“You can do anything that you want to do…just please, don’t frack my mother!” This lyrical ballad written by Sean Lennon and featuring notable celebrities ranging from Joseph Gordon-Levitt to Yoko Ono to Adrian Grenier, has generated a rather hostile reaction from many YouTubers. Besides the resentment of so-called “hipsters” featured in the music video, many haters also denounce the video’s core message advocating against the controversial natural gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or more simply, “fracking”. While I can possibly understand antipathy towards big-frame wearing urbanites, the overwhelming and outright dismissal of any and all concerns with fracking is tremendously frightening and sadly, entirely unsurprising.

Why isn’t there more public anxiety over fracking? Well, the answer is really quite simple. The Bush administration took active steps to ensure public ignorance.

In 2005, former Vice President Dick Cheney (who was the previous CEO of Halliburton, the notorious multi-billion dollar company with big stakes in the new fracking industry) endorsed and effectively enacted a series of loophole amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act. These loopholes exempt the fracking industry from federal oversight and monitoring. Most explicitly, the loophole to the Safe Drinking Water Act exempts all natural gas companies from the mandatory public disclosure of chemicals used within fracking fluids. In short, the Bush/Cheney administration did everything possible to prevent the public from seeking federal protection against the fracking process.

But, why did Bush and Cheney put so much effort into preventing federal oversight and banning public access to information about fracking? What do they have to hide?

It turns out, pumping a mixture of chemicals, sand and water deep underground at high pressures and volumes in order to release natural gas trapped within hard rock shale is great for the profits of oil and gas companies, but not so great for the environment or human health.

Even with the inadequate amount of resources made available to scientists (thanks to the disclosure loophole of 2005), the results of non-governmental, independent studies have been both conclusive and alarming.

The ultimate consensus among scientists is that fracking fluids pumped underground are leeching back out of drill sites and flowing into nearby drinking water supplies. This “flowback” fluid not only contains synthetic, undisclosed chemicals (an estimated one fourth are proven carcinogens and half are known endocrine disruptors), but also includes naturally occurring carcinogens and toxins (such as arsenic, radioactive materials, mercury, and other heavy metals) brought up from deep below the ground’s surface during the drilling process. With methane also mixing into “flowback” fluids, drinking water supplies near fracking sites are both deadly and flammable.

This scientific evidence is extremely disconcerting. Millions and millions of Americans are put at risk of poison from water contamination under current policies, or lack thereof. And to make matters even worse, the fracking process requires about 2-10 million gallons of water per pump. This means, fracking companies are not only contaminating drinking water supplies, but are depleting them too!

Notable scientists and affected communities have teamed up to petition for government oversight and serious federal studies of fracking. Despite these desperate calls for action, more and more gas drilling sites are being established (many within our very own state of California) without any regulation at all. Quite simply, the health and wellbeing of Americans are consciously being compromised for the short-lived and singular profit of oil and gas companies.

With the fracking industry already looking to export their patented formula abroad, international communities are also at great risk. We now face a potentially global, environmental and public health catastrophe. This is an issue that can no longer be ignored.

The national government’s priorities should be maintaining public health and promoting safe and sustainable energy alternatives, not securing a few extra billion-dollar checks for the already overflowing coffers of oil and gas executives. Federal regulation, investigation and monitoring of the fracking process should be enacted immediately, in order to understand and address the full health impacts of this gas drilling technique. Perhaps if YouTubers understood the serious consequences of fracking, they wouldn’t be so quick to denounce Sean Lennon’s “hipster” music video. Maybe instead, they would be singing loud and proud, “please, don’t frack my mother!”

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