AlterNet.org: Fracking

Why Citizens in Colorado Can’t Keep the Oil Industry Out of Their Backyards

Phillip Doe, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:45:00 -0700

Fracking in some neighborhoods means residents could expect heavy industrial activity out their back door for up to three or four months a year, 24/7, over half a decade.

Do you want to know how cold it can get in Antarctica in midwinter? Go to a city council meeting in Greeley, Colorado, any time regulation of the oil and gas industry is on the agenda. You’ll get an idea. Last week, the room temperature felt near absolute zero from the iciness of the council’s reaction to citizen petitions to rein in industry designs on their neighborhood, a place called Fox Run.

What was up for debate was a proposal to approve permits for 16 horizontally fracked oil wells on a small parcel of undeveloped land, itself about 16 acres within the city. The 16 wells would be only 350 feet from the back door of some residences. These wells, according to the oil company, would be fracked four at a time, meaning the citizens of these neighborhoods could expect heavy industrial activity out their back door for up to three or four months a year, 24/7, over half a decade, perhaps. We’re talking literally tens of thousands of truck trips to deliver water, chemicals, steel pipe and a variety of heavy industrial machinery via a single point of ingress.

Envision, if you will, the Saturday afternoon barbeque, with the excited voices of children at play competing with the drone and earth rattle of drilling next door as unknown quantities of who-knows-what are spewed onto the festivities. This scene could be played out over and over again as money is made for the few and public health and social wellbeing are sacrificed by the many. That was the argument most often made by the homeowners.

Add to this that some local businesses would actually be only 200 feet from the wells. It happens that the man who owns the 16 acres for the drilling site also owns the street-front buildings in which these businesses are housed. They had all voluntarily agreed to the reduced setback, and no one suspected collusion in these robust economic times. As the owner said--employing small town, Daddy Warbucks logic--these people couldn’t tell him what to do with his land. That would be a takings, and he would have to be compensated, royally. In his mind, his individual rights were superior to the public’s.

His understanding is almost certainly wrong, for the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed over and over again that the protection of the public’s health and well-being is superior to property rights, but no use to talk to this scion of private-property-rights-uber-alles. The only thing keeping the takings assertion alive for the oil boys and rent-seeking land owners is that government refuses to look at the health implications of fracking systematically, even though a host of scientific and public policy leaders at all levels of government and academia are asking for them. The EPA is studying the impacts on water. A draft of this study is to be released in 2014, but the agency has scrubbed any analysis of air impacts as a result of oil industry pressure.

In the end, despite roughly 45 people speaking in opposition to the permit, and only about 7 in favor--four of them owners of the permits and the property involved--in an audience of about 150 people, the city council voted 7-0 in favor of the oil company and private enrichment over repeated calls for caution and deferral until the health impacts of fracking are better understood.

Of the opposition, many are homeowners in Fox Run, some are tearfully concerned about their children, all are concerned about the air impacts. A doctor, head of the pulmonary unit at the Greeley Hospital, tried to appeal to the council’s better angels. Another woman explained that Fox Run is home to two city-chartered apartments for the disabled, 40 units in all. These units were built with $4 million in public money from HUD. Ranging in age from 20 to 70, many of these citizens are wheel chair bound, and the majority use oxygen, in the newer unit all but one. The impacts on them might prove frightful she reasoned.

One person said she had heard the vote was rigged, it had already been decided, but she had come to the meeting anyway just to find out. Her intelligence would prove out.

Leading the charge for adoption was Mayor Tom Norton. Of stentorian voice, and coifed in surprisingly vivid auburn hair, he was in control, for, after all, he was used to a much larger stage. He had been president of the Colorado Senate during the heyday of former Governor Bill Owens. Owens fancied himself a Texas oilman and had the pickup and plates to prove it, though perhaps not the chin, but that too has been altered to fit his rough and ready oil patch persona.

Norton, himself an engineer, had risen to become Owen’s Director of the Department of Transportation, before retiring to Greeley, his longtime residence, and running for mayor. A family affair, Governor Owens appointed Tom’s wife, Kay, President of Northern Colorado University. It too is in Greeley. She still heads this university of over 12,000 students. Previously, she was a staff lawyer for Monfort Meat Packing.

This “private sector” experience she recently wrote caused her to take the lead in leasing 246 acres of mineral rights under the university to Mineral Resources, Inc., the same family oil company that was seeking approval for 16 oil wells that would run under Fox Run.

In glowing terms she described the Richardson family owners as our neighbors, much in the same fashion they had described themselves at the hearing. She went on to fancifully describe their oil business as “boutique”. She reasoned, too, that since city records showed the Richardsons already had leases to the mineral rights under most of the city, both public and private, a little more land couldn’t hurt and might foster orderly development.

She also wrote that the university considered student public health issues and, in her opinion, there was nothing to worry about. In fact, she effused, the state’s regulations would only get stronger and more protective of the students.

The idea of stricter regulation to protect public health was not what husband Tom argued last winter when the state was considering greater setbacks. The proposal, eventually adopted, increased the setbacks from 350 feet to 500 feet. But as Matt Lepore, the head of the state’s oil regulatory agency, the COGCC, said to the press, these regulations were not to protect public health, but to reduce noise and dust near homes, or more concisely, the anger factor in neighborhoods invaded by the industry. Lepore added that the state hadn’t really gotten its head around the health issues. This fiscally wasteful and cynically driven form of decision-making was recognized as dangerously flawed by COGCC Commissioner Holton who said in these debates:

“I just felt like we should wait until we get some good data, in order to make a decision. If it’s 100 feet, fine, if it’s 1000 feet, whatever. Basically it looked to me like we were just changing the rules because we could, and I don’t think that is a good idea.”

Norton speaking for the city council, felt none of these compunctions, he was worried about reduced revenues to the city if some areas were no longer available to the industry because of a 500-foot setback rule. After all he said, the city already has over 400 operative wells and with the potential for many more, new setbacks might “affect the $3.2 million in annual city revenue from oil and gas, and the $900 million of royalties projected over 25 years to Greeley…”.

Clearly, the Nortons see Greeley as a classic company town where public services are paid out of monopoly oil and gas revenues. Moreover, Mayor Tom and the council need not have worried because the COGCC and the Department of Public Health approved a setback of only 200 feet for businesses in the case at hand. The Richardsons, father and son, did admit under friendly questioning that the council needed to act quickly because the new setback rules, which become effective on August 1, would make their well oiled plans more difficult, perhaps requiring even more official variances.

Unknown to most in the audience was that Mayor Tom, only weeks earlier, dressed all in black, with resplendent auburn mane, had come to Denver to testify against HR 1275, the only significant piece of fracking legislation before the 2013 state legislature. It would have funded a one-year effort to survey reported health impacts from people living near fracking. Mayor Tom said it was unnecessary, that everyone was happy with fracking in Greeley, for revenues from fracking helped pay for public services. His testimony was seconded by the boldly feckless Dr. Chris Urbina, Governor Hickenlooper’s choice to head of the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment. Urbina spoke against the bill because of the dangers of collecting medical data too hurriedly, as opposed to the dangers of collecting none at all, apparently. These two presumed representatives of the public provided the cover needed to allow state representative from Greeley, Dave Young (D), to vote against the measure, thus ensuring its defeat. Company town, indeed!

Greeley has suffered greatly from oil and gas development. Its attempt to deny drilling within the city boundaries back in the 1980s was met with one of those great, dunderheaded decisions that only courts can make. The Colorado Supreme Court, uninformed about geography, reasoned that oil and gas development was so important to the state that any attempt to deny the industry access to the city proper would pose a threat to maximum development. Colorado is 104,000 square miles in size. Greeley is 47. Couldn’t they do the math?

Consider, too, that most of Colorado is underlain by shale deposits, the ancient sea floor that is giving up its treasure to the industry through the “magic” of horizontal fracking. All the incorporated cities and towns in the state comprise about 1900 square miles, less than 2 percent of the state. Yet, it is this wrongheaded 1980s court decision that is allowing the oil and gas industry to invade cities at will across the state.

The testimony of the city planner, parrying the comments of the young attorney, Matt Sura, who had been hired to represent the homeowners, was straight out of Charles Dickens. Sura was masterful in pointing out the numerous holes and unanswered questions in the city’s evaluation of the 16 drilling permits. Chief among them was the unanswered question of the impacts of these wells on public health, particularly for those people living in close proximity to the wells. The city manager, with obsequiousness one might expect of a Uriah Heep before his betters, told the council that he thought the city had done a stellar job of answering all questions except the questions concerning public health. But said he, that shouldn’t concern the council since the public’s health was a matter of state and federal concern. It was not their responsibility.

Surely there can be no truth in the old notion that we deserve the government we get.

How Corporations Are Subverting Attempts to Rein in Their Power

Thomas Mc Donagh, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:07:00 -0700

Citizens have won important policy victories only to be undermined by the growing web of international investment rules and arbitration courts.

In 2009, when the government of El Salvador refused to issue an environmental permit to a Canadian mining corporation, community activists in Las Cabañas rejoiced. For years they had been fighting a pitched battle against the efforts of the company, Pacific Rim, to mine for gold in their region - plans that included the dumping of toxic arsenic in their rivers. It was not a campaign without risk. Four Salvadoran anti-mining activists have been assassinated in the course of their courageous efforts. That victory, however, may well prove to carry a high cost for the people of El Salvador. In a legal assault filed in a World Bank trade court, Pacific Rim is now demanding $315 million in compensation payments from the Salvadoran government, an amount equal to one third of the country’s annual education budget.

That is just one example among many where citizens have fought for and won an important policy victory only to find that victory undermined by corporations using the growing web of international investment rules and arbitration courts. There are many others. Public health campaigners in Uruguay won a huge victory in 2010 when the national government passed new health laws to discourage tobacco consumption. Even though those new laws (including aggressive new warnings on cigarette packages) directly mirrored the guidelines of the World Health Organization, the U.S. corporate tobacco giant Philip Morris retaliated with a $2 billion legal action against the government.

Nowhere is this muscle-flexing by multinational corporations a greater threat than on issues related to sustainable development. The result is a little known but enormous legal obstacle planted directly in the policy path toward a sustainable future. The Democracy Center has just documented that threat in an important new report released this week: Unfair, Unsustainable and Under the Radar: How Corporations Use Global Investment Rules to Undermine a Sustainable Future.

For many this system of corporate-driven investment rules and “dispute resolution” burst into public view a decade ago when Bechtel, the San Francisco-based engineering conglomerate, sued the people of Bolivia for $50 million following the now-famous Cochabamba Water Revolt, after investing just $1 million in the country. A global citizen campaign aimed at the corporation ultimately forced Bechtel to drop that case for a token payment of 30 cents. Yet in the years since, the pile of corporate cases has only grown ever higher.

