that's a distance. it's good of you to join us this is artsy live from moscow hear your headlines now the french decide their future with voting in the presidential election and well on the way ten candidates in the running including incumbent nicolas sarkozy though the next leader will face a tough job of fixing a faltering economy and record unemployment. the u.n. resolved to deploy a three hundred strong observer mission in syria to monitor the project troops but despite a unanimous vote in the security council some members are accused of undermining the peace efforts. controversial formula one grand prix goes ahead despite

widespread protests against the regime and the brutal crackdown by police that's left one dead tens of thousands have been out in force demanding immediate democratic reform. and thirty minutes that gripped the global attention julian a song to premier his own interview show on r t this week giving voice to those ostracized by the mainstream media the show has sparked a range of reaction from praise all the way to hysteria. right now an eye opening examination of the consequences consequences and conflicts arise between landowners and the untouchable energy companies in the u.s. you're watching. we buy forty acres and nineteen ninety three and decided it would

be a great place to find my bell the harmony hire. i am fifteen aeration my great great grandfather homesteaded here. let's go let's go to gates that way was filled with what he wanted go a mile. sarah lawrence and bought. we have three hundred head of al and come down on the high country they're encouraged to believe beautiful. i'm a fourth generation rancher when i was little dad would let me have two cows out of the herd so i could have known her. my favorite things is the red winged blackbirds that use the honey honey the red

winged blackbirds are back you know. this has been my favorite place i've ever lived in my life say river is good news it's fine you're you have called and you're playing every regulatory senate house in the legislation so they direct from president bush's goodness and growth present world countries or clean or thirty six billion dollars to tribal councils twenty dollars a barrel dollars number one for six dollars and there she is. we call it our new neighbor neighbor nine o seven. we are in a spy. state situation where we on the surface and someone else on some mineral rights and what happens in colorado and i think in most western states is the mineral rights. are dominant. law and mineral extraction

goes back hundreds of years that says the mineral owner has a right to extract that mineral and to a certain extent can extract it and impact the surface without compensation. we have seventy acres here and i can't convince them that they need to drill somewhere besides two hundred feet from our house. to be energy policy has been to drill drill drill drill some more here a very strong industry they've got a tremendous amount but it will influence an awful lot of money. as a civil servant i spoke out. but it's difficult to do this because you feel constantly that you're risking your job and your family's future. and.

i don't know. if you're right. as i sat there and looked out my window and i back yard all i could think was there's no way i can stay up there it's i'm sitting here with all of the right resources these people need help. for having problems before we do right and then. they're motivated by profits and on fortune they are motivated by short term profits they don't take the long view. you come out here unless you come over here and live in my house for a week. i have no rights.

the rocky mountains are seeing an unprecedented boom in oil and gas drilling montana wyoming colorado new mexico utah the boom is happening all over the country there is oil and gas operations in thirty two states right now but the rocky mountain states are really seeing the vast majority of the expansion. and it's all referring to communities where people are seeing this right in their backyards. but i'll show you where they wanted to put this location one of the first places that they wanted to put it surprise you and say we have three well out there you don't have in the city. a split a state situation is when somebody who owns the surface of their land does not own

the resources that are underneath their land for example oil and gas or other minerals a private person could own a house with land and the federal government or another private individual might on the resources under it the person who owns the oil and gas has rights to access that oil and gas which means that whoever owns the surface probably can't control what happens on their own property they're always limited just one middle miles off the field i believe this this they represent their outer boundary of of their. just guessing the it would be about two hundred feet from our house which is all foreclosures because we say we don't want the smell and they say well i'd rather smell like. lifestyle that's it you're crazy to think you could get sick from some ill in life you feel so helpless you know. displeases state is a concept that dates back to when the english king reserved his rights to gold and

silver deposits despite who owned the land as america was homesteaded the government continue the tradition of this kind of separate ownership. for one minute that anything is off one hundred fifty feet away from your house one and half times a month of there so fall over one hundred we see this look on people's faces and then they get that look at my story the minute i can't be right that's not fair that can't be what it is that's the way it is this is an active drilling rig near a small house showing just how close the gym can be and how large the pad is during drilling a site can cover several acres before it is reduced to a smaller pad for the producing well. today with cries for more domestic oil and gas production energy companies have been aggressively leasing mineral rights so

they can drill beneath both private and public lands all over the rocky mountain west this industry has been expanding dramatically tens of thousands of new wells across the region in colorado alone we've had about thirty thousand wells and we expect another thirty thousand in the next five or six years for decades the oil and gas industry has lobbied to create a regulatory climate which is pave the way for the current drilling boom that in two thousand after the bush cheney election there was a dramatic excel aeration and drilling activity both had received large contributions from oil and gas interests and the vice president had been the chief executive of halliburton a major player in the drilling industry. in the days of our growing economy also means expanding our domestic production of oil and natural gas which are by. i don't feel for transportation electricity and manufacturing whatever i hope you are

