if you. see from stupid. stunts on t.v. dot com. good to have you with us here on r t we're coming to you live from the russian capital syria headlines the death toll after a devastating floods in russia's southern region of dog continues to rise reaching one hundred fifty five water swept through thousands of homes in the worst disaster area has ever seen. u.n. envoy kofi annan says international peace efforts in syria have so far failed and he warns against placing the blame on russia for stalling the process. by julian assange to remains in the safety of ecuador's london embassy as the deadline for

his extradition expires meantime though he's a wiki leaks web site is publishing files on syria. and the west. are next year not a report on a controversial method of extracting oil and gas that's certainly unearthing some strong criticism this is out. it's not bigger than texas it is texas. downtown dallas what the locals call the high from. is a strange twisted beauty it's more than just a complex multi-layered with interconnected freeways it's a monument to america's energy power. and nation. has. a high five groups and rolls out over some of the richest shale fields in the

mines. that means the new united by moving into the suburbs around here might well be a drilling. i know people who tried everything they possibly did and they still have drilling right next to their houses and they're very unhappy if. you don't have to travel fucked to witness a collusion between community and comus family and industry we all take risks every day driving to work you know but there's risks that you have to take and recess you don't have to take and to me it just doesn't make sense to put a heavy industrial process right next to somebody's house. this is south like a prosperous community on the outskirts of dallas. a few years ago forbes magazine

named this the most affluent neighborhood in the united states. a place where usually money talks. but right now the talks all about the riches of the bonnet shale field underneath suburbs like south like. home to dr gordon. expected. as are so many things we don't know about this process and that's really what became most frightening is the things that are being generated during the fracking process we know have the potential to cause things like a nap seen in benzene which we know are linked to leukemia we know are linked to cancers and other types of neurological disorders. the emergency room doctor and his band of suburban activists often get to hear at the local mexican restaurant with the children to discuss the perils of

a process they may not have even heard of a few years ago even in oil savvy texas fracking. and so this was where they were going to put it correct. just pass a second fence line there. would have been about sixteen seventeen hundred feet from my front door and within about eleven hundred feet of a saw my neighbors the. neighbors like diane harris and her family you know we can't be i'm not going to put a price tag on the health and safety and wellbeing of my family and there is no amount of money that will convince me that we should have this in the middle of our neighborhoods. it's similar to my mind to how we found out about cigarette smoking and cancer it wasn't that we did a study and found out oh no look cigarettes cause cancer it was forty fifty years of of exposure. the process that so worries the

doctor is hold by the industry is the key to energy independence. the drill holes can go three kilometers down and then push out horizontally for kilometers as well a cocktail of more than five hundred chemicals millions of liters of water and truckloads of sand is then used to break up the shale and release gas and oil. the process has transformed the energy business in a few short years. but the jury's out on its impact on the environment and people skills. really this is a new frontier nobody's done nobody's done drilling in an urban setting and studied the long term the facts of what's going to happen and so again it comes back to my health clean air clean water those are things that we can't live without we can all live without gas royalties. you know

a few dollars to have an industrial toxic chemical laden facility literally in your backyard it's not worth it the risks are not worth the reward. i knew that if i. didn't act and if gas drilling occurred near my home and one of my children got sick i would never forgive myself. the method of gas drilling they use is called hydraulic fracturing or fracking as many self like as school and so was up on the fracking process this documentary racing has been proving popular at the local blockbuster. it's called gasland and this is its most famous and. she's just so i went out west and found people who could let their water for many many of them tell their own thing and people started to realize oh by water for eating black my water is bubbling something smells funny my kids are getting that they're all comparing information. and then they discover

a long haul that they can light their water tap. josh fox is the guest land guru really upsetting him and you know it's hard to overestimate the impact of his heartfelt hung spawn yet very powerful documentary. josh fox has become the anti fracking pinup that is a very. inspiration for those fighting big oil and a serious challenge to the industry there's a system here that is corrupt oil and gas pushes people. it's bullying it's aggressive it. gets its way it's about time we're done with that way of doing business with the culture of that because it's literally toxic and every aspect that's talked into the environment is toxic to our political process my.

job. here in texas they used to be go on for generations boyle and cattle the fords the formidable texas cow. if you say ford words and you. say. oh no extreme. north texas. subsidy exxon mobil. looks like the whole woodstock show. the crowd loves the cowboys and the big oil prices the green jobs poster. above the ladybird there's a natural gas in the united states thirteen hundred employees in north texas. and

take care of our kids is not blessed thanks to you oh thanks. but the price of the fracking frenzy a wild bucking broncos same subject. in just a few years drilling rigs have sprouted up through the texas suburbs like towering hills horsed across from shopping centers close to schools otherwise residential neighborhoods have become industrial zones. when the fracking staats trucks gather around the world. the sand water and chemical mix is pushed deep underground at extremely high pressure. escaping vital drifts in the week. three dangers the sea a lot of injuries i've seen since somebody actually get blown all the way back from a blowout c. one got a blow out. dangerous even deadly but lucrative. fracking