Another typical current case features dangerous exposure to lead in Peru. When the national government there revoked the operating license for a smelter plant in La Oroyo (operated by Doe Run Peru) in July 2010, the health of the local population and the surrounding environment got some badly needed respite. The village, located high in the Peruvian Andes, has been declared one of the most polluted sites on earth, and in 2007 99% of the children under seven in the neighborhood closest to the town’s smelter had dangerously high levels of lead in their blood. The government deemed that Doe Run Peru’s failure to meet environmental cleanup commitments at the site constituted a breach of the country’s environmental legal standards. However Doe Run’s parent company, the Renco group, has other ideas. The corporation, owned by US billionaire Ira Rennert, has hit back with an $800 million damages claim, enough money to pay the yearly salaries of almost 15,000 Peruvian school teachers (or nearly 6,000 Peruvian health workers).

The world today is covered by an expanding web of over three thousand bilateral and multilateral trade and investment agreements. These agreements grant rights to corporations and allow them to sue governments for policy initiatives that they claim interfere with their profits. The resulting legal cases, despite their far-reaching local consequences, are settled far away and behind closed doors by a small group of unaccountable private lawyers in international dispute arbitration tribunals. Flying in the face of democratic principles and judicial independence, these tribunals operate with little or no public scrutiny and where the communities directly affected are denied a voice.

The number of these investment cases has exploded in recent years, with 2012 breaking all records. By far the most popular tribunal system used by global corporations is the World Banks’ infamous International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICISID). Corporations can use this and other tribunal systems to demand hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from governments – not just for what they have actually invested in a country, but also vast amounts more for the profits they expected to earn into the future. The lawyers at these tribunals move seamlessly from the role of ‘independent’ arbiter to that of corporate attorney. Some have strong ties to multinational corporations and serious questions have been raised about their independence in an unaccountable system in which they have such a huge vested interest. Although previously used as a court of last resort by aggrieved investors, these tribunals have become the weapon of choice for corporations in their attempts to clear the path for profiting at the expense of public health and the environment.

The proliferation of these investor-state cases has three major impacts. First, in cases where the corporations win (as they often do) the result is a massive transfer of scarce public resources to wealthy private corporations. Second, even if governments are successful in mounting a legal defense, doing that comes at a cost of potentially millions of dollars in legal fees paid to one of the handful of high-priced law firms that specialise in such cases. Third, the net impact is a dangerous chilling effect on the willingness of policy makers to implement policies in the public interest for fear of costly international arbitration cases.

The international investment rules/tribunals system has been used to attack anti-nuclear efforts in Germany, public control of water in Argentina and Bolivia, anti-mining efforts across a host of nations, and today has new targets in its sights.

One new likely battleground is citizen and community efforts against oil and gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’. The proposed investment chapter of the Canada-EU free trade agreement, if approved, may give corporations the legal fire-power to challenge government regulation of this highly controversial practice. Efforts to curb the dumping of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere are also at risk. The South Korean government has shelved a plan to introduce a low-carbon incentive system for the auto industry because of fears that the law would breach a provision in the US-South Korea free trade agreement. If the government were to move ahead with the measure it would risk landing itself before theseinternational trade and investment courts.

Today, just as communities in El Salvador and Peru have taken up the battle to protect their natural resources, a whole global movement is emerging to rethink the relationship between economic development and social and environmental well-being, and is pushing governments to take policy action in that urgent direction. This important shift, however, is in direct conflict with the interests of transnational corporations hard-wired to maximize short-term profit and pass on the environmental and social costs of their operations to others. The Democracy Center’s report puts a spotlight on how global corporations are using the investment rules system to undermine the policies essential to sustainable development and the democratic process essential to such policies.

Long an obscure interest of trade and investment lawyers, the system of international investment rules and tribunals has remained off the radar for most of the groups and communities that it affects. This is slowly beginning to change. As the number of controversial cases rises, the injustice of the current system is becoming increasingly clear.

Much as the deregulation of financial markets encouraged by the banking sector helped lead to economic collapse, the system of international investment rules works pushed by multinational corporations is leading us toward environmental collapse. As we hurtle towards a number of ominous tipping points in terms of many of the earth’s natural systems, there has never been a more urgent time for activists, academics, development workers and others to understand the legal and political barriers that block us from changing course. This de facto privatized justice system for big business is a massive such barrier that urgently needs to be brought down.

Four Examples from the Last Week Prove Obama Is Full of Hot Air on Climate Protection

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:05:00 -0700

You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.

A lot has happened in the last week. The Earth hit the 400 parts per million CO2 threshold for the first time in human history. Scientists tell us this is bad news if we want to prevent runaway climate change. "If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades," scientist Michael Mann told Democracy Now! "We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate."

If you didn't know this already, we should be listening to Mann and to other scientists. I thought this was settled a long time ago, but someone keeps giving print space to climate deniers, so a new survey of 12,000 peer-reviewed studies on the climate was just completed and the not-so-shocking conclusion was this, as Mother Nature Network reports:

Published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the analysis shows an overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are a key contributor to climate change, while a "vanishingly small proportion" defy this consensus. Most of the climate papers didn't specifically address humanity's involvement -- likely because it's considered a given in scientific circles, the survey's authors point out -- but of the 4,014 that did, 3,896 shared the mainstream outlook that people are largely to blame.

In light of this news, it makes it even more infuriating to see that the Obama administration has spent the week prostrating to the fossil fuel lobby. Here are four disturbing things the administration's been up to.

1. Moniz Hearts Fracking

Obama tapped nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Energy Department and the Senate gave a big thumbs-up to Moniz on Thursday. Many environmental groups had concerns that Moniz was too pro-fracking, and those concerns are clearly warranted. Moniz's first order of business Friday was to clear the way for 20 years of liquified natural gas exports via Freeport LNG Terminal on Quintana Island, Texas.

Of course, we've already been sold the story that we're suposed to frack the crap out of the country in the name of energy security, but we knew all along it was for industry profit, right? Brad Jacobson recently detailed for AlterNet about how Congress members are clamoring for export plans to be fast-tracked -- although what Americans will get out of the deal will be higher gas prices and less energy security.

2. Thanks for Nothing, Sally

While the nomination of Moniz disappointed many environmentalists, some were cheered by REI exec Sally Jewell taking over the Interior Department. Those same folks might not be cheering after Jewell announced the Bureau of Land Management's newest regulations (or lack thereof) for fracking on our public lands.

As Sierra Club's Michael Brune reported Friday:

The new rules are disappointing for many reasons: Drillers won't be required to disclose what chemicals they're using, there is no requirement for baseline water testing, and there are no setback requirements to govern how close to homes and schools drilling can happen. Once again, though, the policy documents an even bigger failure to grasp a fundamental principle: If we're serious about the climate crisis, then the last thing we should be doing is opening up still more federal land to drilling and fracking for fossil fuels.

3. No Time for Farmers

The group Bold Nebraska reported this week that Obama turned down an invitation to hear from Nebraska farmers and ranchers about their concerns that the Keystone XL pipeline could destroy their livelihoods. Of course, the President is a busy guy, right? And besides, the White House said he was not "taking any meetings on the pipeline."

Or is he? The group writes:

Bold Nebraska was therefore surprised the President is meeting with staff at Ellicott Dredges, a company that just testified in Congress in support of Keystone XL and makes equipment that creates the tailing ponds, which are massive bodies of polluted water and a byproduct of the tar sands mining process.

"I simply do not understand why President Obama can find the time to visit a company that helps hold 12 million liters of toxic tar sands water but cannot find the time to visit ranchers who put over $12 billion of Nebraska-grown food on Americans' dinner tables every year," said Meghan Hammond, a young farmer whose family land is at risk with the current route in Nebraska.

4. Who Needs the Arctic? (Hint: We Do)

Subhankar Banerjee, a photographer and longtime Arctic activist, was recently appalled by a new report from the Obama administration on the future of the Arctic. And the rest of us should be, too. Banerjee writes about the report:

“Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.” In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.” Of course the report mentions protecting the environment, but gives no specific details.

We know that Obama talks a good talk about climate protection, but his second term has proven thus far that he's completely out of touch with reality. You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.

It's Not Easy Being Green: Are Some of the Biggest Enviro Groups Giant Sell-Outs?

Jason Mark, The American Prospect — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:00 -0700

As climate change worsens, the internal strains in the environmentalist movement are starting to show.

About a year ago, on March 26, 2012, Sandra Steingraber, an environmental writer and activist against natural-gas fracking, wrote a public letter titled “Breaking Up with the Sierra Club.” Breakups are never easy, and the letter, published on the website of the nature magazine Orion, was brutal from the start: “I’m through with you,” Steingraber began.

The proximate cause of the split was the revelation that between 2007 and 2010 the nation’s oldest environmental organization had clandestinely accepted $26 million from individuals or subsidiaries associated with Chesapeake Energy, a major gas firm that has been at the forefront of the fracking boom. “The largest, most venerable environmental organization in the United States secretly aligned with the very company that seeks to occupy our land, turn it inside out, blow it apart, fill it with poison,” Steingraber wrote. “It was as if, on the eve of D-day, the anti-Fascist partisans had discovered that Churchill was actually in cahoots with the Axis forces.”

In 2010, the club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, stopped taking Chesapeake Energy’s cash. Brune also made the decision to come clean with the revelation and express regret for his predecessor’s lack of better judgment. “We never should have taken this money,” Brune wrote in response to the breakup letter.

But to Steingraber and many others, the betrayal had been done.

“I call them gang-green,” says Maura Stephens, an activist based in Ithaca, New York, who spearheads several anti-fracking groups, including Frack Busters and the Coalition to Protect New York. “There are a lot of so-called environmental groups that were started with noble ideals—for example the ideals of John Muir—but who no longer live up to their mission. … They do good work on some level, but on this [fracking] they are selling us out.”

The eco-infighting over natural gas is just one example of internecine strains that appear to be intensifying in the green movement. When it comes to prescribing ways to address the planet’s ecological challenges, environmentalists increasingly find themselves at odds with each other. In a way, greens’ predicament is a measure of their own prescience. For at least 40 years, they have been warning about the consequences of overpopulation, the risks of industrial pollution, and the loss of wilderness and wildlife habitat due to human encroachment. Few heeded the warnings in time to halt the first effects of large-scale global pollution and resource depletion, and now the consequences of ignoring the warnings have come to pass. Many global fisheries are on the brink of collapse; nearly half of the planet’s land is dedicated to feeding a global population that will soon reach nine billion; freshwater scarcities in some regions are becoming acute; and, most frighteningly, we appear intent on wrecking the global atmosphere, the ecosystem on which all other ecosystems depend.

Environmentalists have found themselves being taken seriously, and it has proved to be something of a curse. As they are asked to come up with solutions for the cascading eco crises, internal divisions are becoming more obvious. The biggest divide may be between those who would do anything to cut carbon emissions and slow climate change—going so far as to support natural gas and nuclear fuel, or even supporting geo-engineering and other controversial ideas—and conservationists who don’t want to trade one earth-damaging practice for another.

