumental music]"