all these developments from around russia we've got the future. could have you with us this hour this is r.t. coming to you live from the russian capital it's the weekly top stories now. one will be the next french president as the two front runners go through for the second and decisive round of voting in two weeks time and he will face a tough job of fixing a faltering economy and record unemployment. the u.n. security council has agreed on a resolution to send three hundred observers to syria to monitor fragile truce in the country despite some remain skeptical of the week old cease fire with europe threatening to adopt fresh sanctions against the massacres. bahrain controversial forward along despite widespread protests against the regime and

a brutal crackdown by police that's one activist dead tens of thousands of. democratic. and thirty minutes that gripped global attention. both interview show here on t.v. this week giving voice to those ostracized by the mainstream media the show has sparked a range of reaction from praise histeria. well that's it for me and the news team for the moment. in less than half an hour of the news continues in the meantime the people of rocky mountain west hope to safeguard their civil liberties and health and energy companies plan to drill in their own backyards a special report spitta state is next here on arctic. we have five forty acres and nineteen ninety three and this side it will

be a great place to find them build a home and retire. i am fifty generation my great great grandfather homesteaded here. let's go let's go to gates that way was killed or you would go a mile don't think sarah go on board that. we have three hundred head of al that come down on the high country there in her inability to you know. i'm a fourth generation rancher and 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 and she was the honey honey the red

winged blackbirds are back you know. this has been my favorite place i've ever lived in my life i say representatives it's your and your . i've called interplaying every regulatory senate house in the explosions that is a direct from president bush days when there's a group resample oil companies are paid for thirty six billion dollars per month twenty dollars a barrel not always a number that's a win for three seats. and there she is. we call it our new neighbor neighbor nine o seven. we are in a spy. the state situation where 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 the law i'm literally extraction

goes back hundreds of years that says the mineral water has a right to extract that mineral and to a certain extent can extract it can 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. the energy policy has been to drill drill drill drill some war era very strong industry they've got a tremendous amount of political influence and an awful lot of money. as a civil servant i spoke out. but it's difficult to do so because you feel constant that you're risking your job and your family's future.

i don't know. if you're right. as i sat there and looked out my window into my backyard all i could think was there is no way i can stay up there so i'm sitting here with all of the right resources these people need help he before any problems the people who do the right thing and then train. they're motivated by profits and unfortunately are motivated by short term profits they don't hate the feeling. time this it you come out here and you come over here and live in my house for a week. i have no rights.

in 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's 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 overflowing into communities where people are seeing this right in their backyards . oh sure you were they wanted to put this location one of the first places that they want to put it surprise you and say we have three well out there you don't have a missing you. i 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 always limited to. the middle mile fell field i believe this this they represent their outer boundary of. just just in the would be about two hundred feet from our house which is also close because we so we don't want the smell and they say well i'd rather smell like. life this is you're crazy to think it's big personal life you feel so helpless you know.

display the 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 lawful one hundred fifty feet away from your house one half times the length of their social falls over one hundred years we see the look on people's faces and they get that look and i say wait a 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 attitude of drilling rig near a small house showing just how close the chain can be and how large the pad is during drilling a site can cover several acres before it is reduced to a smaller for the producing well. today with cries for more domestic oil and gas production energy companies have been aggressively leasing mineral rights so that

they can drill beneath both private and public lands all over the rocky mountain west as industry has been expanding dramatically tens of thousands of new wells across the region in colorado we've had about thirty thousand wells and we expect another thirty thousand in an x. 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. back into the thousand after the bush cheney election and there was a dramatic acceleration in 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 will feel for transportation electricity and manufacturing whatever i hope for

developing alternative sources and conserving energy and that's part of our plan the reality is the loss of fuel supply virtually one hundred percent of our transportation needs and many democrats for the bush cheney energy policies they felt they were shut out of the process of developing the nation's 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 meet 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 and the energy companies we don't know what other provisions may have been and it is a 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. is 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 the debate in 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 arlen 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 and 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 in canada and 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 negotiating 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. 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 guard with the state go on to the land and drill anyway that's what happened to the bellows. one way or 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 and i think it is private interests that all human rights also here once you're on the forests or bialy arm and of course it's a government garfield county located high in the colorado rockies was always a quiet rural 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 oil the time that there was this and that it

fuels corporation and it was all about oil shale natural gas they didn't have high points for it and so they were trying to figure out what to do with all the natural gas and you know there was a lot of there was no use for a little time now natural gas was the biggest thing that's going on in less than colorado. israel and canada leases in here cross roads build their corporation and over there on ten acre spacing for mayor i mean you want your eleven four and you knew how many wells were impaired it i bet you could see three four hundred wells. you're standing right over abide by in right here by the way. brewers fan and we had a spill. and you see over my head here we've got the neighbors wells i don't know