“I feel like the community has splintered,” says Chris Clarke, a writer in Joshua Tree, California, and a co-founder of the group Solar Done Right, which has battled the construction of utility-scale solar stations in the Mojave Desert that involve destroying vast stretches of wilderness. “Some people are unwilling to call themselves ‘environmentalists’ because ‘environmentalist’ has now come to mean climate-change mitigation at any cost.”

Some environmentalists say the divisions have been fueled by gadflies looking to appear contrarian for the sake of minor celebrity. “I think, bluntly, that part of this is [happening] because there’s some value to the post-environmentalists in hippie-punching,” says Alex Steffen, a self-described “bright green” futurist who is the author of a new book, Carbon Zero. “Just saying, ‘Oh, those guys are wrong’—since there are a lot of people who want to think that traditional environmentalists are wrong—is a great way to sell books and get speaking gigs.”

It’s true that some of the noise seems calculated for effect. But it would be dangerous to wave off the differences of opinion. A careful look at the environmental movement reveals a profound gap among people who share a worry about the state of Earth. There is a real split over what should be considered a smart survival plan for billions of people on a finite planet. That split, if it’s not navigated constructively, threatens to sap the environmental movement’s political muscle just when it is needed most to achieve its goal: keeping the planet healthy enough to maintain our civilization.

***

In a sense, today’s differences are just a new variation on a century-old dispute. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American environmentalists fell into two distinct camps. The first, led by Sierra Club founder John Muir, was part of the larger Romantic movement that viewed wild areas as pristine places that needed to be saved from the scourge of humanity’s hand. The second, led by the founding head of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, thought of nature more like a garden—something to be tended by man. Natural resources, in Pinchot’s view, should be mindfully stewarded to conserve them for future generations.

The split between those who esteem nature for its intrinsic value and those who want to protect it for its instrumental value persisted through the years. Some 21st-century environmentalists—most prominently the leaders of The Nature Conservancy—now talk almost exclusively about environmental protection in terms of preserving ecosystem services. We should invest in nature and protect natural infrastructure because humans benefit from them: Wetlands blunt hurricanes, forests suck up carbon dioxide, clean rivers bring us water. At the same time, some environmentalists have been re-energized by a nascent grassroots movement to recognize legal rights for natural systems, an effort inspired by the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia that grant nature formal rights.

Opposing opinions on what constitutes appropriate use of modern technology also divides some putative eco allies. An instinctual techno-skepticism has formed an undercurrent in environmental thought—at least since Silent Spring and the backlashes to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and near disaster at Three Mile Island. As worries intensify about unchecked greenhouse-gas emissions, however, some greens are rethinking their posture toward once-verboten technologies. James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who twice has been arrested at the White House while opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, has said, “Next-generation, safe nuclear power is an option which we need to develop.” Nuclear power is anathema to many other environmentalists, but the British writer George Monbiot reversed his long-standing opposition two years ago and wrote in The Guardian, “Abandoning nuclear power at a time of escalating greenhouse gas emissions is far more dangerous than maintaining it.”

The use of genetically modified organisms also highlights this divide. Even as most rank-and-file environmentalists remain suspicious of them—with their vibe of Promethean overreach and their control by monopolist corporations like Monsanto—some self-identified greens say GMO technologies are the only way to feed a growing population. In a speech earlier this year, Mark Lynas, another British environmentalist, told the Oxford Farming Conference, “The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food.”

Another rift involves the geographic scope of individual environmentalists’ concerns. Ever since Henry David Thoreau set up a shack on Walden Pond, environmentalism has been animated by a love of place. A righteous parochialism was the spark that inspired scores of successful environmental campaigns: a desire to protect this river, this forest grove, this mountaintop. On the other hand, environmentalism has also been animated by a planetary consciousness from the moment the Apollo mission beamed back images of a tiny blue marble floating in space. For a generation these two ideals were in chorus, exemplified best by the greenie bumper sticker: “Think Global, Act Local.” But in the era of global climate change, a love for the local and a concern for the global might be in conflict.

This is best illustrated by the controversies over putting giant solar installations in the Mojave Desert and building a wind farm off of Martha’s Vineyard. One person’s blueprint for clean energy infrastructure is another person’s unthinkable desecration of a beloved place. While some environmentalists argue that we have to pave parts of the desert with solar panels in order to save other parts of the desert from a four-degree Celsius temperature rise, others see that as heresy.

“I think the important split is actually between people are who thinking in planetary terms and people who are not,” Steffen, the futurist, told me. “The key to intelligent planetary thinking is to recognize that goal number one is to be promoting the stability of planetary systems, and then figuring out goal number two: how to get the greatest set of interesting possibilities for humanity into that constraint. And I worry that this debate between ‘old environmentalists’ and ‘post-environmentalists’ or whatever totally misses the larger point. The only kind of conservation worth having is one that starts at those larger systems, talks about what is necessary to maintain their stability, and starts scaling down from there into the particularities of political contexts, and specific places, and technological systems.”

Achieving those goals could get increasingly difficult, however, if the movement is publicly split, as has happened with the issue of hydrofracking for natural gas.

***

The Sierra Club, under the leadership of its previous executive director, Carl Pope, wasn’t the only prominent environmentalist organization heralding natural gas as a bridge fuel that could take our energy system from carbon-intense coal to renewables like wind and solar. (When burned, gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal.) Among the most vocal proponents of natural gas today are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, founders of the Oakland-based liberal think tank the Breakthrough Institute. Nordhaus and Shellenberger ticked off greens in the early aughts with the essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” which urged green groups to rethink the core assumptions of their political strategy. The pugnacious pair is often bashed for their rhetoric, but the two are genuine in their hawkishness on the climate and their commitment to global equity.

“As we look ahead to the human-development challenge, we’re going to need other kinds of low-carbon and zero-carbon energy,” Shellenberger says. “If we have everything riding on solar and wind, then we have all of our eggs in one basket.”

Nordhaus adds: “Look, we have two billion people who don’t have access to anything other than wood and dung [for energy]. Assume a world of nine billion people. Now assume that we have perfect economic redistribution from rich to poor, and everybody makes $15,000 a year. And then just do the math on global energy use—it still triples. You can’t meet that all with renewables.”

But since the fracking boom began in earnest, a larger, anti-fracking grassroots has emerged. Small towns in the East that were unaccustomed to the thrum of the fossil-fuel industry have been shocked to find themselves surrounded by trucks and heavy machinery and with compressors in their back lots whirring all night long. Some homeowners had their wells contaminated with flammable methane. Places like Ohio and Arkansas that weren’t used to seismic activity started to experience earthquakes when underground wastewater injections stimulated geologic faults. Today, the movement against gas fracking has become a cause célèbre (Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo have an “Artists Against Fracking” group) and is one of the most invigorating issues among grassroots environmentalists. At February’s Forward on Climate rally near the White House, easily a fifth of the placards in the crowd of 35,000 had to do with gas drilling.

“No sensible person would ever be a proponent of shale gas,” anti-fracking activist Maura Stephens says. “The number of people whose water is contaminated, I can’t even count. And the number of people who have been given a gag order and been given shut-up money is incredible. The whole idea is to do the harm and then mitigate.”

“Of all the forms of fossil-fuel extraction, fracking is the only one that is wrapped up in a green myth,” says Sandra Steingraber, who wrote the letter against the Sierra Club. “The demand for energy is not some inexorable thing like gravity. We control that. And it’s plain to me that we could reduce our energy use by half and entirely run our economy on renewables.”

Nordhaus and Shellenberger have a nearly opposite worry: that the intensity from partisans like Steingraber and Stephens has forced some big green groups to retreat from gas. The World Resources Institute, a D.C.-based environmental research organization, is an example of that shift. As recently as early 2012, the organization was expressing qualified enthusiasm for gas as a “potential game changer” that “should be part of America’s low-carbon energy mix.” But when asked recently to comment on the gas controversy, Jennifer Morgan, director of the institute’s climate and energy program, chose her words carefully. “It’s an extremely fraught and tough discussion,” Morgan told me. “I think we recognize both the risks—and the risks are significant—and the potential opportunity.”

And, of course, the Sierra Club has retreated from natural gas under its new executive director. Last week at a conference in Santa Barbara organized by The Wall Street Journal, Michael Brune warned that fracking’s greenhouse-gas emissions might be worse than coal due to leaks of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas. The club also has launched a new section on its website: “Beyond Gas.”

***

Whether the question is shale-gas development, nuclear power, utility-scale solar and wind, or GMO crops, the core of the debate among environmentalists comes down to what’s realistic. That, of course, is the same dilemma that confronts any political movement, whether on the right or on the left. But environmentalists’ conundrum is especially complicated because it involves a system beyond our control: Earth.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger say their pragmatism is grounded in what is politically possible given a range of shitty options. In the other camp, Steffen, Steingraber, and Stephens also claim the mantle of pragmatism, one based on geophysical necessity. The existential threat of climate change has become a sort of projection screen: Either it confirms that we are locked into business as usual, or it’s proof that we need to make a societal 180-degree turn in how we relate to the planet.

“Those of us who are calling ourselves the latter-day abolitionists, our idea of what’s possible is grounded in physical and natural laws. How much water and land and resources do we need to feed ourselves?” Steingraber says. “My hope that is that we can help people imagine, have a vision of a future when blasting gas out of the ground to make our tea kettles whistle is just barbaric, which it is.” It’s a view Nordhaus and Shellenberger call naïve.

It’s clear that, much of the time, environmentalists are arguing past each other. Beyond any debates over strategy or technology, the various factions of greens harbor completely different ideas about human nature and the planet’s capacity to hold us. While some eco-policy wonks appear to have internalized the notion that there are no alternatives to our modern, energy-dependent ways, the environmental grassroots remain committed to encouraging a change in consciousness that will prompt a new, less resource-intense mode of living. It’s as if the environmental movement is playing three-dimensional chess, but with the players operating on totally different planes.

Such differences of opinion aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Political movements often benefit from some degree of ideological tension. The differences only become a political liability because our environmental situation urgently needs a solution. Carbon emissions continue to rise, the number of humans continues to grow, and Earth isn’t getting any bigger.

The environmental movement has a surplus of good ideas for how to manage ecological problems. It’s got plenty of smart and passionate people. The one key asset it doesn’t have is time to sort its issues out.

How Our National Parks Are Threatened by Fracking

Glenn Scherer, Blue Ridge Press — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:55:00 -0700

A booming and unregulated energy industry is quietly but quickly encroaching on some of our most cherished national parks with gas and oil drilling fields.

When I was a teenager, a friend and I cruised across the U.S., touring our national parks. What I remember most from that 1977 trip is rolling over vast, wild, unspoiled miles, heading toward the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Zion.

