All I Want is H2O
In the early days when they come to town,
Spread money all around.
They treat you so polite,
‘till you sign away your mineral rights.
Then they build a fracking tower so high,
Looks like it’ll touch the sky.
Pretty soon they start to drill,
and they’re just not thinking ‘bout what might spill.
Or what it might do to your water…..oh well, they must’ve forgot
That it can end up full of fracking chemicals.
And just what they are, they don’t have to tell,
But there’s hundreds of tons in every well.
They can keep it a secret, and that’s a fact,
It’s exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act…
Called the Cheney Loophole…… sometimes called the Halliburton Loophole.
So they’re pumping it down with a big machine,
And what comes up is brown and green.
It’s poison through and through,
I do believe that it’s bad for you.
It’s got triethanolamine,
It’s got methane and benzene and naphthalene.
It’s got arsenic and mercury,
It’s got radioactivity, and
CHORUS
All I want is H2O, clean water don’t you know!
All I want is H2O.
Clear as a mountain stream, I don’t want brown or green,
All I want is H2O!
So now we’ve got poison going up and down,
and folks, our water’s underground,
Down around 500 feet, and
6% of these casings leak!
If that number doesn’t sound high enough,
over time it just keeps going up.
In fact the industry engineers
Tell us half of them are leaking at 15 years!
And you know how many wells there are?
192,000 so far.
And that means, pretty soon, about
100,000 fracking wells leaking out!
And that’s about 50 billion pounds
of chemicals mixing all around.
Me? I wouldn’t mix a ounce of things
that I cannot pronounce!
CHORUS
And if all that fracking makes you sick,
they’ll try to see that it won’t stick,
With a gag order, and what that means,
you’re not allowed to spill the beans.
They’ll pay you money, but you can’t tell
anyone about who poisoned your well.
Keeps it out of the news, so they can claim
it’s perfectly safe, and that’s their game.
Seems like easy money at first,
right up till you die of thirst.
They’ll take whatever they can find and
ship it out in a pipeline.
And speaking of pipelines, it’s a fact:
the more they build, the more they frack.
So don’t be shy, and don’t hold back,
gotta stop every one of them in their tracks!
CHORUS
©Doug Hendren 2016
What’s it about? In recent years, natural gas from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the United States has been touted as a “clean bridge fuel”, since it produces only half as much CO2 as coal during combustion. Studies have now shown, however, that the carbon footprint of natural gas from fracking is even greater than coal, because of the large amount of “fugitive methane emissions” in the fracking process.
The fracking industry fiercely proclaims that fracking is safe, clean and has been going on for over sixty years. In reality, contemporary methods and scale of operations are little more than a decade old, and have now been shown to have very serious and costly medical, public health and environmental consequences. For an up-to-date review of medical studies on fracking see the Physicians for Social Responsibility compendium below.
The fracking industry has also saddled the American public with a vast, unfunded cleanup job of leaking and abandoned oil and gas wells, on a scale difficult for most of us to grasp. Letting the public pick up the tab has been part of their business model all along.
The powerful oil and gas industry has hidden essential public health information for years using gag orders and other strategies. See my song “Fracking is Everywhere.”
The so-called “Halliburton Loophole” has also allowed the industry to evade scrutiny for many years, due to the influence of then-vice-president Dick Cheney. Fortunately, these days are coming to an end.
For more information:
TOO DIRTY, TOO DANGEROUS: Why health professionals reject natural gas. A report from Physicians for Social Responsibility
COMPENDIUM OF SCIENTIFIC, MEDICAL, AND MEDIA FINDINGS DEMONSTRATING RISKS AND HARMS OF FRACKING (UNCONVENTIONAL GAS AND OIL EXTRACTION). 3rd edition, Oct 14, 2015. Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians For Social Responsibility.
Duke Study: Rivers contaminated with radium and lead from thousands of fracking wastewater spills.
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry. Bill McKibben, The Nation, March 23, 2016.
Toxins found in fracking fluids and wastewater, study shows. Michael Greenwood, Yale News, Jan 6, 2016.
In “David vs. Goliath” fracking case, families handed major win. Common Dreams, March 10, 2016
Fracking-affected families plead with President Obama: “We Need Help”.
