October 11, 2016

The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama,
We are writing to ask you to take action addressing fracking in your last 100 days in office. Over
the course of your Administration, oil and gas drilling and fracking have dramatically increased
across the nation. As a result, over 17 million Americans now live within one mile of a well pad.
While we are grateful for your leadership in acknowledging climate change, the expansion of
drilling and fracking for oil and gas during your presidency and its disastrous impact on the
climate threaten to undermine the legacy of this significant work. At the same time, drilling and
fracking put the health of hardworking Americans at risk as well. This extreme form of fossil fuel
extraction that you have supported is contaminating people's drinking water, polluting the air,
and making more and more families sick.
To expose how dire the situation is with fracking, we made a documentary about the expansion
of fracking across the country called Dear President Obama: The Clean Energy Revolution is
Now. We ask that you and your top environmental and energy advisors watch our film. We
spent three years interviewing people across this country, giving voice to some of the everyday
Americans who have become victims of drilling and fracking, and drawing on experts to explain
the widespread problems and harms.
While our film interviews people harmed by fracking, it is not a substitute for meeting with
Americans who have been impacted firsthand. During your time in office, you have met with
representatives from the oil and gas industry and environmental organizations and now we are
asking you to meet with Americans who have suffered for many years from the impacts that
fracking has had on their lives and their health. With the support of the group Friends of the
Harmed, over one hundred impacted Americans wrote to you recently asking you to meet with
them before your speech at the Democratic National Convention. Now, we are asking you once
again to meet with impacted Americans along with the both of us.
In addition to watching our film and meeting with impacted residents, one thing that you can do
to begin to right this wrong on your way out of office is to instruct your Environmental
Protection Agency to resume investigations into aquifers and well water contaminated by drilling
and fracking in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Texas that were inexplicably stopped in your first
term, and aggressively pursue additional investigations across the country where drilling and
fracking have contaminated people's water. The EPA Administrator has powers under Section
1431 of the Safe Drinking Water Act to take emergency action to protect public drinking water
supplies when upon receipt of information that a contaminant is present or is likely to enter a
public water system or an underground source of drinking waterwhich may present an
imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of persons and that appropriate State and
local authorities have not acted to protect the health of such persons. If these two conditions are

met, the EPA administrator may take such actions as he may deem necessary in order to protect
the health of such persons. We are urging you within your last 100 days in office to use this
power to investigate water contamination from fracking in communities across the United States
and to take action to protect the publics health and safety.
Finally, fracking is an issue that is not going away and in fact, the more we learn about the
process, the more we learn about the lasting harm it will inflict on people, drinking water, the
environment and the climate. During your time in office, science has overwhelmingly found that
fracking is not clean, not safe, and must not be a part of our energy future. With this evidence,
states like New York banned fracking and others have put a halt to it. But there is a dire need for
action and leadership at the federal level. You still have time to take action before you leave
office.
Sincerely,
Mark Ruffalo
Jon Bowermaster