Three years later, I visited Great Smoky Mountains National Park with my fiancé. What I recall from that trip is Gatlinburg, the park’s garish gateway with its Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium, Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, Hillbilly Village, and other weird attractions vying for the attention of corndog and cotton candy-eating visitors.

Gatlinburg became a tourist eyesore by accident—born out of random uncontrolled development. A more serious accident is now occurring in the great open spaces downwind and downstream of such natural wonders as Grand Tetons National Park, Glacier National Park, and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

The threat is fracking. A booming and unregulated energy industry is quietly but quickly encroaching on some of our most cherished national parks with gas and oil drilling fields.

“From Glacier National Park’s eastern boundary, visitors can throw a stone and hit any of 16 exploratory wells and their associated holding tanks, pump jacks, and machinery,” says a just released report by the National Parks Conservation Association Center for Park Research. “Visitors heading east from Glacier National Park encounter road signs urging caution against the poisonous gases that fracking operations emit.”

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a lesser-known preserve in the North Dakota Badlands, once offered stargazers some of the nation’s darkest most pristine night skies. Now, fracking fields just outside the park create a scene right out of the science fiction movie Blade Runner, with gas flares spewing flames high into the sky and huge trucks roaring by. Ironically, a proposed bridge and road to service a newly planned fracking field will soon dominate the view from the park’s Elkhorn Ranch, where President Theodore Roosevelt first conceived his influential conservation ideas.

Of today’s 401 national park units, 131 lie either directly above or fewer than 25 surface miles from major underground oil and gas deposits. More than 33 percent of America’s national parks could be impacted by fracking.

The number of fracked wells encroaching on national parks is currently still small, but about to skyrocket. In 2010, for example, there were 1,000 frack well pads in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale region west of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. That number is projected to rise to as many as 15,000 well pads in twenty years.

Fracking doesn’t belong near our national parks. Hundred-foot tall derricks dominate the drilling fields. Each well consumes acres of land for its concrete well pad, plus more land for roaring, air-polluting compressor stations; wastewater tanks and pits; miles of potentially leaky pipeline; and new roads that require thousands of truck trips to transport the millions of gallons of freshwater needed to frack a well, and to haul away toxic wastewater containing volatile organic compounds like benzene, toluene and xylene.

Add to this a witches brew of air pollution—fumes burned off of wells or that rise from wastewater pits that can contain carbon disulfide and carbonyl sulfide (smelling like rotten eggs); the neurotoxins methyl pyridine and dimethyl pyridine; and lung-damaging ozone.

Fracking isn’t just a toxic eyesore. Its infrastructure is bad for local business, and already putting pressure on people who earn a living through tourism, hunting and fishing. Outfitters near national parks complain that they can’t take hunters back to prime hunting areas because elk and deer have been driven off by drilling. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership notes on its website that “increases in energy development… are threatening public-lands hunting and fishing opportunities across the country.”

Fracking needs to be managed responsibly. There’s no reason we can’t increase domestic energy production while also protecting our nation’s most inspiring natural wonders. Protection may not even require an act of Congress. All that is likely needed is conscientious oversight by the Department of the Interior and the Obama administration.

©Blue Ridge Press 2013

Blue Ridge Press senior editor Glenn Scherer lives in Hardwick, Vermont.

Hidden Power Grab Stops Communities From Deciding Their Own Futures

David Morris, On the Commons — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:40:00 -0700

Increasingly states are quashing the power of local governments--and thwarting innovation.

In his 1996 State of the Union Address Democratic President Bill Clinton famously declared, “the era of big government is over.” And during his tenure he did everything he could to make that true—deregulating the telecommunications and the financial industries; enacting a free trade agreement severely restricting the authority of the federal government to protect domestic jobs and businesses; and abandoning the 75-year old federal commitment to the poor.

Seventeen years later I fully expect a Republican Governor or two to declare in their state of the state address, “the era of small government is over.” Because again and again, Republican governors and legislatures are preempting and abolishing the authority of communities to protect the health and welfare of their communities.

Earlier this year Wisconsin passed a law eliminating the authority of cities villages and counties to require public employees to live inside city limits, which also voids any existing requirements.
A few weeks ago Kansas passed a law prohibiting cities, counties, and local government units from requiring private firms contracting with these governments to provide higher compensation than the state minimum wages or require other benefits and leave policies.
The Florida House recently voted to preempt local governments from enacting “living wage” laws and “sick time” ordinances. If signed into law, the bill also overrules counties like Miami-Dade and Broward that have “living wage” ordinances that require companies that contract with the county to pay wages higher than the federal minimum wage, and sometimes provide certain benefits.

According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 19 states severely restrict or outright abolish the right of local governments to build their telecommunications networks. Cities began building their own networks after years of begging private phone and cable companies to upgrade their inadequate infrastructure, moderate their continual price increases and improve their customer service. When cities proved to be serious and successful competitors, telecommunications firms, rather than responding to the competition, went to state legislatures to abolish it. Last year North Carolina became the latest state to join the ranks of those who refuse to allow communities to make their own decisions about their own affairs.

Freedom for Unrestricted Fracking

Several years ago the federal government abdicated responsibility for regulating fracking. The Safe Drinking Water Act mandates federal regulation of underground injection activities in order to protect groundwater sources. But in 2005 Congress amended the definition of “underground injection” to specifically exclude “the underground injection of fluids or propping agents (other than diesel fuels) pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities.”

In November 2010 Pittsburgh became the first city in the nation to ban fracking within city limits.

In February 2012 the Pennsylvania legislature responded by passing Act 13, a law that allows fracking in all parts of the city, including residential neighborhoods, which in essence abrogates the right of cities to exercise traditional zoning powers to protect residential neighborhoods from noise and odors and industrial dangers.

In mid-2012 Longmont, a suburb of Denver strengthened its oil and gas regulations. The Colorado Attorney General filed a complaint in court. In response activists successfully got the question put on the ballot. In November 2012 Longmont voters approved the measure with almost 60 percent of the vote. The Attorney General sued. And Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper announced the state would sue any and every city or county that followed the lead of Longmont.

In each of these cases one could argue about the legislation these communities want to enact. In hundreds of communities over the past decade such arguments have taken place, vigorous debates about the appropriateness of residency requirements, or living wage ordinances or fracking restrictions. Communities have gone both ways on these issues. But I would argue that they should have the right to make the decision for themselves. For it is at the local level where those who feel the impact of the decision have the biggest opportunity to be involved with making the decision. Certainly when it is a question of how to spend local taxpayers’ money, or what kinds of commercial activities to allow within residential areas of a city, the community itself should be the locus of decision making and state legislatures should as much as possible respect the outcome.

Cities in Constitutional Limbo

The U.S. Constitution specifically discusses the authority of the federal government and the states. It does not mention municipalities. For that matter, neither does it mention private corporations. Yet after the Civil War, as businesses became more powerful courts gave corporations personhood and dramatically expanded their rights in the face of local and state regulation. At the same time the courts severely redefined cities as mere appendages of the state and restricted the authority of municipalities to govern their own affairs.

For many courts, John Forrest Dillon’s 1872 book Municipal Corporations remains a guidebook for judicial decisions. In an 1868 case, Judge Dillon famously declared, “Municipal corporations owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from, the legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so may it destroy. If it may destroy, it may abridge and control.”

Hundreds of U.S. court decisions to the present day have employed the Dillon Rule to determine the scope of municipal powers and rights. In 1907, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the power of Pennsylvania to consolidate the city of Allegheny into the city of Pittsburgh, despite the wishes of the majority of Allegheny residents.

Beginning about 1920, increasing citizen dissatisfaction at their communities’ servile legal status led states to amend their constitutions to include home rule provisions that broadened the power of cities to govern their affairs. In 1961, for example, the Kansas Constitution was amended to provide that “cities are hereby empowered to determine their own local affairs…” It remains to be seen whether Kansas courts will conclude that deciding how to spend local taxpayers’ money is a “local affair.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has rarely come down on the side of local authority. The 1996 Telecommunications Act was justified by Congress as a way to increase competition. The law specifically allowed the federal government to preempt state and local regulations “prohibiting the ability of any entity” to provide telecommunications services. In 1997 Missouri passed legislation that prohibited cities from providing telecommunication services. The Missouri Municipal League asked the Federal Communications Commission to nullify the state law. The FCC refused to do so because it viewed municipal governments much the way John Dillon did in the 1870s. In 2004 the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 decision, upheld the FCC’s ruling that municipalities “are created as convenient agencies for exercising such of the governmental powers of the State as may be entrusted to them in its absolute discretion.”

Last August a Pennsylvania court went in the other direction by overturning Act 13 concerning fracking in a 4-3 decision that found the law in violation of the state constitution by invalidating many existing municipal zoning requirements The Pennsylvania Attorney General has appealed. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is reviewing the decision.

Government Near the People

Local government is the most accessible of all governments, the most responsive to the popular will. Alexis De Tocqueville described local government as “the great school of democracy”. If we don’t like what our city council or county commission does we can throw the bums out. And kicking them out is not very difficult. Most local elected officials serve for only two years. Running for local office is within the means of many citizens, unlike running for federal or even statewide office.

There is a clear case for higher level intervention is when a community’s majority tyrannizes its minority. Constitutionally protected civil liberties, for example, demand intervention by states. But when it comes to how a city spends its money, or what kinds of commercial activities it allows within its borders, the burden of proof should rest heavily on the state government to explain why it should be allowed to intervene in local affairs.

Republican lawmakers in Florida defend their bills forbidding local minimum wage and living wage laws as a way to prevent the state from having a “patchwork” of laws across its 67 counties. “This bill provides consistency with regards to benefit packages across the state,” said Rep. MaryLynn Magar (R-Tequesta). “It levels the playing field.” But consistency is a poor excuse for undermining a fundamental principle of democracy. Indeed, one of the compelling reasons for allowing local control is the innovation and learning experiences that result from a diversity of local initiatives.

Intervention by local governments to protect communities against the predations of private corporations makes sense. The more remote decision makers are from the community affected by a decision, the less likely they will hear citizens’ concerns. This creates a more unequal the public-private power balance. Large corporations have a much easier time persuading higher levels of government, which are farther removed from the people and issues involved, and also more in need of campaign contributions.

Corporations are legally prohibited from putting the interests of the communities they serve above the maximization of profits to their shareholders. And within corporations, power is determined by the number of shares owned, unlike in a political democracy where one person has only one vote.

There has been much written about the federalist nature of the American political system. But virtually all of it focuses on the rights of states vs. the federal government. At this historical moment, where the last bastion of true democracy is at the local level, we need to extend the debate to include the rights of communities vs. the states.

5 Critical Actions Obama Needs to Take Right Now to Avert Massive Climate Disruption

Michael Brune, AlterNet — Mon, 06 May 2013 08:58:00 -0700

Each of these actions is within President Obama's power right now. If he's serious about addressing climate disruption, not one of them is optional.

