Fracking's Latest Scandal? Earthquake Swarms. At exactly 10:53 p.m. on Saturday, November 5, 2011, Joe and Mary Reneau were in the bedroom of their whitewashed and brick-trimmed home, a two-story rambler Mary's dad custom-built 43 years ago.
Their property encompasses 440 acres of rolling grasslands in Prague, Oklahoma (population 2,400), located 50 miles east of Oklahoma City. When I arrive at their ranch almost a year later on a bright fall morning, Joe is wearing a short-sleeve shirt and jeans held up by navy blue suspenders, and is wedged into a metal chair on his front stoop sipping black coffee from a heavy mug.
His German shepherd, Shotzie, is curled at his feet. Joe greets me with a crushing handshake—he is 200 pounds, silver-haired and 6 feet tall, with thick forearms and meaty hands—and invites me inside. He served in Vietnam, did two tours totaling nine years with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then, in 1984, retired a lieutenant colonel from the US Army to sell real estate and raise cattle. Scientists plan to reduce greenhouse gases by breeding fartless cows. Natural gas wells leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere as a consequence of the production process.
So do cows. But where well leaks are called “fugitive methane emissions,” cow leaks are simply called farts and burps. Regular Grist readers will remember that we’re really quite interested in this unusual source of methane. It’s silly, but it’s also a big problem. Scientists now think, though, that they’ve hit on a solution: They might simply be able to breed to farts and burps out of cows. The Verge reports: Cows, goats, deer, and sheep naturally produce an abundance of methane — one of the more powerful greenhouse gases — but researchers are hoping that they can all but bring an end to that with selective breeding. Try that with a natural gas well. Illinois illegally seizes bees resistant to Roundup; kills remaining queens.
The "rope test" for foulbrood The Illinois Ag Dept. illegally seized privately owned bees from renowned naturalist, Terrence Ingram, without providing him with a search warrant and before the court hearing on the matter, reports Prairie Advocate News.
Behind the obvious violations of his Constitutional rights is Monsanto. Ingram was researching Roundup’s effects on bees, which he’s raised for 58 years. “They ruined 15 years of my research,” he told Prairie Advocate, by stealing most of his stock. A certified letter from the Ag Dept.’s Apiary Inspection Supervisor, Steven D. “During a routine inspection of your honeybee colonies by … Inspectors Susan Kivikko and Eleanor Balson on October 23, 2011, the bacterial disease ‘American Foulbrood’ was detected in a number of colonies located behind your house…. Ingram can prove his bees did not have foulbrood, and planned to do so at a hearing set in April, but the state seized his bees at the end of March.
(Visited 51,418 times, 6 visits today) The North Pole Is Now a Lake.