Mercury..I hadn't even thought about that one in connection with this topic, but it certainly is a scary problem, and related, in addition to the huge amount of pollution produced not only by coal burning industries, but cars etc as well.
Not many people really understand why it's primarily in fish that mercury shows up, and since fish is one of the best foods you can eat, it's a really scary problem.
I've been a fisherman since before I can remember, so I was really upset when I started seeing mercury notices on many lakes a rivers, and I Had to look it up years ago when my father insisted it was no big deal and mercury got there from people throwing tin cans in the lake.
HUH???
OK so I did a bit of research...all coal burning industries, not just power plants, produce mercury as a by product, usually floating into the atmosphere from their smokestacks. (power plants and paper mills were the two primary examples quoted in the articles I read.) After being carried any distance, in some cases across oceans, it gets dropped into the water by rain. Plankton transform it into the mercury that ends up in fish, from a variety known as organic mercury. (I'm relying on memory here, but I believe that's correct and I can't remember the type it's transformed into either) then it gets consumed by larger and larger organisms as it moves up the food chain. The highest levels of concentration are found at the top of the food chain, which is what humans eat...fish, mainly.
And that's where it becomes a problem for us. Mercury is related to several different medical issues, but mainly brain damage. That's why I was appalled to find that mercury was also used in a number of vaccines, how stupid is that???
Autism, Alzheimers, ADD, ADHD...what else might be related? and nothing is being done about it, most "experts" won't even admit it's a problem. Nobody in the food industry will admit it for sure, they like making money...
Also, I looked up my geology book, earthquakes have been caused by man in a couple of different ways. The one I mentioned was in Colorado. The army was pumping toxic waste from nerve gas and insecticides into the ground in a 2 mile deep well, under high pressure. It was originally in holding ponds, but was leaking out and killing crops and animals etc so they put it underground. It took only six weeks to cause the first mild earthquake. What it did was to force water into existing cracks, widening them, introducing lubrication and allowing rocks to move around, resulting in earthquakes. The earthquakes finally stopped a couple of years after the Army stopped pumping water into the ground in 1966. They tried to keep it quiet, but the story gradually got out anyway.
Also, the filling of Lake Mead caused minor earthquakes for 10 years in a previously earthquake free area, as did the creation of the Kariba Dam in Africa in 1963-66. Those were stronger. Same for Konya Dam in India, 1967, which also cracked the dam itself. That one killed over 150 people.
Nuclear testing has also resulted in earthquakes in Nevada. (Howard Hughes pestered Nixon constantly to stop nuclear testing in Nevada, it shook the hotel he was living in)
So this type of oil drilling seems to me to be a very bad idea, and I live too close to the Texas drilling area for comfort. I'll soon be moving even closer...east Texas a couple of hours from Sans. So I'm not happy about this at all, there's already a fault line running through Texas, which has been mostly dormant for a long time. It's a minor one, and dormant for apparently around 750,000 years. But it runs right through the area I'll be...and between Houston and Austin too. Then it runs north, and curves east to where I live now...then across Mississippi and back south to the coast.
Pretty scary stuff, when you realize this is not imagination, it's proven fact. This type of drilling is doing the exact same thing that caused earthquakes in Colorado in the 60's, and actually worse, since in that case they didn't break up the underlying rock, just lubricated it. This time the rock is being broken up. Nothing good can come of this...
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