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

If all goes well, my parents will finally get to return home today. They live on the New Jersey Shore, on Chadwick Beach Island, next to Barnegat Bay. My brother, sisters, and I all grew up in the house, which my dad built with my uncle, almost fifty years ago.

Six months ago, Sandy took it apart.

By the time it hit the eastern seaboard, Sandy was an unusual hybrid of a post-tropical cyclone and an upper level low system. "Superstorms" like Sandy could develop without the influence of climate disruption, but warmer ocean temperatures and a shifting jet stream unquestionably have increased the odds. The scariest thing about Sandy is that such a freak of weather may no longer be so freakish.

A new norm of extreme weather is a daunting prospect. In Sandy's case, the damage to my childhood home was part of the worst U.S. natural disaster since hurricanes Katrina and Rita -- much more than $50 billion in damages and at least 72 deaths. But Sandy also destroyed something intangible -- our complacency. No longer can we assign the consequences of climate disruption to some distant future. When Sandy struck, the future rose with the sea and smashed into us head on. The question it left behind was this: What do we do about it?

For the past 100 days, Sierra Club members and supporters have answered that question loudly and clearly. We gathered in Washington, D.C., for the largest climate rally in history. We held town hall meetings and grassroots rallies across the country. And we helped send more than a million messages to Barack Obama -- telling him that we want bold action on climate disruption.

For his part, the president answered Sandy's challenge by talking about the climate crisis in his strongest words yet, both in the State of the Union and his inaugural address.

The president's words were welcome, but words will not be enough. Here are five critical actions we need him to take:

Reject the toxic Keystone XL pipeline.
Protect our water from coal plant pollution.
Close loopholes on fracking and protect our wildlands from oil and gas development.
Finalize strong standards for cleaner tailpipe emissions.
Move forward with standards against industrial pollution.

Each of these actions is within President Obama's power right now. If he's serious about addressing climate disruption, not one of them is optional.

Meanwhile, we have to keep our own voices raised. If you haven't added yours yet -- you can do it here. Together, we will move forward on climate -- and we need our president to lead the way.

Fracking Ourselves to Death in Pennsylvania

Ellen Cantarow, Tom Dispatch — Thu, 02 May 2013 08:59:00 -0700

Don't expect the government to protect you from this pernicious industry.

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
More than 70 years ago, a chemical attack was launched against Washington State and Nevada. It poisoned people, animals, everything that grew, breathed air, and drank water. The Marshall Islands were also struck. This formerly pristine Pacific atoll was branded “the most contaminated place in the world.” As their cancers developed, the victims of atomic testing and nuclear weapons development got a name: downwinders. What marked their tragedy was the darkness in which they were kept about what was being done to them. Proof of harm fell to them, not to the U.S. government agencies responsible.
Now, a new generation of downwinders is getting sick as an emerging industry pushes the next wonder technology -- in this case, high-volume hydraulic fracturing. Whether they live in Texas, Colorado, or Pennsylvania, their symptoms are the same: rashes, nosebleeds, severe headaches, difficulty breathing, joint pain, intestinal illnesses, memory loss, and more. “In my opinion,” says Yuri Gorby of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, “what we see unfolding is a serious health crisis, one that is just beginning.”
The process of “fracking” starts by drilling a mile or more vertically, then outward laterally into 500-million-year-old shale formations, the remains of oceans that once flowed over parts of North America. Millions of gallons of chemical and sand-laced water are then propelled into the ground at high pressures, fracturing the shale and forcing the methane it contains out. With the release of that gas come thousands of gallons of contaminated water. This “flowback” fluid contains the original fracking chemicals, plus heavy metals and radioactive material that also lay safely buried in the shale.

