What the frack?

In Pennsylvania earlier this year, a law was passed that enables individual counties to charge hydraulic fracturing companies a set fee for drilling within the county’s borders. Sounds like a great law, until you read the provision requiring medical professionals who request information about “trade secret” chemical additives used by drillers to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Under Pennsylvania’s Act 13, drillers are required to tell any doctor who asks what chemicals they are pumping underground — but doctors are prohibited from sharing this information with anyone else. What’s more, there is no standard confidentiality agreement form, so each drilling company drafts its own terms.

This isn’t anything new — there are similar laws in Texas, Ohio and Colorado, and withholding information about environmental hazards from the public is a well-tested government practice. In 2009, for example, the Obama administration decided to keep secret the location of four dozen coal ash waste storage sites (they said it was a matter of national security).

The debate of individual citizen versus corporation rights is well-known in American history, and it’s been raging in recent years. Take the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which explains that if a corporation discloses information to the government, the information is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and the company is exempt from persecution. What’s more, whistleblowers for such corporations can get into serious trouble.

What’s more important? A citizen’s right to know when their health is being threatened, or a company’s right to protect “trade secrets” in which they’ve invested millions or billions of dollars?

I would hope the protection of human and animal life would come before the protection of economic assets, but this certainly isn’t the case with current laws in Pennsylvania and other states.

Citizens are unable to respond to anything if they don’t have access to necessary information. During World War II, American news outlets and the government told the official story that no lethal radiation was released by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and suppressed stories to the contrary.

Current government agreement with hydraulic fracturing companies to keep information about toxic chemicals secret from the public comes from a similar line of thinking.

The practice of non-disclosure is anti-democratic, disempowering citizens in matters that directly affect them. Although the option for anonymous disclosure by fracking companies is available (such as through the website fracfocus.org), this is not a solution, as it does not hold companies accountable for their actions. It only provides information to select citizens — those who live in areas where fracking companies have chosen to anonymously disclose online.

Pennsylvania’s Act 13 clearly acknowledges that chemicals used by hydraulic fracturing are potentially harmful to humans, other animals and the environment, and studies have found that certain fracking chemicals contain known carcinogens.

The “is it safe?” debate is over. Now is the time to ask more legitimate questions, such as why no preventative measures (such as outlawing fracking, as Vermont has done) are being taken, why profit is being valued more than human and animal life and why such drastic and harmful measures are being taken in pursuit of a form of energy that is ultimately unsustainable.

­— ccleahy@indiana.edu