developing alternative sources and conserving energy and that's part of our plan the reality is the loss of you will supply virtually on hundred percent of our transportation needs oh how many democrats fought the bush cheney energy policies they felt they were shut out of the process of developing nations approach to energy this administration is a gas and oil administration frankly and so they're they're wedded to an old policy they're wedded to a twentieth century policy where we need a twenty first century policy you have the bush administration you have to all men at the very top and they aren't sympathetic they're making very serious mistakes because they talk to themselves and the energy companies and only themselves in the energy companies we don't know what other provisions may have been and it is the special interest provisions that that are easy to add in when you're writing one of these bills in secret in two thousand and five the administration's energy bill

passed with support from members of both political parties it provided the gas and oil industry. of dollars in subsidies tax breaks and research money sixty five percent of the current subsidies go to gas and oil and you have this imbalance we ought to have sixty five percent or more eighty percent ought to be going to alternative renewable technology to energy efficiency the energy bill makes practical reforms to the oil and gas permitting process to encourage new exploration after years of debate and division. congress passed a good bill. it all began here for us twenty five years ago when my husband moved here then i moved

here eighteen years ago arlo's and i were married in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight i was a pharmaceutical chemist for many years. my husband is a civil engineer with a specialty in water and he is retired a few years ago we ran into some real problems with the oil and gas industry because they have begun drilling here and can island gas contacted us in the early spring of two thousand and four with the proposal that they would put wells on our land and we began negotiations a surface use agreement with them and we negotiated for nine months and the bulldozer showed up one day and began ripping and tearing before we had signed a surface use agreement. the regulations require that oil and gas companies consult with landowners before drilling if the landowner doesn't agree to the terms the company proposes it can post

a bond with the state go on to the land and drill anyway that's what happened to the bells. when we first just i asked the seller about the mineral rights and he said he didn't have them to sell eighty five percent of landowners in colorado do not own the rights to the minerals under their land until you get on the federal property i think it is private interests that only rides through here when you're on the forest or b.l.m. land of course it's the government garfield county located high in the colorado rockies was always a quiet neural area for its residents. but in the one nine hundred ninety s. things started to change. gas and oil drilling began to boom and development has expanded dramatically each year when i first came to colorado twenty seven years ago the energy production was for all the time that there was this and that it

fuels corporation and it was all about oil shale natural gas they didn't have pipeline spartan so they were trying to figure out what to do with all the natural gas they knew there was a lot of there was no use for little time now natural gas was the biggest thing that's going on in western colorado. there's no in canada leases in here cross roads build their corporation over there on plane acre spacing for me are really what you're looking for and you knew how many wells around i bet you could see three four hundred wells. we're standing right over a pipeline right here by the way. right where was the man and we had a spill. do you see over my head here we've got the neighbors wells that are all three forum over there and that stack closest to us lou one day it

was quite old faithful had over there the separator spewed paraffin out all over the pad and on over into good a number of acres of our pastor and that paraffin was laced with effects chemicals hydrocarbons of various kinds we were concerned it would contaminate and did. and the grasses were heavy and dry and whatnot so we burned a d.h. in writing carvings along with it so when get it it's water. it comes with a laptop or it's got ten thousand wells here in the face in which is. an incredible

number of wells to try and manage on a daily basis and so as a simple example we do well over the years and look at what a well should be delivering if we spend five minutes per well. it takes about nine months to go through that process everything below us down here is our mentor and you if you get up on the big here is make the benches those bankers are just littered with wells approximately five hundred all told. and now with the new wells they approved will go from five hundred to about one hundred within the next twenty years we drill that averages about three hundred fifty new wells per year when you take colorado side and include that we think that conoco phillips has probably another ten thousand wells there where you will grill in the basin over the next forty years. to sharply increase drilling on kilbourne our mentors ranch

is typical of what has happened to vast expanses of northern new mexico land. a satellite image shows the crisscrossing patterns of access roads and wells extending for hundreds of miles across san juan county and north west new mexico. the land surface has been so bad that i can't recognize it from the first time i saw it. the ranch lands of san juan county are the only areas inundated by drilling rigs. in the towns near gilbert are meant as land there are a wells everywhere in neighborhoods and near schools. gas industry has been here for fifty plus years and we do drill in populated areas and you can

go out here a couple hundred yards from this office and find a pretty decent well conoco phillips is the largest producer in the san juan basin and you look at the total when our workforce directly and indirectly or in the forest it's about a person of the local population so we're a very large employer in the basin. industry has brought jobs and money to the county but for gilbert our men to the prices been much too high. gate will be the gate through entering from our property the old company had me completely locked out for two and a half years the only way they would give me a key. is if i agreed to keep the gate locked at all times. industry has the mentality that. it's all theirs and one belong to nobody else. and that's what they tell us when they come off the grill here on our land that