The industry that uses this technology calls its product “natural gas,” but there’s nothing natural about up-ending half a billion years of safe storage of methane and everything that surrounds it. It is, in fact, an act of ecological violence around which alien infrastructures -- compressor stations that compact the gas for pipeline transport, ponds of contaminated flowback, flare stacks that burn off gas impurities, diesel trucks in quantity, thousands of miles of pipelines, and more -- have metastasized across rural America, pumping carcinogens and toxins into water, air, and soil.
Sixty percent of Pennsylvania lies over a huge shale sprawl called the Marcellus, and that has been in the fracking industry’s sights since 2008. The corporations that are exploiting the shale come to the state with lavish federal entitlements: exemptions from the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Clean Drinking Water Acts, as well as the Superfund Act, which requires cleanup of hazardous substances. The industry doesn’t have to call its trillions of gallons of annual waste “hazardous.” Instead, it uses euphemisms like “residual waste.” In addition, fracking companies are allowed to keep secret many of the chemicals they use.
Pennsylvania, in turn, adds its own privileges. A revolving door shuttles former legislators, governors, and officials from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) into gas industry positions. The DEP itself is now the object of a lawsuit that charges the agency with producing deceptive lab reports, and then using them to dismiss homeowners’ complaints that shale gas corporations have contaminated their water, making them sick. The people I interviewed have their own nickname for the DEP: “Don’t Expect Protection.”
The Downwinders
Randy Moyer is a pleasant-faced, bearded 49-year-old whose drawl reminds you that Portage, his hardscrabble hometown in southwestern Pennsylvania, is part of Appalachia. He worked 18 years -- until gasoline prices got too steep -- driving his own rigs to haul waste in New York and New Jersey. Then what looked like a great opportunity presented itself: $25 an hour working for a hydraulic-fracturing subcontractor in northeastern Pennsylvania.
In addition to hauling fracking liquid, water, and waste, Randy also did what’s called, with no irony, “environmental.” He climbed into large vats to squeegee out the remains of fracking fluid. He also cleaned the huge mats laid down around the wells to even the ground out for truck traffic. Those mats get saturated with “drilling mud,” a viscous, chemical-laden fluid that eases the passage of the drills into the shale. What his employer never told him was that the drilling mud, as well as the wastewater from fracking, is not only highly toxic, but radioactive.
In the wee hours of a very cold day in November 2011, he stood in a huge basin at a well site, washing 1,000 mats with high-pressure hoses, taking breaks every so often to warm his feet in his truck. “I took off my shoes and my feet were as red as a tomato,” he told me. When the air from the heater hit them, he “nearly went through the roof.”
Once at home, he scrubbed his feet, but the excruciating pain didn’t abate. A “rash” that covered his feet soon spread up to his torso. A year and a half later, the skin inflammation still recurs. His upper lip repeatedly swells. A couple of times his tongue swelled so large that he had press it down with a spoon to be able to breathe. “I’ve been fried for over 13 months with this stuff,” he told me in late January. “I can just imagine what hell is like. It feels like I’m absolutely on fire.”
Family and friends have taken Moyer to emergency rooms at least four times. He has consulted more than 40 doctors. No one can say what caused the rashes, or his headaches, migraines, chest pain, and irregular heartbeat, or the shooting pains down his back and legs, his blurred vision, vertigo, memory loss, the constant white noise in his ears, and the breathing troubles that require him to stash inhalers throughout his small apartment.
In an earlier era, workers’ illnesses fell into the realm of “industrial medicine.” But these days, when it comes to the U.S. fracking industry, the canaries aren’t restricted to the coalmines. People like Randy seem to be the harbingers of what happens when a toxic environment is no longer buried miles beneath the earth. The gas fields that evidently poisoned him are located near thriving communities. “For just about every other industry I can imagine,” saysAnthony Ingraffea of Cornell University, coauthor of a landmark study that established fracking’s colossal greenhouse-gas footprint, “from making paint, building a toaster, building an automobile, those traditional kinds of industry occur in a zoned industrial area, inside of buildings, separated from home and farm, separated from schools.” By contrast, natural gas corporations, he says, “are imposing on us the requirement to locate our homes, hospitals and schools inside their industrial space.”
The Death and Life of Little Rose
Little Rose was Angel Smith’s favorite horse. When the vet shod her, Angel told me proudly, she obligingly lifted the next hoof as soon as the previous one was done. “Wanna eat, Rosie?” Angel would ask, and Rosie would nod her head. “Are you sure?” Angel would tease, and Rosie would raise one foreleg, clicking her teeth together. In Clearville, just south of Portage, Angel rode Little Rose in parades, carrying the family’s American flag.
In 2002, a “landman” knocked on the door and asked Angel and her husband Wayne to lease the gas rights of their 115-acre farm to the San Francisco-based energy corporation PG&E(Pacific Gas & Electric.) At first, he was polite, but then he started bullying. “All your neighbors have signed. If you don’t, we’ll just suck the gas from under your land.” Perhaps from weariness and a lack of information (almost no one outside the industry then knew anything about high-volume hydraulic fracturing), they agreed. Drilling began in 2002 on neighbors’ land and in 2005 on the Smith’s.
On January 30, 2007, Little Rose staggered, fell, and couldn’t get up. Her legs moved spasmodically. When Wayne and Angel dragged her to a sitting position, she’d just collapse again. “I called every vet in the phone book,” says Angel. “They all said, ‘Shoot her.’” The couple couldn’t bear to do it. After two days, a neighbor shot her. “It was our choice,” says Angel, her voice breaking. “She was my best friend.”
Soon, the Smiths’ cows began showing similar symptoms. Those that didn’t die began aborting or giving birth to dead calves. All the chickens died, too. So did the barn cats. And so did three beloved dogs, none of them old, all previously healthy. A 2012 study by Michelle Bamberger and Cornell University pharmacology professor Robert Oswald indicates that, in the gas fields, these are typical symptoms in animals and often serve as early warning signs for their owners’ subsequent illnesses.
The Smiths asked the DEP to test their water. The agency told them that it was safe to drink, but Angel Smith says that subsequent testing by Pennsylvania State University investigators revealed high levels of arsenic.
Meanwhile, the couple began suffering from headaches, nosebleeds, fatigue, throat and eye irritation, and shortness of breath. Wayne’s belly began swelling oddly, even though, says Angel, he isn’t heavy. X-rays of his lungs showed scarring and calcium deposits. A blood analysis revealed cirrhosis of the liver. “Get him to stop drinking,” said the doctor who drew Angel aside after the results came in. “Wayne doesn’t drink,” she replied. Neither does Angel, who at 42 now has liver disease.
By the time the animals began dying, five high-volume wells had been drilled on neighbors’ land. Soon, water started bubbling up under their barn floor and an oily sheen and foam appeared on their pond. In 2008, a compressor station was built half a mile away. These facilities, which compress natural gas for pipeline transport, emit known carcinogens and toxins like benzene and toluene.
The Smiths say people they know elsewhere in Clearville have had similar health problems, as have their animals. For a while they thought their own animals’ troubles were over, but just this past February several cows aborted. The couple would like to move away, but can’t. No one will buy their land.
The Museum of Fracking
Unlike the Smiths, David and Linda Headley didn’t lease their land. In 2005, when they bought their farm in Smithfield, they opted not to pay for the gas rights under their land. The shallow gas drilling their parents had known seemed part of a bygone era and the expense hardly seemed worth the bother.
With its hills and valleys, the creek running through their land, and a spring that supplied them with water, the land seemed perfect for hiking, swimming, and raising their son Grant. Adam was born after all the trouble started.
Just as the couple had completed the purchase, the bulldozers moved in. The previous owner had leased the gas rights without telling them. And so they found themselves, as they would later put it, mere “caretakers” on a corporate estate.
Today, the Headleys’ property is a kind of museum of fracking. There are five wells, all with attendant tanks that separate liquids from the gas, and a brine tank where flowback is stored. Four of the wells are low-volume vertical ones, which use a fracking technology that predates today’s high-volume method. A couple minutes’ walk from the Headleys’ front door stands a high-volume well. A pipeline was drilled under their creek.
“Accidents” have been a constant. When the well closest to the house was fracked, their spring, which had abounded in vegetation, crawfish, and insects, went bad. The DEP told the Headleys, as it did the Smiths, that the water was still safe to drink. But, says David, “everything in the spring died and turned white.” Adam had just been born. “No way was I exposing my kids to that.” For two years he hauled water to the house from the homes of family and friends and then he had it connected to a city water line.
All the brine tanks have leaked toxic waste onto the Headley’s land. Contaminated soil from around the high-volume tank has been alternately stored in dumpsters and in an open pit next to the well. The Headleys begged the DEP to have it removed. David says an agency representative told them the waste would have to be tested for radioactivity first. Eventually, some of it was hauled away; the rest was buried under the Headleys’ land. The test for radioactivity is still pending, though David has his own Geiger counter which has measured high levels at the site of the well.
An independent environmental organization, Earthworks, included the Headleys among 55 households it surveyed in a recent study of health problems near gas facilities. Testing showed high levels of contaminants in the Headleys’ air, including chloromethane, a neurotoxin, and trichloroethene, a known carcinogen.
Perhaps more telling is the simple fact that everyone in the family is sick. Seventeen-year-old Grant has rashes that, like Randy Moyer’s, periodically appear on different parts of his body. Four-year-old Adam suffers from stomach cramps that make him scream. David says he and Linda have both had “terrible joint pain. It’s weird stuff, your left elbow, your right hip, then you’ll feel good for three days, and it’ll be your back.” At 42, with no previous family history of either arthritis or asthma, Linda has been diagnosed with both. Everyone has had nosebleeds -- including the horses.
Five years into the Marcellus gas rush in this part of Pennsylvania, symptoms like Randy Moyer’s, the Smiths', and the Headleys' are increasingly common. Children are experiencing problems the young almost never have, like joint pain and forgetfulness. Animal disorders and deaths are widespread. The Earthworks study suggests that living closer to gas-field infrastructure increases the severity of 25 common symptoms, including skin rashes, difficulty breathing, and nausea.
Don’t Expect Protection
DEP whistleblowers have disclosed that the agency purposely restricts its chemical testing so as to reduce evidence of harm to landowners. A resident in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Washington County is suing the agency for failing fully to investigate the drilling-related air and water contamination that she says has made her sick. In connection with the lawsuit, Democratic state representative Jesse White has demanded that state and federal agencies investigate the DEP for “alleged misconduct and fraud.”
In the absence of any genuine state protection, independent scientists have been left to fill the gap. But as the industry careens forward, matching symptoms with potential causes is a constant catch-up effort. A 2011 study by Theo Colborn, founder of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange and recipient the National Council for Science and Environment’s Lifetime Achievement Award, identified 353 industry chemicals that could damage the skin, the brain, the respiratory, gastrointestinal, immune, cardiovascular, and endocrine (hormone production) systems. Twenty-five percent of the chemicals found by the study could cause cancers.
David Brown is a veteran toxicologist and consultant for an independent environmental health organization, the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project. According to him, there are four routes of exposure to gas-field chemicals: water, air, soil, and food. In other words, virtually everything that surrounds us.
Exposure to water comes from drinking, but showering and bathing makes possible water exposure through the skin and inhaling water vapor. “Air exposure is even more complicated,” says Brown. The impacts of contaminated air, for example, are greater during heavy activity. “Children running around,” he says, “are more apt to be exposed than older people.” What further complicates the emerging toxicology is that chemicals act not as single agents but synergistically. “The presence of one agent,” says Brown, “can increase the toxicity of another by several-fold.”
Brown deplores the government’s failures to heed citizens’ cries for help. “No one is asking, ‘What happened to you? Are there other people who have been affected in your area?’ I teach ethics. There’s a level of moral responsibility that we should have nationally. We seem to have decided that we need energy so badly... that we have in almost a passive sense identified individuals and areas to sacrifice.”
Circles of Trust
No one I interviewed in communities impacted by fracking in southwestern Pennsylvania drinks their water anymore. In fact, I came to think of a case of Poland Spring as a better house gift than any wine (and I wasn’t alone in that). Breathing the air is in a different universe of risk. You can’t bottle clean air, but you can donate air purifiers, as one interviewee, who prefers to be unnamed, has been doing.
Think of her as a creator of what a new Pennsylvania friend of mine calls “circles of trust.” The energy industry splits communities and families into warring factions. Such hostilities are easy to find, but in the midst of catastrophe I also found mutual assistance and a resurgence of the human drive for connection.
Ron Gulla, a John Deere heavy equipment salesman, is driven by fury at the corporation that ruined his soil -- his was the second farm in Pennsylvania to be fracked -- but also by deep feeling for the land: “A farm is just like raising a child. You take care of it, you nurture it, and you know when there are problems.”
Gulla credits Barbara Arindell, founder of the country’s first anti-fracking organization, Pennsylvania’s Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, with teaching him about the dangers of the industry’s efforts. Now, he is a central figure in an ever-widening network of people who are becoming their own documentarians. Everyone I interviewed brought out files of evidence to show me: photographs, videos, news reports, and their own written records of events.
Moreover, in the midst of ongoing stress, many have become activists. Linda Headley and Ron Gulla, for instance, traveled with other Pennsylvanians to Albany this past February to warn New York State officials not to endorse fracking. “A lot of people have said, ‘Why don’t you just walk away from this?’” says Gulla. “[But] I was raised to think that if there was something wrong, you would bring it to people’s attention.’”
“You have to believe things happen for a reason,” says David Headley. “It’s drawn so many people together we didn’t know before. You have these meetings, and you’re fighting [for] a common cause and you feel so close to the people you’re working with. Including you guys, the reporters. It’s made us like a big family. Really. You think you’re all alone, and somebody pops up. God always sends angels.”
Still, make no mistake: this is an alarming and growing public health emergency. “Short of relocating entire communities or banning fracking, ending airborne exposures cannot be done,” David Brown said in a recent address in New York State. “Our only option in Washington County... has been to try to find ways for residents to reduce their exposures and warn them when the air is especially dangerous to breathe.”
In the vacuum left by the state’s failure to offer protection to those living in fracking zones, volunteers, experts like Brown, and fledgling organizations like the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project have become the new protectors of citizens’ health. Growing numbers of fracking victims, including Angel and Wayne Smith, are also suing gas corporations. “If I could go back to 2000, I’d show them the end of the road and say, ‘Don’t come back,’” Angel told me. “But we’re in the situation now. Fight and go forward.”

Ready for Rationing? Why We Should Put the Brakes on Consumption If We Want to Survive

Robert Jensen, AlterNet — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:26:00 -0700

Stan Cox talks about his new book "Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing."

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

It’s not clear whether Stan Cox is a plant breeder with a penchant for politics, or a political provocateur who finds time to do science. Whichever aspect of his personality is dominant, Cox artfully draws on both skill sets to make the case for rationing, perhaps the most important concept that is not being widely discussed these days. The power of his new book, Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, comes from his blending of scientific analyses of dire resource trends with a compelling moral argument about the need to reshape politics and economics.

In his day job at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, the country’s premier sustainable agriculture research facility, Cox works to develop perennial sorghum. A member of the editorial board of the magazine Green Social Thought (formerly Synthesis/Regeneration), Cox also has been thinking long and hard about the multiple ecological crises we face. In 2010 he published Losing Our Cool, a sharp-edged examination of the impacts of our society’s obsession with air-conditioning.

In this new book on rationing, he argues that we have to become a society that puts the brakes on consumption—in an egalitarian fashion—if we want to survive. A society dependent on reckless growth that enriches a small minority of people cannot expect to endure and flourish for the long haul. Cox believes that the right kind of rationing can produce a happier and healthier life for everyone.

Robert Jensen: In your book, you mention that some have compared raising the possibility of rationing to “shouting an obscenity in church.” Why is that idea so unacceptable today?

Stan Cox: People have shown a willingness to accept rationing in a broad variety of situations in which society-wide scarcity is obvious—wartime, say, or when governments have a fixed supply of subsidized food to sell, or in a drought when there's only so much water to go around. But if rationing is proposed as a way to preserve resources and ecological life-support systems for the future—for dealing with environmental problems or providing equitable healthcare, for example—then we are talking about limiting consumption when there is no apparent scarcity. In that situation, we all like to believe that we exercise freedom in the marketplace, and to many it seems outrageous to limit that freedom.

RJ: Before getting to the specifics of how rationing might work, let’s talk about those cultural assumptions about freedom and abundance. We live in a world that routinely tells us there are no limits, that whatever limits we bump up against we can overcome with human creativity and advanced technology. You seem to believe that we live in a physical world with physical limits.

That’s a rather sensible position, of course, but it seems to cast you in the role of Eeyore, always the gloomy one. How do you defend yourself?

SC: OK, you’re getting down to the heart of the matter right away here. When opposing any kind of environmental responsibility, the Right loves to raise the specter of rationing, but it’s really the bigger idea of overall limits to growth that’s at the heart of our anxiety. We face an irresolvable contradiction: We all know intellectually that no kind of growth can go on to infinity, yet if we exist within a capitalist economy, our lives and livelihoods wholly depend on unceasing expansion of economic activity. A year, even a quarter, of slack or negative growth might reduce national carbon emissions but it also triggers widespread human misery. The converse isn’t true; robust growth doesn’t necessarily bring prosperity to all. In recent decades, the benefits of growth have flowed almost exclusively to the top of the economic pyramid.

With the imposition of any serious physical or ecological limits on the economy, familiar capitalist economic relations would malfunction, to say the least. So those at the top of the economy who benefit from growth have every reason to be alarmed by the idea of fair rationing. And if we agree to overall limits but remain committed to the current means of rationing resources and goods—that is, “to each according to ability to pay”—then the rest of us should be alarmed as well. But with a commitment to “fair shares for all,” as they put it back during World War II, and with everyone playing by the same rules (and of course with a much smaller chance of global ecological breakdown), life under physical limits could well be a better life for the great majority of us.

