WEBINAR: PA's Shale Gas Boom: How Policy Decisions Failed to Protect Public Health & What We Can Do

On July 21, 2022, the Environmental Health Project and HealthFirstPA hosted a webinar summarizing the findings of EHP's latest white paper, Pennsylvania's Shale Gas Boom: How Policy Decisions Failed to Protect Public Health and What We Can Do to Correct It. A recording of the webinar is available below.

This one-hour webinar focuses on policy decisions made by the Pennsylvania state government that failed to protect public health from the harmful effects of shale gas development (also called “fracking” or “unconventional gas development”). The webinar also examines the resulting health impacts of these decisions. Finally, it explores what state government can do moving forward to better protect residents from the health impacts of this pollution.

The webinar content relies largely on the findings of the Environmental Health Project’s white paper, “Pennsylvania's Shale Gas Boom: How Policy Decisions Failed to Protect Public Health and What We Can Do to Correct It.” The webinar is geared toward anyone with an interest in learning about how government repeatedly failed to protect public health and what steps can now be taken to remedy the situation.

WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE:

PANELISTS:

Beth Weinberger, Environmental Health Project

Makenzie White, Environmental Health Project

Rev. Mitchell C.Hescox, Evangelical Environmental Network

Alison Steele, Environmental Health Project

Petrochemical Pollution and Our Health

By ELIZABETH BECHARD

There’s a good chance that as you’re reading this, you’ve already touched multiple items of plastic so far in your day. Perhaps you’ve brushed your teeth with a plastic toothbrush, typed an email on a plastic computer keyboard, tucked a handful of Goldfish crackers into a Ziploc bag for your child’s lunch, or donned a disposable N95 mask. Maybe you’ve joined a 5-year-old in an epic kitchen table battle between Barbie and Buzz Lightyear. Maybe you’ve put a plastic bandage on a small, scraped knee…

Even for those of us who are already trying to minimize our use of plastic, avoiding it entirely can feel nearly impossible. And while many of us are aware of the growing harms of plastic pollution and some of the frightening potential health impacts of plastic exposure, many of us don’t realize that the plastic we use in our everyday lives is made from fossil fuels—the very same fossil fuels that are causing climate change.

Plastics are the largest category of petrochemicals, which are extracted from deep in the earth to create the products we use in our everyday lives. The ubiquity of plastics and other petrochemicals comes at a steep cost to our health, especially for those living near production and processing facilities. People living near petrochemical production facilities have higher risk of numerous types of cancer, adverse birth outcomes, asthma and respiratory illness, and kidney disease. Children are especially vulnerable to harms from petrochemical pollutants.

READ MORE HERE

Testimony: Cutting Methane Pollution: Safeguarding Health, Creating Jobs, and Protecting Our Climate

This is the oral testimony of Patrice Tomcik, Senior National Field Manager for Moms Clean Air Force, on June 24, 2022, to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on the Climate Crisis about cutting methane pollution.

"Chair Castor, Ranking Member Graves, and members of the Select Committee, thank you for inviting me here today to speak about protecting our health and our climate by cutting methane pollution.

"I am Patrice Tomcik, a Senior National Field Manager for Moms Clean Air Force, a national community of more than 1 million parents and caregivers united to protect our children’s health from air pollution and climate change. We envision a safe and equitable future where all children breathe clean air and live in a stable climate.

"I am the mother of two boys living in Southwest Pennsylvania on top of the Marcellus Shale, where many oil and gas operations are located within communities like mine.

In the US, the oil and gas sector is the largest industrial source of methane pollution contributing to climate change. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and the main component of natural gas..."

READ MORE HERE