describe what brought you to subject. field of interest, the country, the history.

>> who does a film on jesse jackson and jesse james. who does a book about country music and america imperialism it has just been a fantastic will ride. i would never compare, but let let me say this when i was a kid i grew up in missouri and my parents used to take me around and they used to take me to the birthplace of mark twain. there's a house in florida missouri, it's a little two-room shack. and then you know the kind of life you got to and for god sakes, $611,000 in his estate when he died in 1910 which is going to be like what

$15 million so i'm thinking even as a little kid this writing gig, there may be something in it. [laughter] it is now 45 years later and i am just coming around to the realization that maybe this is not the best plan. if you want to accrue $611 and estate, it's been a joy i have met people i could not have imagined meeting. i've met bite president and vice presidents, i meet really fascinating interesting people all the time. some you know, some you don't know. wonderful professors of history who help me out. i was explaining to craig earlier, my wife is also a writer. she got tired of me bringing home mark twain to dinner every night.

so she signed up her own biography and she started bringing to helen gurley brown, and we would all sit around and chat. it is been a great career and the people who have most interested me are the people who have traveled the greatest instances, walt whitman and who traveled traveled a great metaphorical distance. and mark twain. he went around the world. it has been nothing but fun. >> is there another question in the front row.

>> my question has to do with manifest destiny and imperialism. i think before the civil war the movement toward manifest destiny explains the territorial movements acquisitions from other presidents. however hey was heavily involved in some which took a leap away from the traditional united states of america. that was, when william steward, during will after lincoln's assassination, required alaska. so i would think that one can make the point that american imperialism and hay was around all this might have begun with the purchase of alaska which was beyond the usual territorial jurisdiction of the united

states. could you comment on those two ideas, manifest destiny which explains a jefferson to some extent in the beginning of imperialism. >> yes. especially with young john hay was sent off to europe after michael was assassinated. he was also the kind of guy in the early 1870s who is talking about this being god's will and this is the only nation, america is the only nation that really, truly has liberty and it is our duty to spread it around the world and god wants us to do that and alaska was a little hop step in that direction. you can can still get there by land. the other thing that people don't, you could talk about manifest destiny and imperialism but you could also talk about how driven this was by economic

reasons, for instance when they first started talking about the transcontinental railroad and they started talking about this in the 1840s the id about the transcontinental railroad was not just to get the east coast with the west coast, but america is going to be the highway to the pacific. the pacific was always the panacea. china, hundreds of millions of people or should i say consumers, that was always a big piece of the u.s. that the subtext of everything we can talk about what the american public wants and what god wants, but in fact what we can really talk about is what our bank accounts want and mckinley made

it very clear that a statesman had to be aware of the commercial possibilities of places like the philippines. there is a report that francis greene who is the commanding general in the philippine did for mckinley just before they signed the treaty of paris and took over the philippines. it basically laid out the resources to be exploited in the philippines. i actually point out the spanish were very worried that egg and aldo who is the filipino revolutionary was going to roar into manila with his men and whip the entire city which he was like what to do by the way. but the much more interesting looting expedition was our own.

in fact, i don't know if he ever made it to theater roosevelt's oyster bay house but when he was renovating i think a trophy room he ordered a special wood from the philippines to be put in there. i do not know that made it or not but i know it was in the plans. >> ladies and gentlemen, we just scratched the surface of this fascinating book. it was a pleasure for me to read and i encourage you you to pick up a copy. we are going to conclude now by thinking mark for spending time with us and giving us insight into his book. i know you would be anxious to talk to him personally and you can have a chance to do that but please let him out the door so he can get to the table to sign books that people have

purchased. with that, mark, thank you very much for coming here tonight. we appreciate it and please come back again to the mark twain house. [applause]. >> thank you so much. not. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] >> this is a book to be on c-span two. television for serious readers. here's our primetime lineup. coming lineup. coming up shortly, "frackopoly", the battle for the future of energy and the environment. on afterwards on nine eastern, historian pamela historian pamela haig provides a history of guns in america.