it's all roads and you're in norway. we just think the good neighbor program was something that was somewhat elementary and it's this respect because if you don't two things will happen first is the government will regulate and a lot of times regulated out of business and second is to mexico be problems and unfriendly business environment and oil and gas industries go elsewhere i don't think the state wants that the oil and gas industry doesn't want that we have a very large emphasis with our three hundred twenty five member companies about being a good neighbor about talking to people about doing the things that you would do in your neighborhood with your next door neighbor. in the u.s. from the old forty eight on shore the boom that is clearly going on has driven a lot by technology or been a lot of technological advances was horizontal drilling with fracture stimulation

one of the key elements to finding and getting the resource out of very tight sand or hard rock is a fracking process fracking is just a short word for fracturing hydraulic fracturing or fracking as it's commonly called is a drilling technique first commercialised by how labor in one thousand nine hundred forty nine comes in with very high powered water and sand and a slightly soapy mixture and all it does is it goes down and it just fractures little tiny fractures in the rock and then sand goes into those fractures and allows that gas to escape. and then the gas flows in to the pipe up to the servants in the people's own. hydraulic fracturing is largely responsible for the domestic drilling boom because of its high cost it was not widely used until recently in the one nine hundred ninety s. when the price of natural gas shot up high enough to make it affordable this is

here in the reserves it's here to see you colborne is one of the world's leading authorities on endor current disrupting chemicals in the environment and their impact on humans here the trucks are coming all the way which is thirty miles here she has been studying the chemicals used by the industry for drilling and extraction and documenting their effects basically our first list of the chemicals that were being used was this very very sure and an interesting list that e.p.a. for together it certainly wasn't comprehensive we know we found out very rapidly but it was no small list they don't tell you everything that's in a product you may only get five percent of what's in that product and the rest of it is proprietary or they just don't get it they don't have to. or oil and gas deposits below ground contain toxic compounds that are brought to the surface

during drilling these compounds pollute the environment and can cause health problems but the impacts of drilling are made even worse by the chemical products that are injected during the process dr colborne has documented over two hundred products used in colorado drilling over ninety percent contained chemicals with adverse health effects. there is not only prove that there's anything harmful in the fracking fluids that are used to fracture the route in our floors are not toxic and we did a lot of it as well. mis understanding of what is actually in the fluids i have fracking fluid taken right out of a tracking truck in my office i've had it in my mouth it tasted it and i would just fight for people who are telling you that these products are safe first ask them what they have been trained did to find out who's paying their salary and third

actually hand them a real class full of something that you have taken from an of affirmation of them and ask them to drink it. i think it's all part of people understand it we live here you know that also so i would be a mess in our newest. books. but he and harold hoffmeister live across the road from the belle farm surrounded by an ever increasing number of natural gas wells and we are and dad actually sleeping and. we heard this pop and then our son called and said that the well is on fire and my husband went to try to go outside and it was too hot on the deck so he couldn't remove them lloyd wright and wade are all and then the fire trucks came

but they waited way down because there was nothing they could do a proper way for more for their. own growth of the. so i think they were there basically for our homes and if they caught fires something you know one of our structures. in just real accidents and spills are common in these communities between two thousand and three and two thousand and eight it is estimated that there were one thousand four hundred and thirty five spills in colorado. nearly a quarter of the spills are believed to have contaminated either ground or surface water in stage every time we do this why is why we see this when you see it. and it's a good thing but you know. a little farther down dry hollow road is the divide creek. that you would go that's where lisa bracken and her family live.

this is backwards first discover. little cole one day april first from a neighbor steve thompson and said you know i found some stuff down here on my place that doesn't look right. i think look at it and he said it's not normal the all in both of them are water up their large little first your own body. yes that's all there are from. both those in our properties there was a the evidence of bubbling in the creek we don't know what it was it looked like a pepsi can there was just an eruption of bubbles fizzing all over the place in the reeds in the water in an effort to convince authorities that the bubbling was not occurring naturally lisa and her family demonstrated that the gas would ignite. by. water samples taken from the groundwater in the divide creek seeping

area showed levels of the carcinogen benzene forty eight times government standards gas was released into the creek for fifty five days before the well believed to have caused a seep was resealed after they were mediated the well evidence of the sea largely disappeared here and went away and pepys place on langer's it remember significantly and there's still some evidence of it there but it's the only lingering presence. to this day gas continues to bubble up at the seams main exit point on pepe langer's land. so what they're trying to do is contain everything. they can probably in a full life in a certain area here if there's no benzene to reign in there and nobody knows how long it's going to three or if ever. we're really you know everything is going to

be freed up. according to a statement provided by the end can a corporation nothing that and can a did was out of compliance with the regulations in place at that time extensive monitoring following the incident indicates there was no contamination of residential water sources as a result of the sea and air convection system is in place to remove benzene from the groundwater in the plume area spills and groundwater contamination can occur anywhere there is drilling industry representatives often try to downplay their environmental impact. since colorado matters so coloradans who with the oil with gas will say drilling is making the series spike in oil and gas drilling in colorado is having a good senators for they should about the effect it will truly off your health.

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