This past week, the natural gas industry -- the people who've brought fracking to a community near you -- held a major convention in Philadelphia, not far from the Marcellus Shale region where some of the most frenetic drilling is taking place. Inside a gleaming convention center, the multi-millionaire CEOs of Big Gas and their political hand-puppets like the Republican governor of Pennsylvania, sought to reassure the world that fracking is a safe, clean way of producing not just cheap, clean energy for America but also good, plentiful jobs. But outside the hall, on the streets of Philadelphia, a different kind of confab was taking place. There were hundreds of folks from all over Pennsylvania and from upstate New York -- many came from as far as a couple hundred miles away, on their own hard-earned dime. These self-styled "fracktivists" were there not only to protest the Shale Gas Impact conference, but also to tell their own stories, of what it's really like to live near a fracking rig. For example:
Tammy Manning of Susquehanna County said the gases around her well recently tested at 82 percent methane. She said she was told to leave the water running all ...