Trump has been pushing to expand fracking in California, including near Sequoia National Park. After a nine-month moratorium on new fracking permits, it seems like California Governor Newsom is following suit. While most of the state is on lockdown, California’s latest fracking permits would primarily harm people in the Central Valley’s Kern County -- home to many farmworkers who are helping feed the country during this pandemic.
Already, the nearby largely low-income communities and residents of color suffer from poor air quality. New fracking in the region would create more toxic air pollution, causing respiratory illnesses like asthma, which increase the risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19.
In fact, a new nationwide study has found that coronavirus patients in areas with high levels of air pollution are more likely to die from the infection than patients in parts of the country with lower pollution levels.
In addition to polluting our air, fracking contaminates groundwater, causes earthquakes (in already-earthquake-prone California, no less!), and emits methane -- a greenhouse gas 86 times more damaging to our climate than carbon dioxide.
That’s why Friends of the Earth has been fighting fracking projects across the country, including the massive fracked gas Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would devastate communities, Indigenous cultures, iconic landscapes like the Appalachian Trail, and our climate.
With your support, we can keep partnering with local groups resisting new fracking infrastructure, including coordinating marches and providing legal support. We can keep pushing elected officials at all levels of government to not only recognize fracking’s dangers, but to push transformative policies like fracking bans -- and eventually phase out fossil fuels altogether.
We’re running out of time, John. Protect public health and our planet by donating $10 or more to Friends of the Earth today.
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While Republicans in office -- and even some Democrats -- spread the myth that fracking is a “bridge” to cleaner energy, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
We need to keep all fossil fuels in the ground to stand a chance of surviving climate chaos. But the method of fracking itself is also extremely dangerous: It involves injecting tons of toxic chemicals into the ground at high pressure to crack the bedrock and release oil and gas.
Fracking has flooded streams with radioactive waste and sentenced generations of people near fracking wells to cancer, birth defects, and other ailments.
Thanks to support from members like you, Friends of the Earth recently released a hard-hitting analysis exposing how the fracking industry isn’t just dirty, it’s also failing -- and was financially unstable long before the coronavirus.
We’re shining a light on how fracking corporations in particular are trying to exploit this moment to take taxpayer dollars, which should instead go to people hardest-hit by the pandemic.
We need to end drilling and fracking nationwide, and instead promote solutions that put communities, not corporations, at the center. And we need you with us to do so.
Can you help fight the fracking industry and donate $10 or more to Friends of the Earth today?
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Thank you,
Nicole Ghio,
Senior fossil fuels program manager,
Friends of the Earth
