Without serious intervention, it will be business as usual: the industry will withhold crucial chemical data under the guise of "trade secrets."
NC residents deserve to know what's being pumped into their ground and water. Tell the Mining and Energy Commission you expect FULL PUBLIC Disclosure of all fracking chemicals.
We, the undersigned, do not accept Charles Holbrook’s “Goldilocks” rule (not too hard - not too soft) as an adequate guideline for industry disclosure of fracking chemicals.
Nor is it enough, as Commission Chairman Womack (a former Chevron employee) suggests, “…to get as full a disclosure as we can, in consideration of trade secret laws," or “…to lean more to the most expansive set of standards that we can find in any other state."
This means allowing the industry to disclose as little as it can get away with and accepting the unacceptable in NC just because other states are doing so.
Nor is it acceptable, as Holbrook suggests, that full chemical disclosure be made only to "emergency responders and medical personnel.” The PUBLIC has a right to full disclosure of toxic chemicals used anywhere in the environment.
For years the pesticide industry - the same industry that makes fracking chemicals, some of which are used in pesticides - has withheld and even misrepresented info about so-called “inert” ingredients - to the serious detriment of public health and the environment. These inerts usually make up the majority of pesticide formulations and are often just as toxic, if not more so, than the formulas’ active ingredients. These inerts have included extremely volatile and often carcinogenic chemicals like benzene, xylene and toluene. Furthermore, tests to determine “safety” of pesticides are done on active ingredients alone, without including these often extremely toxic inerts in the formulas tested, therefore disregarding any inert or synergistic effects involved in the mix to which the public is exposed.
In 2009, Oregon’s Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides petitioned the EPA to “Require Disclosure of Hazardous Inert Ingredients on Pesticide Product Labels,” and the EPA responded, saying it “…agrees with the petitioners that the public should have a means to learn the identities of hazardous inert ingredients in pesticide formulations.”
There should be nothing different regarding fracking chemicals, and we insist that NC’s Mining and Energy Commission, should the state go ahead with this insane practice of fracking, demand no less for the citizens of NC.
Thank you for your time.
ao assinar, você aceita o termos de serviço da Care2 Você pode gerenciar suas assinaturas de e-mail a qualquer momento.
Está tendo algum problema?? Avise-nos.