then at ten p.m., actress stacey dash on her life in conservativism for it at 10:30 p.m., an interview with marcia clark, that lead prosecutor in the o.j. simpson trial. we wrap up tv with the new york times white house correspondent, mark minard's report on the relationship between president obama and former secretary of state, hillary clinton. that all hillary clinton. that all happens next on c-span twos book tv. coming up first, wenonah hauter. >> after tonight's talk we will have time for questions from the audience. after which will have a book signing which will be here at this table. we have copies of "frackopoly" available for 20% off at the register which is in the next room. this event i want to say thank you for buying books here at the bookstore your purchase supports the future of an independent bookstore. thank you for that. we. we are pleased to have c-span's a book to be here taping today's

event. when asking questions during the q&a please know that you will be recorded and please wait a moment for the microphone to come to you before asking your question. also a reminder and thank you for selling lansing yourself over tonight's talk. now, i am pleased to introduce your speaker. wenonah hauter is that the executive director of the food and water watch which focus on corporate and government accountability relating to food, water, fishing. she has worked in written expect exclusively in food, water, energy and a better mental issues including as director of public citizens and energy environment program and is the environmental policy director for citizen action. her previous book, food aptly, the battle over the future of food and farming in america was originally published in 2012 and 2012 and has now been released in paperback. it unveiled the issue of corporate control of food in the united states. her latest latest book, "frackopoly" takes on hydraulic manufacturing looking at the parties have supported it and arguing that the rush to

bracketing is dangerous to the impairment and human health. e-uppercase-letter is appraised as a truly -- from one of its greatest events. the huffington post calls it, a comprehensive history of fracking in america, said read "frackopoly", it's well-written, timely and important. where please bring the conversation to harvard bookstore tonight. please do me in welcoming wenonah hauter. climax. >> thank you to harvard bookstore in tel aviv are coming to see me. in the mid- 19 '90s i worked on a renewable energy project called power in the midwest. we knew in the 90s that renewables were ready, that energy efficiency was ready we really needed to make a

transition. so a couple of years ago we had been working on fracking of food and water watch for several years as a first national group to call for a ban on fracking. i started looking at some of the statistics about how far we had come with renewables since the mid-19 90s 90s when i worked on this project. it was stunning. as of 2015, only 5% of our electricity is generated from solar and wind energy. we need to do so much better and yet, here in a state like massachusetts where you are not really suffering from fracking but you are suffering from all of the infrastructure to really promote fracking to allow it to expand. so i decided to write this book

because you really need to know where you have been to know where you are going. i wanted to see how we ended up with this monopolized oil and gas industry that has so much power over our democracy and over the future. so i started at the turn-of-the-century. i want to talk about that history tonight and i mean the turn of the 20th century not the turn of the 21st century. before i get started on that history i want know how familiar people are with fracking. maybe i should start by defining it and talking a little bit about the impact and why we care that there is so much oil and gas drilling of fracking across this country. come on in, there's plenty of room. so fracking is a science fiction like process that uses large

amounts of water, toxic chemicals and very fine sand. it is injected deep underground in a well and then over multiple stages the fracking takes place. the wells are drilled about one mile, up to 2 miles into the ground and then a horizontal tunnel is drilled, again it could be as much as a mile or two miles. then miles. then this toxic mixture of sand, chemicals, and water is injected under very, very high-pressure and multiple stages to fracture the rock. you silly share and to release the oil and gas. although we're we're talking a lot about fracking being for natural gas, since 201280% of

fracking has been for oil. so, what is this doing in the communities where the fracking is taking place? these are called sacrifices else. there have been 140,000 wells wracked in the last ten years. today, 17,000,000 17 million people live within 1 mile of a well. there is a lot of infrastructure to support fracking and the drilling and fracking for oil and gas. we are talking about thousands of miles of pipeline, compressor stations, and processing facilities. now compressor stations, the fracking and drilling itself, the processing facility, all all of these have a lot of impact,

