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tv   [untitled]    August 11, 2012 6:30pm-7:00pm EDT

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for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report. two thirty in the morning here in moscow glad to have you with us this is our team broadcasting twenty four hours a day let's get right to your top headlines and i see reception riot police clash with anti-war activist cindy stumble furious over hillary clinton's visit who pledged millions of dollars to the syrian rebels stepping up plans for a post assad future washington and turkey are considering various measures to assist the opposition including a no fly zone as the conflict there deepens. plus a bribe for desertion qatar reportedly offers the syrian ambassador to martini a one million dollars and political asylum if you defects and voices his support of the rebels diplomat is thought to have rejected the proposal calling it a blatant interference in syria's affairs. and the u.s.
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says it has visibility into iran's nuclear program and is confident it will know if tehran moves towards building an atomic bomb but a leading israeli newspaper claims that tell of even could launch an imminent strike on iran even before the presidential elections in the united states. up next on our two years our documentary series split state. forty acres and nineteen ninety three and decided it would be a great place to find my build a home and retire. i am fifteen aeration my great great grandfather homesteaded here. let's go let's go
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to gates that way was killed when he would go a mile. sarah long gone. we have three hundred head of al i come down on the high country there and current of libya. from 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 choose 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 is one your you have called interplay with every regulatory house and senate house the legislation
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today directing president where do these witnesses represent the oil companies are made or thirty six billion dollars or twenty dollars a barrel dollars number telling for two months. there she is. we call it our new neighbor neighbor nine o seven. we are in. the 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 the law on 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 impact the surface without compensation.
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we have seventy acres here and i can't convince them that they need to drill somewhere besides two hundred feet from our house. policy has been to drill drill drill drill some more 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 constantly that you're risking your job or your family's future. i don't mean. if you can't say as i sat there and looked out my window and my backyard all i could think was there is no way i can stay at sea i'm sitting here
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with all of the right resources these people need help this is before problems before we do right and then. they're motivated by profits and unfortunately are motivated by short term profits they don't take the long view. you can load 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.
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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 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 wanted to put it surprise you and say we have to well out there you don't have any so you. a split a state situation is when somebody who owns the surface of their land does not own their 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
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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 just one new state in the middle a mile full field believe this this they represent their outer boundary. of they're . just guessing that 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 yes well life this is you're crazy you think you can't get sick from civilian life you feel so helpless you know. the split a 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. i don't
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believe for one minute that anything is off one hundred fifty feet away from your house one and a half times the length of there so if it falls over your house we see the look on people's faces and they get that look and i saw wait a minute that 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 two can be and how large the path 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 that 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
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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. back in two thousand after the bush cheney election and there was a dramatic acceleration in drilling activity both had received large contributions from all and gas interests and the vice president had been the chief executive of how a major player in the drilling industry. the dates 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 our hopes for developing alternative sources and for 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 many democrats fought the bush cheney energy policy they felt
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they were shut out of the process of developing the nation's approach to energy but 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 when 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 at it is a special interest provisions that are 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 billions 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
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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 arlen and i were married in nineteen eighty eight i was a pharmaceutical chemist for many years. my husband is a civil engineer with
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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 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 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 to sell eighty five percent of landowners in colorado do not
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own the rights to the minerals under their land until you get on the federal property i think it is private interests that all human rights through here once you get on the forest you're b.l.m. 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 in 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 and at the time that there was the synthetic fuels corporation and it was all about oil shale natural gas they didn't have pipelines for it and so they were trying to figure out what to do with all the natural gas you know there was a lot of there was no use for it at the time now natural gas was the biggest thing
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that's going on in lester in colorado. there's no and canada leases in here and cross roads build very corp and over there on ten acre spacing for me are really what you're looking for and you know how many wells around parents i bet you could see three four hundred wells. you're standing right over a pipeline right here by the way. right where we stand and we had a spill. you see over my head here we've got the neighbors wells i don't know three four of them over there and that stack closest to this blue one day it look like old faithful had over there the separator spewed paraffin out all over the pad and on over into
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a good number of acres of our passion and that paraffin was laced with the tax chemicals hydrocarbons of various kinds we were concerned it would contaminate and did. in the grasses were heavy and dry and whatnot so we used to burn the did shin writing carbons along with it so we would get it or get water. comes with a laptop or it's about ten thousand wells. here in the basin which is. an incredible number of wells to try and manage on a daily basis and so it as a simple example we do well reviews and look at what our wells should be delivering if we spend five minutes per well. it takes about nine months to go through
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that process everything below us down here is our men to canyon if you get up on the big here is makes a bench is those bankers are just littered with wells approximately five hundred all told. in now with the new well spaces that they approved will go from about five hundred to a thousand five 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 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 san juan county and
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north west new mexico. the land surface has been scarred up 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 wells everywhere in neighborhoods and near schools. gas industry has been here for fifty plus years and we do drill in populated areas you can go out here. a couple hundred yards from this office and find it producing well conoco phillips is the largest producer in the san juan basin and when you look at the total between our workforce directly and indirectly supporting forest it's about a person of the local population so we're
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a very large employer in the basin him. industry has brought jobs and money to the county but for gilbert our men to the price has been much too high. so gabe will be the gate to enter into my 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 it five greed to keep the gate locked at all times. on the street has the mentality that. it's all losers and don't belong to nobody else. knows what they tell us when they come out to drill here on our land it's all right you're in our way. we distinct a good neighbor program was something that was somewhat elementary and it fist respect because if you don't two things will happen first is the government will
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regulate and a lot of times regulate out of business and second is the mexico becomes an unfriendly business environment and oil and gas industries go elsewhere i don't think the state wants 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. in the lower forty eight on shore the boom that is currently going on has driven a lot by technology or been a lot of technological advances with 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
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called is a drilling technique first commercialised by how the burden in one 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 a 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 in the people's homes. 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 that don't you see oh colborne is one of the world's leading authorities on endor korean disrupting chemicals in the environment and their impact on humans down in here the trucks are coming all the way which is
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thirty miles to hear 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 west that if he a put together it certainly was uncovered heads that we know we found out very rapidly that 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
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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 wells you know our flaws are not toxic and we did a lot of things 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'm just fine for people who are telling you that these products are safe first and ask them what they have been trained in to find out who's paying their salary and third actually hand them a real glass full of something that you have taken from an evaporation time and ask them to drink it. i think it's just
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a part of people understand that we live here and love it also so i would be messin or nast. d and harold hofmeister live across the road from the belle farm surrounded by an ever increasing number of natural gas wells where and bad actually sleeping and. we heard this pop and then our son called 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 remove those annoying right away are all and then the fire trucks came but they waited way down because there was nothing they could do approach to wait for more food to burn yeah founder of the yeah so i think they were there basically for our homes you know if they caught fires something you know one of our structures.
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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 we hear that's why it's why we see this when you see. and it's a horrible thing you know. a little farther down dry hollow road is the divide creek. ok here we go that's where lisa brock and her family live. this is back was first discovered. who got a call one day 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. i think if you come look at it in he said it's not
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normal he always involve them at water up their bomb large little first jump on the yes that's all there after. both is 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. like that. and say. if you're by. water samples taken from the ground water in the divide creek c.p. 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
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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 it diminished 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 contained everything they come combination but in this area here if there's benzene to live in and nobody knows how long it's going to three or even ever. oh really you know everything is going to be cleared up. according to a statement provided by the end can a 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
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was no contamination of residential water sources as a result of the seat an 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 with the oil and gas wells see drilling is making the recent spike in oil and gas drilling in colorado is having a big it say there's new information about the effect it will truly on your health .
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