Former state health employees say they were silenced on drilling

[midnight]

"In the more than 20 years he worked for the department, Deasy said, “community health wasn’t told to be silent on any other topic that I can think of.”


"It was not unusual, Stuck said, for department brass to send out written talking points on certain issues, such as the H1N1 or “swine flu” virus, meant to guide staff in answering questions from the public.

This was different.

“There was a list of buzzwords we had gotten,” Stuck said. “There were some obvious ones like fracking, gas, soil contamination. There were probably 15 to 20 words and short phrases that were on this list. If anybody from the public called in and that was part of the conversation, we were not allowed to talk to them.”

http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2014/06/19/former-state-health-employees-say-they-were-silenced-on-drilling/


While this was reported last year in Pennsylvania. This year it is happening in Wisconsin.

"Wisconsin Treasurer Matt Adamczyk has decided that staffers in the state's tiny public lands agency are no longer allowed to talk about global warming. They've been ordered to not respond to citizens' emails related to climate change, and to altogether avoid the subject while they're at work.

Why take a pretend-it-doesn't-exist position on the greatest environmental issue of our time? Turns out it all stems from Adamczyk's beef with executive director Tia Nelson, who has a passionate history with global warming."


"Along with Adamczyk, the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands includes Attorney General Brad Schimel and Secretary of State Douglas La Follette. Schimel sided with Adamczyk, but La Follette thinks the 2-1 vote to gag agency workers is basically nuts.

"Obviously him and I have a huge difference," Adamczyk says. "Maybe Douglas La Follette thinks that we should be concerned with [climate change], but I don't see why that would be. That's not what our job over here is to do."


http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2015/04/wisconsin_treasurer_matt_adamczyk_gags_state_workers_on_climate_change.php


Is this silencing going on in your state legislature?

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

1. They have fracking operations...

...all along the New Madrid and other fault line(s) around the nation. They are causing earthquakes, widespread chemical contamination of soils and ground water, destabilizing the mantle with underground explosions, and lubricating fault lines with the massive amounts of toxic chemical laden water they pump into the ground. Beyond insanity.

26 Earthquakes Later, Fracking’s Smoking Gun Is in Texas

....There’s a monster lurking under Texas, beneath the sand and oil and cowboy bones, and it’s getting a little restless after a 15 million year nap. Shaking things up in the city of Irving, just slightly west of Dallas, where no less than ten earthquakes yesterday and today bring the total tremors to 26 since October in that town alone. Over 100 quakes have been registered in the North Texas region since 2008, a staggering uptick from just a single one prior that year.

The Balcones Fault Zone divides the Lone Star State in half, loosely following the route of Interstate 35 and passing under Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, and San Antonio. And it’s not just a huge amount of human populations that sit on top of it. There are also thousands of fracking wells boring down in to the earth’s crust, pumping millions of gallons of water down with the direct intent of breaking apart what lay beneath.

Irving itself has more than 2,000 of these sites nearby, and some of the more than 216,000 state wide “injection wells” responsible for disposing of fracking’s wastewater byproduct are in close proximity. Located thousands of feet below the ground, these wells hold millions of gallons of chemically tainted h2o, and science has proven that the pressure and liquid combination can combine to “lubricate” fault lines. And that may well be what is happening in the Barnett Shale region around, yes, Dallas and Irving.

Barnett Shale is the largest land-based gas field in Texas, with an estimated 40 trillion cubic feet of natural gas just waiting to be hammered out of the ground and into your SUV’s tank. It’s a nearly bottomless potential bank account for corporations with the resources to drill and grind. But, as the people of Irving are now discovering, all of this poking and prodding is not without potential consequences....

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/07/26-earthquakes-later-fracking-s-smoking-gun-is-in-texas.html