they let a lot of chemicals, things like benzene, methane, a range of a range of chemicals are emitted into the air that make the people living near those facilities sick. there have been, since 2013, 62 studies written about the health impact. 94. 94% of the study show adverse effects and health impacts in living near where fracking is taking place or the compressor where the processing facility. now, let's talk about the water. fracking uses 50 times more water on average than conventional drilling. we are talking, for one well one well anywhere from 1,700,000 gallons to 13,000,000 gallons million gallons to 13 million gallons in a state like texas. lots and lots of water is used. fracking of course is going on

in some of the driest places in the nation. places like texas but have been having a trout. california, and in a state like colorado crackers have also been competing with farmers and having a real impact. when you are using injections to send all of this water and chemicals and sanded deep underground a lot of it comes back to the surface. it is bringing not just the fracking chemicals and we know that although the companies do not have to disclose exactly what the chemicals are, we know that there are over 400 chemicals that are used, many of them carcinogenic and with other health effects. a lot of that water comes back up out of the wells, on average each average each day about

10,500,000,000 gallons of water. that is a lot of wastewater. it has to be dealt with. one to be dealt with. one of the ways it is dealt with is by injecting it deep under ground, it is called deep well injection. we note that has its own impact. earthquakes, this is not something i made up of the the book, this is something the geologic service and a lot of authorities have now confirmed. fracking wastewater injected deep underground causes earthquakes. in the state like oklahoma, it has been really shocking. before fracking started there were one or two serious earthquakes over 3.0 magnitude. today, there is as many as 5400 earthquakes, that is a a recent figure, annually that are picked up on the seismic equipment. a huge number of earthquakes. this is this is happening in multiple

states, ohio, arkansas. there are a lot of other impacts but you can seat this is something that if you live in a community where fracking is taking place you are probably concerned about it. your family members that may be sick, having rashes, having rashes, nosebleeds, and even more serious impacts. that is why there is a big movement that has sprung up in these communities against fracking and drilling, which i will touch on in a minute. but now now i want to turn more to the story of how we ended up with the next stream energy practice like fracking taking place. why we are continuing to use fossil fuels even when our globalclimate is threatened. as i was saying earlier, that story does begin at the turn of

the 21st century. when jd rockefeller from them you probably learned about in history class had rolled up the oil and gas industry, controlled 90% of it, used, used a lot of ruthless and unethical practices to drive other companies out of business and to really control a resource that was very important at the time. originally it was used for kerosene which people depended on providing their houses. around the turn-of-the-century other companies formed, texaco was formed around oil found in texas. in europe there were two other companies, i'm going to call all of these companies by their modern names because with the mergers and acquisitions through

history they have gone through dozens of changes. so we're talking about some very important companies that have done a lot of lobbying and have had a big impact on where we are today. so the european companies are shell and bp, the u.s. company reformed after rockefeller's standard oil was broken up. you'll remember from history that teddy roosevelt challenged the oil industry under rockefeller and there was a proceeding on the ended up breaking up standard oil, rockefeller's company into about 30 companies. that is usually the end of the story. but but actually that should be the beginning of the story because standard oil was not really broken up. standard oil got to write its own plan and each of those 30 companies with exxon actually getting about half of the value

of the original standard oil, rockefeller maintained an interest in each one. the three rockefeller companies were exxon, chevron, and mobile. of of course we know exxon and mobil eventually were merged and actually texaco also merged into chevron. we are actually talking about for companies today. but for most, a good chunk of the 20th century there were seven companies that were really almost dictating public policy and the american company had a huge impact on our tax policy, the research that was done for the oil and gas industry, the whole system of energy that we actually used today.