RJ: You mention WWII, one of the cases of successful rationing. As you say, the conventional wisdom is that such rationing is only possible in times of crisis, when the need to limit consumption is clear. So, how would you explain the crises we face today that make rationing necessary?

SC: In the 1940s, Washington did shore up support for the ration system by promising a world of plenty once the war was over. And except in a few resources like rubber, there was no absolute scarcity. Farms and factories were highly productive, there was no unemployment, and wages were rising. But a huge share of what was produced—for example, 4,000 calories worth of food per soldier per day—was diverted to Europe and the Pacific. People could see that with the end of the war, all those resources and goods were to be available again to everyone.

Now the green future, if there is one, will parallel the wartime ‘40s in the sense that a large part of the economy will have to be diverted for a period of years, or in this case, decades. We won’t be using resources to pump up the consumer economy, because they will have to be shifted into vast projects needed to build non-fossil, non-nuclear energy sources; convert to a much less energy-dependent infrastructure; build or convert to more compact, low-consumption housing; rework agriculture; and rearrange living and working patterns to reduce the amount of transportation required. The economist Minqui Li has estimated for the United States that building the necessary wind and solar capacity alone would cost $120 trillion.

All of that production will be unavailable to the consumer economy. It may provide stimulus, but with a nationwide policy of leaving resources in the ground, bigger paychecks will serve to drive up the prices of goods that are available. If the past is any guide, the only acceptable solution will be price controls and fair-shares rationing. Indeed, in both the ‘40s and the ‘70s, there was popular demand for formal rationing. Next time around, as you say, we won’t have the consolation that we can look forward to a peacetime or post-energy-crisis cornucopia. For example, alternative energy sources, even at full capacity, will provide far less total energy than do fossil fuels today. However, we may still be able to anticipate better times to come, once the physical conversion of society has achieved its goals.

At that point, not only will most of the economic effort that had gone into the conversion become once again part of the “civilian” economy, but that new economy will be able to satisfy more real needs for each unit of physical consumption. I guess if there is any light at the end of the tunnel, that’s it. If the conversion is successful, there won’t be as much easy energy around, and GDP won’t be rising, but quality of life will have been given the space needed for improvement.

RJ: Let’s go back to these two basic points that are so contentious. Your pitch for rationing is partly based on an assessment of physical realities: Resources are finite, and technological capacities to stretch resources have limits. Lots of people don’t accept that. You also are arguing that we are going to live with a much a lower level of consumption. For lots of people, that is depressing. Let’s tackle both of those.

First, one of the major things you argue we have to ration is energy, at a time when lots of people are celebrating new technologies that allow humans to tap into new sources of fossil fuels (fracking, tar sands, etc.). How do you see our energy future?

SC: Until a few years ago, a lot of environmentally minded people were hoping that the imminent peak and subsequent decline in the annual extraction of conventional fossil fuels would do our work for us, enforcing strict limits on consumption. Now a bonanza of so-called unconventional fuel reserves has blown that possibility away, forcing us to face the necessity of practicing self-restraint. Can we leave precious energy in the ground when we have the ability to bring it out? If we manage to do that, I guess it will be a first. But that’s what we need to do.

It will be a test of how addicted to dense energy we really are. Are we willing to launch an all-out assault on the Earth, just to avoid a disruption of economic business-as-usual? Unconventional fuels are a disaster—destroying vast landscapes, wrecking water supplies, causing spills of petroleum and nasty chemicals, increasing carbon emissions, and giving the human economy the capacity to do all the usual ecological damage that potent energy sources encourage. And these fuels are no free lunch. Individual gas wells are small and dry up quickly, so enormous numbers of them have to be drilled. They require a huge investment of energy and other resources to produce each unit of usable fossil energy. Yet even with all those problems, that energy is too valuable not to use, and we face a seemingly irresistible temptation to use up these resources as fast as we can extract them. You could say we’ve met our 21st-century Mephistopheles in the sands of Alberta and the Marcellus shale.

RJ:Second, in a world where so many people associate happiness with consumption, how do you make the argument that for those of us in the more affluent parts of the world, less can be more?

SC: In the early 1990s, several economists took note of an apparent statistical anomaly. While people in richer countries tend to be happier than those in poorer countries, increases in average real income in richer countries have not conferred an increase in happiness. In the words of Richard Easterlin, a University of Southern California economics professor whose name has become attached to this seeming paradox, “raising the incomes of all” will not “raise the happiness of all.”

It’s a fascinating problem, but the solution is just as dreary as most explanations of modern life. As society becomes materially richer in the aggregate, it takes a higher income every year just to keep up and maintain the same level of contentment. When everyone has an increasing income, it becomes harder and harder for anyone to achieve greater happiness. In this sense, times haven’t changed much in the century-plus since Thorstein Veblen described this phenomenon. Erosion of happiness is largely a result of everyone trying to keep up with the Joneses.

It’s not just the global north. In many nations once considered poor (and in which most people still are poor), rising incomes are not bringing happiness. On the contrary, examination of average income levels in countries worldwide has shown that more rapid aggregate growth is associated with a reduction in average happiness. The kind of breakneck growth that can carry a nation as a whole from poverty to affluence in a single generation also tends to worsen inequality and eat away at its citizens’ sense of well-being. But make no mistake, simply putting more emphasis on the pursuit of happiness cannot tame a capitalist economy any more effectively than can appeals to life or liberty. Inequitable growth in consumption is in the DNA of capitalism, and that has to be faced directly.

RJ: It’s clearer now why rationing is like an obscenity in church. It means leaving fossil fuels in the ground and permanently reducing overall consumption for almost everyone in the United States. That will require collective action through government and a serious overhaul of the economy. All this has to happen at a moment when what passes for leadership in the political system can’t face the basic problems, let alone imagine serious systemic change.

So, last question: What do you hope your book will accomplish? It’s a clear, compelling argument for rationing in a society that seems unwilling to accept limits and unable to comprehend the need for them. How do we get this into the public conversation?

SC: My aim is, in a way, parallel to what I tried to do with Losing Our Cool—to touch off a debate where there seemed to be total agreement. Air-conditioning has always been viewed as being of pure benefit to humanity, which it’s not. Rationing is constantly being held out by the Right as an unutterably nightmarish fate that awaits us if we get serious about ecological restraint and fairness. Meanwhile, the environmental establishment (in basic agreement with the Right) wants to go on letting people believe that the human economy can just keep on growing, that the market can allocate fairly, and that rationing is indeed an evil to be avoided at all costs.

My purpose with this book is to ask, so rationing’s the worst that could happen? Really? Well, let’s see how bad it might actually be—which may not be as bad as you think. And then let’s compare it to major-league worst-case scenarios, like the global ecological meltdown and all-against-all conflict that we could well see if we don’t restrain ourselves.

Get Ready for Higher Prices and Less Energy Security: Our Natural Gas Reserves Are Being Plundered For Export

Brad Jacobson, AlterNet — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:57:00 -0700

A deeply flawed study that ignores the harmful environmental and health impacts of gas drilling is being used to rally for exports.

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

Unlimited export of U.S. natural gas would have enormous implications on the future of the nation's economy, environment and domestic energy choices. Yet a burgeoning chorus in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, is calling for the swift approval of 19 liquid natural gas (LNG) export permits.

The acceptance of these permits would unleash an unprecedented frenzy of domestic high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, just to meet daily production rates under decades-long contractual obligations. If accepted, the total of the permits currently under review by the Department of Energy for LNG export would be equal to 28.54 billion cubic feet (Bcf) per day, approximately 45 percent of what the U.S. is projected to consume daily in 2013, according to the U.S. Energy Administration.

Congressional supporters of unlimited exports argue that turning the U.S. into a major net exporter of LNG would not only boost our economy and create jobs, but also -- seeming to defy the basic tenets of supply and demand -- sustain low domestic natural gas prices, increase our energy security and propel us to energy independence. Some have even contended that such exports would smooth out boom-and-bust cycles and stabilize the price of natural gas.

By law, the Natural Gas Act requires the Department of Energy to grant export permits of LNG to non-free trade agreement countries only if such exports are deemed in the public interest. LNG exports to countries the U.S. has free-trade agreements with, such as Canada and Mexico, do not require a public interest determination.

On the Senate floor last month, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) argued, "What could be inconsistent with this for the public interest? This is something that would be cheaper gas for us and give us total independence in a matter of weeks."

At an event last year sponsored by the trade group America's Natural Gas Alliance, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said, "Exports of natural gas ... are not expected to play a significant role in setting prices here at home."

In a statement released by his office, Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK), told AlterNet, "Concerns that natural gas exports will significantly drive up the price of natural gas for domestic use are overblown."

He added, "Additionally, even with dramatic growth in LNG markets abroad and use of natural gas at home, the U.S. has more than enough gas to satisfy both markets for a long time."

But many experts close to the issue -- backed by multiple studies, real-world numbers and historical trends -- say these elected leaders are either not leveling with the American public or are simply ill-informed.

"Members of Congress are not energy experts so they are easily confused," said Tad Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas. "And their religion is free market. It's got nothing to do with reality, especially energy markets."

Patzek, an expert in unconventional gas recovery who has extensively studied U.S. shale plays, called congressional boosters of unlimited exports "delusional" in an interview with AlterNet.

"This is the same argument over and over again," he added. "If we have a boom, then twice the boom is always better. Right? Well, not necessarily."

Domestically, natural gas remains cheap, hovering around $3.50 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf). But in Europe and Asia, respectively, prices are three to nearly five times that amount.

The current glut of natural gas in the U.S. has kept prices low for both consumers' electricity bills and for energy-intensive areas of the economy, such as the revitalized domestic manufacturing sector, which uses natural gas for feedstock. But over the last couple of years, gas companies have been losing money because supply has outpaced demand and returns on natural gas at its domestic price became too low to warrant the cost of production.

Exporting LNG to the highest bidder overseas would greatly benefit the profits of gas companies and also some companies involved in its export. But many experts agree, and multiple studies reveal, that it would have the dual effect of raising prices domestically to levels that would both hurt consumers and all other energy-intensive sectors of the economy.

"If we are forced to pay $12 to $16 per Mcf, well, then our economy's going bust," Patzek said.

"I don't know of anybody who's studied this who doesn't acknowledge that prices will go up," said Art Berman, an oil and gas geologist who heads the Houston-based geological consulting firm Labyrinth Consulting. "So if we lock ourselves into 20-year contracts to export X number of billions of cubic feet a day, well, that's going to increase the price. And that's really what it's all about."

Berman's research on actual U.S. shale well production, as opposed to mere projections, has led him and others to question industry and government mantras boasting of America's ever-abundant supply of natural gas reserves. With industry and government projections upward of 100 years of untapped domestic natural gas, Berman, based on the rate of returns from drilled shale plays across the nation, estimates that a more realistic number would be around 20-25 years of supply.