is now underway in thirty four states in the us. both a kid and urban cowboy tyler is just one of those cashing in on the new energy good one of four with three. guys this place. it's great money like i said it is a lot of stuff once you decide to do it once you get in full force with it you go with the ball it around you don't know but when i was younger i always said never have been able to get saved that money. tyler he is working on a drilling rig just a few miles from the dallas fort worth if. and just a stone's throw from new housing to go see. any kind of leaks or like that or a big has expressed you know if. there was

a problem on location as i say somebody like sparked a lot or in the wrong place or you know a spark was was discharged from like a piece of equipment you know in this well was to blow to say that that gas is not going to die and i think the ground it will point if it was up around the airport. and that's the rub there's a lot about what's happening under there that has people worried. and has the oil companies on the defensive. certainly the a.p.i. is best practice its operation standards that we encourage in st louis are very important in how industry goes about doing its business to make sure that they are operating safely environmentally sound and respectful of the neighbors and the stakeholders so there are lots of things that go under the standards that i think address a lot of you she said people are raising. it's literally like a chemistry detective novel. one of the issues is chemical

injection the other issue is simply connecting the layers between the zones which are toxic to groundwater very far into the ground where you have a gas oil. all of organic compounds benzene tell you and at the benzene. normally occurring radioactive material and what you've just done is you've created a connecting straw between layers that nature separated out millions of years ago with the groundwater. the fracking process was invented by halliburton a company like to run by dick cheney for some years before he kind george w. bush's vice president in two thousand and five the bush administration pasta an act exempting fracking from the safe drinking water act. that means they don't have to apply for a permit for chemical injection and you're creating a highway of gas and oil that's going through the water the aquifer protected by a one inch cement casing and yes the industry. you casings fail unless of course

fifty percent of them fail over the life of the will fifty percent of them fail over the life of the well which means that in twenty thirty years you've got water contamination situation that's potentially catastrophic. as is definitely divided the town and it has not brought harmony to southlake let's put it that way in sounds like the fracking funeral was provoked argument and insult there's just something about this town that's called not in my backyard you know if i can't have it you can't have it either a lot of that is happening it's not just the people in south like americans are just afraid of their shadows. the suburb is split between angry opponents and fervent supporters like oddly enough lifelong democrat zena rucker. when i first

became democratic chair for this history everybody in this town was a democrat and little by little as the yuppies then the dot commers came into town . we used to say they get a little money in their pocket and they change xena rucka is one of the original land holders here and this is my backyard she considers herself as a dedicated environmentalist i love my backyard and a conscientious conserve i'm a true environmentalist i drive a prius i never take anything to the garbage either gets in the compost or it gets recycled. she owns seventy five acres pretty countryside that's worth a bomb on piper a while ago gas companies approached her with offers for the mineral rights on the property is my hanger in my wind sock the chicks were too big to resist even for a prius drive us there was one that was pretty close to three hundred thousand the

last one i catch some of them already but. the leases ran out so anyway this last one however they took back and decided that they just weren't going to do it but they lead me to believe that had they drilled i can easily make thirty thousand a month but have bonanzas here toward the local council has now sided with the fracking opponents and imposed a moratorium on development if there's a gas leak and they're doing a barbecue or they're smoking for the moment a golden all end and his supporters at a have one out my daughter is still in a developmental phase right she's four years old and no one can tell me what the long term effects on things like hormone production and ovaries and what not. it can protect herself from seventy can't sing can't snaps but while suburbs battle with worrying new residents the frak is a descending upon a vast swathes of north america and in one case on must an entire state.

the remote sweeping plains and rugged rouland straits of north dakota. it's pretty inhospitable country. particularly in the grip of the freezing winter when we're. not so long ago north dakota was struggling to keep its population. that as i say is so yesterday. but the way things are going on the off field right now it's just me. this is where the work is it's big. these roads are not made this time the traffic. the amount of trucks that are

around here. you could only expand like flies around a cow shit there just trucks everywhere. my kid got the pedal to the metal and the icy road to the low growth horizon ahead models will be pithed with gold. the average driver on a normal week would probably make somewhere between four and seven thousand dollars a week just to drive. the grocery store to the parts stores to the hardware stores to the truck drivers everybody is doing what. and if they tell you they're not doing well they're either not very good business people are lying it's simple fact they're not up here for anything other than the almighty dollar. like millions before him mike came came to america from ireland in the twenty years he's been in the us he's