this got very traumatic in 1928, kind of the beginning of the oil and gas industry drilling in the middle east. you will remember the middle east was created at the breakup of the ottoman empire by france and britain. the oil industry was already there and interested in the resources. in 1928 when oil was found in iraq, the big oil companies, the seven, the seven, there called the seven sisters, named after a greek mythological story of atlas' daughter who fought amongst themselves, but if there was ever an attack on one of them they all gathered round to and protected her. so they were nicknamed the seven sisters and that is kind of how they

behaved. so when the soil was found in iraq, there was a lot of overproduction. so the seven sisters got together in one of their areas and drew a redline around the middle east, made, made an agreement amongst themselves that they would only go in and drill for oil jointly. they would never go in alone. this was so that they could watch one another. and they would actually limit production six prices and break basic antitrust laws. soon after this agreement was made, the three largest of the seven sisters, exxon, bp, and shall med at a castle in scotland and decided on a set of principles for how they would actually accomplish this price-fixing. moving forward together to break

basic antitrust and monopoly laws that we have in this country. they met periodically after that. meanwhile they were having a big effect on the rules that were being written and the laws that were being decided on. prior to world war ii and after world war ii, but let me step back a minute and talk about the utility industry a little bit because today we have this oil and gas industry, the big electric and gas utility and actually the banks which i will get to in a little bit. the oil industry was rolling up and really dictating the rules around oil and gas drilling and discovery, there is a man named

samuel in seoul who is doing the same in the electric utility and gas utility industry. he gets something that is similar to what happened with the housing market in 2008, 2009. he actually had an ownership in about 5000 gas gas and electric utilities in 30 states. there was a holding company structure or we would call it a multinational corporation today and the parent company kind of looked these utilities charging them big rates and fees for services. meanwhile, he had an investment company, a number of them and he sold the stock over and over again to these different utilities. this all contributed to the crash of the great depression. now i am talking about this because it actually have a big impact on policy today. when roosevelt came into office

there was a lot of activity around trying to curtail what the oil and gas industry was doing, what the electric utility industry was doing and then what the financial services industry at the time was doing. there is a few laws passed that i want to talk about, because when they were repealed it allowed fracking in the oil and gas industry to blossom and created these giant utilities. so the first one was kind of an archaic law which he may have not heard of before. what it does does with actually regulated electric and gas utilities so they had to focus on their main business that they cannot gamble with ratepayer money. they they needed to have continuous service operations. it really dictated the structure

of the industry keeping it from getting too big to fail. so that was one law it was called the public utility holding active 1835 but five but you don't really need to know that. but they were able to get natural gas included. in fact the law that i just talked about was probably the most controversy along in the early years of the roosevelt administration. there were 600 lobbyist in washington lobbying against it, large sums of money were spent and it passed by one vote. they manage to keep natural gas out of it. so three years later they came back and were able to pass another law regulating the natural gas industry. a lot of consumers had been ripped off and there were urban cities that were angry and organizing to try to do something about consumers not having access to affordable

natural gas which was very important for heating and for electricity generation in some places. so this law did something important. it regulated the price of natural gas and it gave the authority to a governmental body called the federal policy commission. they use the cost of what it actually, what the oil and gas industry had to pay to get the resource out of the ground. and then a profit that they added to it which was between 5.6 and 6.5% over 40 four-year period. that was good over the time. this is called cost base regulation. the natural gas industry despise this.

they also, the electric industry despise the other law i talked about. this natural gas natural gas act also regulated pipelines. so you cannot go around and build pipelines and get it approved. there is a process to see a pipelines were necessary. people could be involved in the process, it was a lot more democratic. then there was a big debate for the next really to the 19 seventies. in the book i i talk about a number of characters who played a big role in this. some some of them are really doing this, many of them are big characters, one that comes to mind is bill kerr who was first a governor of oklahoma and then a senator elected in 1948. big belly wore the white suit, has a big 10-gallon hat. i have some pitchers of him. he is actually the great nephew

of audrey mclendon for anybody who actually follows this industry, he just died mysteriously. he was a big cracker at chesapeake and driven out of the company for bad behavior. so this is a relative of audrey mclendon. actually every year kerr introduced legislation for the oil and gas industry to do away with the natural gas act. every year for the next well, until he died in 1963 from a heart attack while in office. there while in office. there were other characters like john j mccloy who is a favorite billing. he worked for the walker feller chase bank and was someone who, for the next -- will he worked as an advisor for nine presidents.

