This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

When people recklessly endanger the lives of others we call them criminals. When people who run corporations do, they call it cost cutting. British Petroleum comes to mind here.

But in the infinite wisdom of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, the criminals are the environmentalists "who prevent us from drilling in safer places." I suggest they watch the HBO documentary "Gasland" to learn how that drilling in safer places is going.

Among the many enduring environmental gifts of Dick Cheney is an exemption from the Clean Water Act for the natural gas drilling technique of "fracking." Fracking has opened up enormous natural gas reservoirs previously locked in deep shale formations reaching into 37 states.

Gas companies consider shale gas a "natural gas ocean" worth trillions of dollars. Halleluja! But there's one small downside.

Fracking a well requires injecting millions of gallons of water and hundreds of chemicals, many of them well-known carcinogens and neurotoxins, into the well bore under intense pressure to fracture the shale and release the gas.

Single wells may be "fracked" repeatedly. Across America 450,000 of these wells are being drilled. The waste water is contaminated, unusable, and toxic to plants and animals. The chemicals can spread into geologic cracks far beyond the well.

Not only are the chemicals not prohibited, their use is not regulated. The gas companies don't even have to disclose what chemicals are used. Perhaps you're thinking the same thought you were when you heard that BP was drilling a mile under water with no plan for stopping a spill, "What could possibly go wrong?"

If it occurred to you that the aquifers, rivers and creeks that provide drinking water for millions of people could be poisoned by this technique, that same thought occurred to people who noticed their drinking water smelled like turpentine, looked like mud and could be lit on fire. There are now thousands of these complaints, but when asked by a congressional subcommittee, CEOs of the gas companies answered there was no proof they did it.

Many rural property owners don't own the mineral rights to their property. They are often powerless to prevent drilling next door to their house. One owner, who started collecting all the dead animals near a creek on her property that had been contaminated by drilling, summed up the corporate strategy from her personal experience:

"The business model is to come into an area, develop it as fast as you can, and if you trash anything, make the people who have been impacted prove it. You make them argue it in a court of law, and the last person standing gets bought off and you move on."

It's not just critical fresh water that's being sacrificed by fracking, it's fresh air as well. In the Colorado Plateau alone, the air pollution from drilling, gas pipelines, vented storage tanks, diesel truck emissions, toxic waste water evaporation ponds, etc., etc., will equal the emissions of 13 million cars within a few years. That's like all the cars in Los Angeles moving into the Intermountain West.

Sparsely populated Sublette County, Wyo., is in the center of this new energy development. Already it often has higher ozone levels than Los Angeles.

The mayor of a Texas town of 150 people, where 10 natural gas pipelines intersect with their vents and compressor stations, had an independent study done of their air pollution. The report stated their town showed "amazing and very high levels of known and suspected carcinogens and neurotoxins." Concentrations of some chemicals were more than 100 times allowed by Texas's very loose health standards.

As an environmental nightmare, fracking could dwarf BP's accident in the Gulf. But this is no accident. This nightmare is inevitable for a nation of fossil fuel addicts, facing dwindling supplies, with wealthy corporate pushers more than happy to keep giving us our fix, at higher cost and with dirtier needles.

For those of you who drink water, or enjoy an occasional breath of clean air, "Gasland" illustrates the grotesque downside of relinquishing our energy policies, and by default our public health protection, to the oil and gas industry. On the upside, those of you who have struggled trying to light your tap water on fire, help is on the way.

Brian Moench

is president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.