TV News LIES

The Marcellus Shale natural gas industry has a huge thirst for water - to hydraulically fracture a single gas well requires upward of a thousand tanker-trucks of water.

And so during the summer, when some streams here in gas-rich northern Pennsylvania naturally turn into trickles, the Susquehanna River Basin Commission pays close attention to ensure that drilling interests don't suck the state's creeks dry.

Smart Meters thus have two primary areas of contention. First, they are a bold invasion of privacy and purport to have authority to gather data and modify behavior and consumption patterns of unwitting power consumers and market data to third parties and government and policing agencies. Second, they are a Class 2b Carcinogen even by WHO standards, and the mountain of toxic data is mounting that Smart Meters are thousands of times more toxic than even cell phones, causing cancer, insomnia, and numerous medical problems. The biological basis is energy transferred to cell membranes and molecules that open calcium and other ion channels and disrupt the non-covalent Van der Waals hydrogen bonds that hold the fragile double helix of DNA intact and cause 4D enzyme active site disruption with disturbed enzyme KMax and nutrient-enzyme interactions and cellular communications.

The communication, part of the cache of State Department cables that WikiLeaks passed to McClatchy and other news organizations, is just one indication of how the U.S. government over the years has maneuvered to influence the world's oil and natural gas markets.

With oil trading near $100 a barrel and gasoline near $4 a gallon at the pump, Americans can take solace in knowing that securing sources of oil has been a chief focus of U.S. embassies across the globe for years.

Thousands of opponents of a $7 billion pipeline that would boost U.S. dependence on Canadian oil sands plan to get arrested in protests over the next two weeks that they hope will help persuade the Obama administration to kill the project.

The State Department is set to issue a final environmental impact report this month on the Keystone XL pipeline project that would bring oil sands petroleum from Alberta to Texas refineries. The department hopes to make a final decision on the TransCanada Corp line by the end of the year.

All but one member of a government advisory panel weighing the safety of one of the most contentious forms of energy development, known as fracking, have financial ties to the natural gas industry, scientists and some environmental groups are asserting. The scientists called for the ouster of its chairman, former CIA director John Deutch, who sits on the boards of two energy-related companies.

The group, which reports to Energy Secretary Seven Chu, is concluding that development of shale gas can be done safely provided that companies fully disclose the chemicals used in fracturing liquids, and that they face monitoring of their activities and rigorous standards for emissions of airborne contaminants.

Olivia Newton-John is the latest celebrity to take on the powerful mining industry over environmental issues. Newton-John, the United Nation's Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment, risks a ''Carbon Cate'' backlash over her public opposition - outlined today in The Sunday Age - to a controversial method of extracting natural gas from coal seams.

Newton-John is concerned about the use of hydraulic fracturing - known as ''fracking'' or ''fraccing'' - which injects huge volumes of water, sand and chemicals deep into shale rock to release gas for commercial use.