he is part of that government that exists that is not elected but is always there is an advisor. he had a major impact in public policy in a lot of different ways that we do not have time to go into. but he was the antitrust lawyer who time and time again stepped in to get the oil and gas industry exempted from antitrust laws. a lot of times they were just sneaking behind the scenes to do this. it matters, this has been a debate since the beginning of our country. remember thomas thomas jefferson wanted to have part of the bill of rights the right to be free of monopolies. he did not care about the price of gas or the price of food, what he cared about was the political power that you get when you are such a large company that you are bigger than most countries. that is what happened to the oil and gas industry. so big that really, especially after world war ii they could

just dictate public policy laws. remember the amount of oil consumed, drilled for and consumed after world war ii doubled in part of that was its use for plastic. also of course the industry was able to make sure it was used for lots and lots of other things and other sources of energy may have been developed but they really were able to dictate how our tax dollars were used. so i want to now fast-forward because we do not have that much time and i want to talk about what happened when these important laws were under attack and repealed. i guess the story really begins, we will start it with the nixon administration. there were a lot of people in the oil and gas industry very

concerned about the environmental laws that were beginning to be passed in the movement, student movement, the real changes in society. the oil and gas industry were concerned about the environmental piece of this but you will remember there was the war in court extending rights to people, categories of people who had not enjoyed those rights before. there. there is the movement against the war, there was a youth uprising, there was a lot of both conservative interests, conservative social social interests and a lot of corporate interest that to not like to see how the country was changing. they helped elect richard nixon and after richard nixon was elected he promoted some of the people that would weaken our democracy. people like lewis powell who

went on to become a supreme court judge. he is a supreme court court judge that right the first opinions and that corporations have the right, the same right to participate in elections as people. he also wrote a very important memo. if you are not familiar with it, google it when you get home. it is called the powell movement. some people call it the palm manifesto. what he what he did was he was a very savvy man, he wrote out a plan for how corporations could take back the democracy. it was a long-term plan. it was around how the most important institutions were actually going against corporate interest. he talked about the media, the

university, all of the major institutions were actually helping to support this free writing of the you rules in the u.s. including the environmental laws. so this memo laid out a long-term plan for how to undo this and lewis powell helped raise a lot of money to make this happen including money from the coke family, the melons, a lot of the very conservative economic interest in this country. they did in fact weaken our democracy and our political system by creating this. now i talk about this in relation to the oil and gas industry because they were key to this. when president carter came along there was a lot of pressure on him and in fact, democrats started receiving corporate money at this time as well because the campaign finance

laws began to change. one one of the things he did, you will remember there was an oil problem because opec was angry about the u.s. foreign policy. so there was a long lines for gasoline. when carter came into office one of the things he said he was going to do was have a new energy policy. he put together a plan to do away with the federal power commission that was regulating natural gas pricing and pipelines. he created a new agency called the department of energy that brought together all of the different federal agencies that were working on energy and he created the federal regulatory commission that now oversees a

pipelines, electric wires, and a and a lot of the infrastructure for energy. it was given more more power over the next decades. that it's really how it began. also under the carter administration there are rules around natural gas prices and pipelines were rewritten. they call it natural gas to regulation. what it actually did was rather than have a process to look at the price of gas and see if it was fair for consumers, see if pipelines needed to be built, now this was all deregulated to let the market select what the price would be and if pipelines should be built. really what it was, was rewriting the rules to benefit the oil and gas industry. that natural gas deregulation was finalized under the record administration. since that time we've had more

than 93,600,000 miles of pipeline built since the deregulation and we have more pipelines being built all the time. a lot of the pipelines today actually are not, we do not even know how many there are because states now govern this and a lot of pipelines are not regulated at the state level. smaller lines called gathering lines. there are many more pipelines and if you count the ones that were built before deregulation, today we have about 2.5 million miles of pipeline in this country. it is enough to circle the globe 100 times. now we are building another 40 years of infrastructure which is really hard to justify considering climate chaos and

what we face in the future. the next thing that happened was electricity was deregulated or the rules were rewritten. they were were rewritten in a way to actually incentivize natural gas and smaller natural gas plants. more recently in 2005 we have seen a lot of other rules change to really incentivize fracking and natural gas. under the bush administration in 2005 the energy bill the energy regulatory bill of 2005 was passed. it had three benefits for the oil and gas industry. one, most of your familiar with the help bert's loopholes which actually exempts the oil and gas industry from the safe drinking water act. the other two