been a fisherman a farmer and a horse breeder. now he's a trucking magnate in the michael holding water to the fracking reefs. i'm good on a river i now have five trucks five trailers all paid for there are weeks here that i could. make in excess of fifty thousand. for my truck in one week. the harder you work the more you make. there's more oil than we can get out right now you know i'm not privy to what in saudi arabia or off the coast or up in alaska but this is a big play that's here for a long time that as long as the needs are in the law as a price stays where it's going to be this looks real strong. no way or in this country is fueling american dreams of energy independence more than this place the shale rich plains of north dakota just the oil that's here could help transform the

world's biggest oil consumer into the world's biggest oil producer. than adequate description of boring beyond i think it's safe to say anything that anybody has really seen in this country since probably the land rushes in the early one nine hundred. this is what food city a year and a half ago that in itself is a misnomer. this little town of just a thousand people was following much of the rest of the state to a long slow decline. but in just eighteen months the population has grown from a little over a thousand to six and a half down. there was a time gene vidhan knew everyone until he grew up here now the shops on main street a full of strangers and for the head of this county's development of florida that's

progress to be proud of. so now are frantically trying to get housing for those people here in an area that hasn't really built much for the last twenty or twenty five years right now the challenges in this community are to get water and sewer in so that developers can build more permanent housing. in. in a country where unemployment still holds as of eight percent north dakota's jobless rate of three percent is the envy of the nation. here in the shale oil belt in towns like what food city and williston job's go begging wal-mart mcdonald's and even a local casino are among the many towns and for workers. for those looted by the

last of the oil boom finding somewhere to sleep can be harder than fun job the lucky ones end up here in high school erected prefab man camps a bunk and food who are in a shared dorm room costs as much as one hundred forty dollars a month. no one's complaining. i'm a frak i work for fracking through always do basically just plop water gel chemicals and sand down a hole and it helps welcome just oil more efficiently last year i grossed eighty five thousand dollars and then this year said there's a lot more. others not so lucky sleep with i can. overflowing with mobile homes and caravans truck drivers sleep in the truck cabs if i sleep much at all. the.

you won't be surprised to know that just like suburban south like texas not everyone's happy. you know us winter one day when thinking about here and found this open spot that simply frozen over. and then we discovered all this water bubbling and how cold was a good oh gosh thirty below here last week thirty below yeah and this will still be like this yeah well jackie shuki says previously pristine spring fed creek started to bubble just a month after fracking on the neighboring property. and actually when i bought this property over six years this spring we were drinking a lot of this crap well really it was so clear you wouldn't drink it now would you oh god no i won't even walk in it let alone drink it yeah my dad had to tell me he goes out. tastes a little bit every bit as good clean water you know but there's a beaver dam near her on the way there the beavers of all moved out.

jacki schilke he blames fracking for the loss of five counts two dogs and a number of chickens. and for the decline of her own house. i was actually diagnosed with hydrocarbon exposure i've got a lot of problems that come along with it well when you live twenty four miles out in the middle of nowhere. that shouldn't be a problem i say bring in the cleanest and. the industry admits its record isn't perfect but says safety standards are improving all the time and those who have been adversely impacted do have options. there's always that issues there's nothing that we do in any industry energy is not unique that's completely discreet. you have the ability to go to your state regulators and raise issues and concerns as private landowners depending on which

state you're in and what the state laws are you may have recourse in the legal system so there are lots of ways that you can seek relief on that the goddamn liars and they're here to rape this land make as much money as they can and get the hell out of here they could give a crap less what they're doing here they will come on your property look you straight in the eye and lie to you. and they will leave without a second thought and they do not care. from north dakota to texas and a slew of states in between many now blame fracking for writing juvenile means. headaches nausea dizziness skin rashes and worse. when they came into my neighborhood i began having a lot of intense long term headaches and extreme fatigue and dizziness and now i've been diagnosed with anemia and of the by never had anemia. jane lynn

lives in texas a middle class suburb just a few miles from south like. the fracking activity here in the past two years has been feverish. this is been like i guess my worst nightmare it's like a bad dream and i keep thinking ok i'm going to wake up and it's going to be back to normal and it's not and it's sad. it's really sad compressed natural gas tonight at the arlington city hall jane lynn is one of a growing group of concerned residents hoping to block proposals for more wells in the neighborhood these drilling rigs are marvelously engineered pieces of equipment the place is packed and it quickly becomes apparent not everyone is on his side that's a good thing for everybody these days seems like the tail wag the dog and i think it's time for the dog to stop that thank you.

to mommy development and perceptions of the national interest of dividing the residents thank you. for not genuine and activist friends won and lost council voted against one well sought proposal but approved a number. everyone was so pro journalling and this is the red white and blue american thing to do and i just never saw it that way and i was being personally affected by it but now i'm seeing other people rise up who are feeling the same way i think a lot of people now would like to do over. this crazy notion with its reliance on the prickly often hostile and unstable middle east is a place where it's easy to see why the energy russia has gathered such. but

where collides with the american heartland and future and where it threatens wildlife and the wildlife in america's vast backyard fracking is fast becoming a very different. like the process itself the fractures and ultimately explode. in the.

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