If you care even just a teeny bit about fracking, odds are you’ve seen the video. You know the one—the footage from Gasland, where a man sets the water coming out of his kitchen tap on fire. It’s enough to make you think twice before you turn on the faucet for a drink, but Steve Hindy, the founder of Brooklyn Brewery, has brought up another fine point (perhaps more devastating to some) about the potential consequences of fracking. Yep, Brooklyn Brewery, which relies on New York City tap water, says beer could be in danger too.
“We need good water to make beer,” Hindy said in a video, produced by Climate Desk, below. The idea that we could ruin our drinking water system through fracking, he added, was criminal. “You can’t brew out benzene,” Mackenzie Schoonmaker, attorney for water quality watchdog Riverkeeper, also said.
While New York has vowed to ban fracking from the areas that provide water to New York City, critics are unsatisfied with the draft regulations. Environmentalists say that toxic fracking chemicals, like benzene, methanol, and ethylene glycol (that stuff in anti-freeze), could still make their way into aquifers or buffer zones. It’s for this reason that the Brooklyn Brewery has promised to campaign until adequate regulations become law. Watch the video below.
[via Grist, Climate Desk]
Save Our Beer is a series of events sponsored by Environmental Advocates of New York and the New York Water Rangers. The Brooklyn Brewery event was a great success, and we’re coming to Troy and Kingston next! Please join us to Save Our Beer at Brown’s Brewing Co. on May 23: http://www.facebook.com/events/193763350744310/