benefits are less well-known. one of them is the repeal of the bill i talked about the public utility company act of 1935. i5. i was repealed and its repeal means that utilities could get is because they wanted. they can engage in any kind of activity including the trading of the speculation on the stock market that was forbidden before. in fact natural gas was not really traded before the 1990s. today we now have 20 giant utilities that operate in this country and provide more than 50% of power. they use the all of the above strategy and they encourage fracking and a party to its. the other thing that changed in the energy policy act of 2005, do not have the name quite right before. it gave the federal energy

regulatory commission that was created under the carter administration new and big powers. it put it in charge of the environment putting it in charged of our most important environmental law in terms of building new things, that is the national environmental policy act that requires that an environmental impact assessment study be done to look at the environmental impacts. to this agency that has almost never seen an oil and gas or electricity project that it does not love now is in charge of doing the environmental assessments. it also gave it the power of eminent domain, superseding what states and localities can do and giving it the ability to condemn lands for pipelines, interstate

pipelines for transmission lines and it hasn't really spurred the development of pipelines and fracking. so i spent a lot of my time tonight talking about the bad things. i'm going to end by talking about the hope of the good things. i think that in the election you have been able to see that a movements has been born around fracking. that is why we have candidates for the democratic nomination for presidency debating fracking. it is because a huge huge movement has grown up around this country. people are saying we do not want to do what is just politically possible. we want to have a future. we want to keep fossil fuels in the ground and we do not want fracking. there's been some big victories. a ban in new york, a very hard-fought bang, a moratorium

in maryland and they are going back for a ban ban this year. your own senate has passed a moratorium on we will see what happens in the house and hopefully you'll have your own moratorium. there have been more than 500 measures either bans, moratoriums or some local measure against fracking across the country. there are major campaigns taking place in about 15 states including states like colorado and california where there is a lot of drilling going on but there is an aroused citizen rates. i think it is really exciting that the movement is growing so big. what we have we have to do for the future is really keep organizing and keep our eyes on the prize. we really need to stop saying that renewables are going to come about because the market is

going to do it. if the market was going to do it it would have already happened. we need to fight for the public policies that are going to bring us a renewable future, that are going to allow us to use energy efficiency, that are going to save the planet for future generations. we do. we do not need 40 more years of infrastructure and a climate that is threatened in local communities that are threatened. so we look forward to working with folks to keep this movement going because i do know that we will be successful in the long term. we can do questions now. [applause]. >> if you have a question -- okay, yes. >> is it also true that the price of natural gas is coming

to historic lows and that the energy companies are mostly on the verge of bankruptcy? >> i think when you look at the history of the oil and gas industry, this is one of the things that have allowed the consolidation. i do not think i mentioned that that exxon is the largest record today. that the four remaining oil companies that i mentioned from the beginning are chevron, bp, and shell. they are all they are all amongst the ten largest crackers. there history is really boom, bust. when there is a bust they pick up a lot of smaller companies. i predicted i would probably place a bet bet on this that within the next two years the price of oil and gas will go back up unless we can really curtail what is going on now and

the industry wants to export oil and gas. remember first of all it was for energy independence and then when there was too much of it they advocated for being able to export oil which had been illegal since the 19 seventies. and they are lobbying to build liquefied natural gas plants which would also allow the export of gas. so the prices will be going back up. >> [inaudible question] >> that is really the history of the industry. they will exported and get a hold of it. that is kind of the strategizing they did throughout the 20th century. they were not always able to stop production. i would predict that pretty soon, based on history that the price will go up. i have a graph of the actual album and flow of the oil industry. it really is, it goes like this.

