Monthly Archives: March 2015

NBASBA urges new fracking commission to be transparent

Recommends consultation with Chief Medical Health Officer

The New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance (NBASGA) welcomes the government’s announcement of a commission to evaluate the impacts of hydraulic fracturing. A year may be sufficient time to allow the review of all the current science and medical research. However, it must be noted that such research has only begun in earnest over the last couple of years. It is accelerating rapidly, it is increasingly identifying new health threats, and it is raising new issues that will require years of further study before they can be resolved.

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What Really Happened in Rexton?

As with all stories, there is always an underside. The following three-part series by journalist and communications strategist/consultant, Dallas MacQuarrie, presents a very different viewpoint than you may have read in the newspapers about the events of October 17, 2013 when police stormed the protest camp set up outside the SWN compound in Rexton, and catapulted New Brunswick into the international spotlight.

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Shale Gas Lobbyists ignore implications for public health, ethics and will of the people

Tory MLA shamelessly urges breaking of campaign promise

MONCTON, NB (18 March 2015) – The supporters of the shale gas industry – the industry itself, the PC-Opposition energy and various editorialists – have lately been calling for the lifting of the moratorium. Their sole, well-worn and questionable economic argument for this demonstrates a lack of understanding of the two basic reasons for a moratorium in the first place.

The primary reason for a moratorium is concern for public health. Increasingly numerous peer-reviewed studies have now associated shale gas extraction with a host of serious health problems from cancer to congenital heart defects, which is cause enough for alarm. More importantly, each study points out how much more we need to know.

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