three four i'm over there and that stack closest to the blue one day it was quite old faithful had crossed over there the separator spewed paraffin out over the pad and on over into a good number of acres of our parish church and that paraffin was laced with anthrax chemicals hydrocarbons of various kinds we were concerned it would contaminate in bits. and the grasses were heavy and dry and whatnot so we burned a d.h. in writing carvings along with it for when get it detroiter. a couple fills up or is about ten thousand wells. here in the basin which is. an

incredible number of wells to climb mountains on a daily basis and so it as a simple example and we do well reviews and look at what a well should be delivering and if we spend five minutes per well i it takes about nine months to go through that process everything below us down here is our mental canyon if you get up on the big hair is make the benches those painters are just littered with wells approximately five hundred all told. and now with the new well space in that they have proved will go from about five hundred two. 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 congo phillips has probably another ten thousand wells there we will drill in the

basin over the next forty years. to sharply increase drilling on gilbert 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 some von county and north west new mexico. the one third has been so bad that i can't recognize it from the first. the ranch lands of san juan county aren't the only areas inundated by drilling rigs . in the towns near gilbert are meant as land there are 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 simple because the phillips is the largest producer in the san juan basin when you look at the total between our workforce directly and indirectly in forest it's about eight percent the local population so we're a very large employer in the basin. industry has brought jobs in monies of the county but for gilbert our men to the prices been much too high. there's a gate will be the gate to 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. in the street has the mentality that. it's all theirs and the loan to nobody else. and that's what they tell us when they cannot the grill here on our land it's

always when you're in norway. we just think a good neighbor program was something that was somewhat elementary in a fist respect because if you don't try things will happen first is the government will regulate and a lot of times regulate out of business and second is new mexico becomes an unfriendly business environment and oil and gas industries go elsewhere i don't think the state wants that the oil or 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. in the lower forty eight on shore the boom that is crew is going on is driven a lot by technology are going to lot of technological advances was horizontal

drilling with the french or 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 surface and the peoples all. 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 reserve it's here to see you colborne is one of the world's leading authorities on endor korean disrupting chemicals in the environment and their impact on humans here the trucks are coming all the way which is thirty miles to a year old 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 short and an interesting list that e.t.a. put together it certainly wasn't comprehensive we know 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 for private terry or they just don't get it they don't have to. boil 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 is anything harmful in the fracking fluids that are used to fracture the wells nor fluids are not toxic and we did a lot of that 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 like for people who are telling you that these products are safe first and ask them

what they have been trained did to find out who is paying their salary and third actually hand them a real glass. of something if you have taken from an evacuation buy and ask them to drink it. i think it's all part of people understand that we live here and love it also so i would be a messenger nast of. the book. he and harold hofmeister live across the road from the belle farm surrounded by an ever increasing number of natural gas wells and we're in bad actually sleeping and. we heard this pop and then our son called and he 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 ring of

illinois right out wade are all and then the fire trucks came but they waited way down because there was nothing they could do a better word for more for the burn yeah folder of the yeah so i think they were there basically for our homes and if they caught fire something you know one of our structures. industrial accidents and spills are common in these communities between two thousand and three and two thousand and eight has estimated that there were one thousand four hundred and thirty five spills in colorado. nearly a quarter of these spills are believed to have contaminated either ground or surface water in the state. every time which is why that's why we see this when you see. i don't see nothing 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 that was first discovered. we got a call and they april first from a neighbor steve thompson and said you know i found some stuff down here on my place it doesn't look right. look at it and he said it's not normal he always vote for them and water up their lard little first your own body. that's all there are from. both those in our properties there was a the evidence of bubbling in the creek we didn'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. a pure. water samples taken from the ground water in the divide creek

seeping area showed levels of a carcinogen benzene forty eight times government standards gas was released into the creek for fifty five days before the well believed to have caused the seep was resealed after they were mediated the well evidence of the sea largely disappeared here it went away and pepys place on langer's that the medicine if it can't leave 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 cram in a full plate in a certain area if there's a frenzy in two in there and nobody knows how long it's going to be or

if ever. we're really you know everything is going to be cleared up. according to a statement provided by the end kind of corporation nothing that and kana 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 this is colorado matters so coloradans who if the oil and gas wells say drilling is making the series spike in oil and gas drilling in colorado is having a big incentive there is new information about the effect it will truly on your health.

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