another question? >> i live between cambridge and tulsa, oklahoma. oklahoma now, because of the tornado capital of the world, the earthquake capital of the world just in the past couple of years it happens almost every day. like a three-point zero, four-point zero, it is not anything like san francisco but it is amazing. what very few people know is that actually from st. louis through texas you have two imagine the fault, apparently the last time there is activity on this was when you had nonoaud, is that even though there are probably eight and now richter type earthquakes, it was like 1814, it knocked over tvs, did not matter.

now you're talking about the water, the wastewater and the thing about it is, the industry is very powerful in oklahoma but there so many people who are being badly impacted by this. i do not realize, new there is a problem with fracking. i did not understand why the water was getting bad because a lot of these places you're talking about farms that are using well water and this is getting into the well water. >> thank you for your comments. >> i have friends locally in new york state who are very involved in the anti-fracking movement and i i have a friend who is involved in trying to stop a pumping station. but what i found in the rural communities is that is also an issue of economic justice. i don't know if you address this at all but you go to the farmers market and you can talk to farmers about

some of them are for some of our against because it is very difficult to survive. rural communities are disappearing, no longer will there be land to fight these kind of things. there has to to be a long-term strategy for economic viability of these communities. >> that is_point. my last line point. my last book was called food napoli where i really addressed how all were ruled communities and agriculture committees have been left with no hope for the future. and you look at the landsman who go in and sell leases, they prey upon people and they were able to do it before people even knew about fracking. people are trying to save their family farm but it has really harmed these communities. you look at a state like north dakota who has had food and bus from agriculture and actually

oil to in the 50s. so there is a lot of development when the transient workers committed, the in some areas what they call man camps and housing for these people. and it also brings a lot of crime and the lifestyle is also affected but then when the price plummets that investment in some of that is public investment for roads and other infrastructure is gone. it's not really a long-term strategy for economic development. even though some people and also in some of these communities the division, the people who had the ability to sell leases and soulmate leases and made money and they are are affecting their neighbors in the anchor. there are lot a sociological effects to this.

we need to reorient our economic system so that via people in rural communities able to make a fair living. it means a complete a reorientation of our food policies, our economic policy, but one of the reasons i wanted to write around energy is because of the short term threat and because we need to get energy right and we can create a lot of new chops if we are doing an energy platform that is really about helping people and not helping a few dozen companies. that is because energy efficiency has a huge potential. we need to retrofit about every existing building. we need to actually have a federal federal funding to get some of this underway. we have to reorient our

political system obviously to do this. but we decided to engage in the fight to add food and water watch because there's no choice if we're going to slave our save our global climate. if people want want to fight for what they really want their tired of these changes and that might have some effect. we need to talk about what the policy changes are and then fight for them. i am excited that we are even talking about fracking during a presidential election. we all know how difficult it is to get an issue to rise. i have big hopes for even after the election for all of that really millions of young people who have been energized by current events. we are at a historical moment. we have to keep up and keep our hope up. but it includes having new policies for rule areas too.

>> my question has to go with -- i think part of the group here in massachusetts that has worked diligently for the past year and a half to stop one of one being very lateral and close to where i live, it personally gone to meetings from the commission to veterans to the judicial court of massachusetts, personally written to warren and marky, did about 40 emails of both in both and five or six meetings in their offices. thousands of signatures have been collected in hundreds of other organizations and it always comes down to the fit between ink new england, the local gas distribution companies and the gas and industry lobbyists. i've been looking at

articles about some of these closed-door meetings that were held and it is a complete revolving door. i would like you to really go into as much of that as he possibly could because we have even had people of massachusetts up approach the commissioner from massachusetts who refuses to meet with us but will meet in closed-door meetings with the oil and gas industry, so please go into that as much as you can and what can we all do to combat that system because it is so thick that's why -- >> you outline a tremendous problem in our movements and i think over time we are going to have to fight to not reform but to eliminate the agency and to start over again with an agency that really is looking at these issues and not doing the oil and gas industry's business because

what we have found and with our 16 offices were involved in these local battles, what we found is that you can stop pipelines and states that have some kind of local process it could be local permitting, i i know in new york state there have been uplands and pipeline stops it but that's because the decision was made by the state. when you have ferc making the decision they're doing the business of the oil and gas industry. nobody really knew much about them