That's without factoring in the impact on supply if the U.S. becomes a major exporter. Patzek said industry and government projections of natural gas reserves are merely "speculation," which is why the use of this resource demands "moderation." Using these reserves in moderation, he said it's probable that several decades of untapped domestic natural gas remains. But what's undeniable, he added, was that opening our supply to limitless exports would force the U.S. to deplete these finite reserves faster, needlessly squandering them.

"How does exporting a strategic natural resource make you more energy independent?" Berman said in an interview with AlterNet. "If you're selling it to somebody else, then by definition you're decreasing your own supply."

He continued, "Signing long-term contracts that require you to export natural gas, if anything, only decreases your energy independence."

Eben Burnham-Snyder, a spokesman for House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), agreed.

"Every single analysis of natural gas exporting has concluded that domestic prices will increase," Burnham-Snyder said in an email to AlterNet. "That's based on basic economic theory."

He continued, "Sending more of our natural gas resources abroad, instead of keeping more of it here for consumers and manufacturers and providing a diverse energy supply, is not a policy to make us more energy secure...[it] makes us less independent, not more."

Berman added, "These companies have stupidly, imprudently overproduced their own product to the point they can't make money at the price they've created themselves. So now they're looking for a solution to that problem, and they've managed to convince a number of idiots in Congress that this is a good idea."

No congressional supporters contacted by AlterNet would explain how exporting natural gas would, in turn, increase the country's energy security and energy independence.

Supporters Rally Around "Seriously Flawed" Study

Congressional supporters of unfettered natural gas exports were buoyed by last year's economic impact study commissioned by the Department of Energy. The report, conducted by the outside firm NERA Economic Consulting, concluded that although domestic natural gas prices would rise moderately and some sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, would be adversely affected, the "U.S. would experience net economic benefits from increased LNG exports."

Following its release, 110 bipartisan members of the House of Representatives fired off a letter urging Energy Secretary Steven Chu to hasten approval of all LNG export permits.

When criticisms of the NERA study began pouring in, a bipartisan group of senators, including James Inhofe (R-OK), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), David Vitter (R-LA) and Mark Begich (D-AK), followed up with a letter of their own to Secretary Chu, insisting he listen to "the sound science and economic theory that comprises" the study's conclusions.

But the NERA study was not only assailed for questionable modeling and omitting economic impacts on the environment, health and local jobs -- such as farms and the businesses they support -- but also for NERA's troubling history of conducting favorable studies for both the tobacco and coal industries.

In a January 2013 letter to the Energy Department, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, ripped the NERA report, calling it "seriously flawed" to the point of rendering "this study insufficient for the Department to use in any export determination."

Shortcomings Wyden highlighted include NERA using two-year-old energy figures to project the domestic consumption of natural gas, failing to fully assess the effect of rising prices on households and businesses, inadequately accounting for production impacts on various regional markets, and omitting the result of higher prices on different socioeconomic groups. All of which, Wyden noted, the Energy Department is tasked to assess in order to meet public interest determinations under the Natural Gas Act.

After its release, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said the study reveals, though downplays, that such exports would "constitute a massive transfer of wealth from working Americans to natural gas production and export companies."

"Most Americans don't own stock in natural gas companies, but nearly all Americans use natural gas and buy goods created using low-cost natural gas," Markey spokesman Burnham-Snyder told AlterNet. "Unlimited exports of natural gas will benefit only a very few, while leaving the rest of America to pay the increased costs from higher natural gas prices."

The Energy Department first commissioned a companion study conducted by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent branch of the Department. The study, published in January 2012, focused on how increased natural gas exports would impact domestic consumption, production and prices.

The report concludes:

Increased natural gas exports lead to higher domestic natural gas prices, increased domestic natural gas production, reduced domestic natural gas consumption, and increased natural gas imports from Canada via pipeline.

Yet even this EIA assessment, as Wyden noted to the Energy Department, made its calculations based on estimated export volumes far lower than the total of the permits now under review. The EIA projected between a low volume of 6 billion cubic feet per day and a high volume of 12 billion cubic feet per day. So even its high range is dwarfed by the roughly 29 billion cubic feet per day now being proposed.

But the findings of an independent Purdue University study, released after the NERA analysis, were even more stark and directly challenged NERA's conclusions.

"The major conclusion of this research is that permitting natural gas exports causes a small reduction in US GDP and also increases GHG emissions and other environmental emissions such as particulates. There is a loss of labor and capital income in all energy intensive sectors, and electricity prices increase."

The authors continue, "The major differences between our results and the other major study (NERA) are that we get considerably higher natural gas price impacts, and we do not get export revenue as large. The higher natural gas prices cause pervasive losses throughout the commercial, industrial, and residential sectors."

In a final note, the authors caution, "Given all the results of this analysis, it is clear that policy makers need to be very careful in approving US natural gas exports. While we are normally disciples of the free trade orthodoxy, one must examine the evidence in each case. We have done that, and the analysis shows that this case is different. Using the natural gas in the US is more advantageous than exports, both economically and environmentally."

Environmental and Health Impacts Left Out of the Mix

Environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Sierra Club, also slammed the study for failing to assess environmental impacts of increased domestic fracking on both the economy and health of local communities in which drilling would occur and on the overall global climate.

The Sierra Club revealed that the NERA study's main supporting point for a net economic benefit from exports was built on ignoring negative environmental impacts.

Applying federal government estimates, the group calculatedthat the increase in natural gas exports would pump an additional 689,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere each year at a staggering social cost of $430,625,000. This additional cost would nullify more than 20 percent of the GDP increase projected in the NERA study, which would shift the slight net gain from exports to a net loss.

Jeff Deyette, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that methane leakage issues, both in the act of fracking and extraction and in the transport of natural gas, demand greater evaluation.

"Given how potent methane is, even modest amounts could make natural gas as bad or worse than coal from a total greenhouse gas emissions standpoint," said Deyette.

The NRDC noted the NERA report "ignores environmental externalities, including global warming, air pollution, water pollution and other pollution impacts" and "wholly neglects to estimate public health and environmental damages that are routinely estimated in regulatory impact analyses."

Henry Henderson, director of the Midwest Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted that the negative drilling impacts on communities don't show up in GDP estimates or corporate annual reports.

"There are long-term impacts on property values and the economies of rural communities that are not properly measured by simply the cost of selling natural gas on the market," said Henderson in a recent interview with AlterNet.

"They are jobs that come and go as opposed to impacts that remain in perpetuity," he said.

This impact has already been seen in states that were home to the early fracking boom, such as Pennsylvania. As a January report by the Center for Public Integrity detailed, the prospect of exporting natural gas was not part of the bargain when Pennsylvanians agreed to open their state to fracking.

So now, adding insult to injury, people in towns who've already suffered environmental, health and economic degradation from this extractive process are "surprised, stunned, angry and upset" to discover these same companies not only want to drill in higher volumes but also seek to export the gas without regard for the increased price or the continued negative drilling effects in their communities.

Patzek, of the University of Texas, noted that in later stages of exploitation of a resource such as hydrocarbons, we tend to go from using faraway places with very concentrated hydrocarbons, such as West Texas or the Middle East, to lesser quality, more difficult and dilute resources, which are close to where people live.

"We are at that stage right now and it's only going to get worse," he said. "We will be encroaching more and more on where people live."

Patzek added, "We don't seem to be able to go beyond the next boom-or-bust cycle and ask for a little bit longer planning. This thought that there is a common good and a common future that we all have has vanished."

Sandra Steingraber's Moving Letter: From Jail on Earth Day

Sandra Steingraber, AlterNet — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:43:00 -0700

Steingraber issued a letter from Chemung County Jail in Elmira, New York after being jailed for civil disobedience.

The following was letter was written from the Chemung County Jail in Elmira, New York where Steingraber is serving a fifteen day sentence for blockading a gas compression riglast month owned by the Inergy gas company near her home in the Finger Lakes region of the state.

This morning – I have no idea what time this morning, as there are no clocks in jail, and the florescent lights are on all night long – I heard the familiar chirping of English sparrows and the liquid notes of a cardinal. And there seemed to be another bird too – one who sang a burbling tune. Not a robin–wren? The buzzing, banging, clanking of jail and the growled announcements of guards on their two-way radios – which also go on all night – drowned it out. But the world, I knew, was out there somewhere.

The best way to deal with jail is to exude patience, and wrap it around a core of resolve and surrender. According to New York state law, all inmates upon arrival are isolated from the general population until they are tested for tuberculosis and that test comes back negative. Typically, that takes three days. Isolation means you are locked inside your cell with no access to the phone (the phone for cell block D happens to be located, tantalizingly, four feet from my bars - just out of reach); no access to books (the two books I have in my cell, lent to me by an empathetic inmate, are the Bible and Nora Roberts’ Carolina Moon, which is a 470-page paperback whose opening sentence is, “She woke in the body of a dead friend.”); and, of course, no access to wi fi, cell phones, e-mail or the internet.

I am writing with a borrowed pencil on the back of the “Chemung County Inmate Request Form,” which is a half sheet of paper. I am writing small and revising in my head. (Forgive the paragraphing – I’m trying to save space.)

Yesterday, I was told that no medical personnel were available to administer my TB test. When I was called down to the nurse this morning, she asked why I didn’t have my TB test yesterday. Of course, she was available yesterday. The resulting delay means that I will join the prison population and be released from 24 hour lock-down on Monday, rather than Sunday.

Frustration will be counter-productive and place me closer to despair. Let–it–go surrender, ironically, keeps me in touch with my resolve.

So, Monday, which is Earth Day, I will emerge from my cell and join the ecosystem of the Chemung County Jail, where the women’s voices are loud and defiant. Stingray (not her actual nickname), broke a tooth yesterday. When she showed it to officer Murphy’s Law (that’s his actual nickname) and said, “the other half is in my cell,” Murphy’s Law replied, “So, you think the tooth fairy’s going to come?” And then he left.

But she stood at the iron door and called for pain meds, over and over in a voice that I use for rally speeches. Full oration. Projecting to the rafters. Stingray is six months pregnant.

She got her pain meds.

Stingray is my inspiration. How can I use my time here – separated from the whole human race by the layers of steel and concrete – to speak loudly and defiantly about the business plans of a company called Inergy that seeks to turn my Finger Lakes home into a transportation and storage hub for fossil fuel gases? It is wrong to compress and bury explosive gases in salt caverns beside and beneath a lake – Seneca – that serves as a source of drinking water for 100,000 people. It is wrong to construct a flare stack on the banks of this lake, which will contribute hazardous air pollutants, including death-dealing ozone, into the air. It is wrong for DEC and EPA and FERC to turn a blind eye to a company that has, for the last 12 quarters, exceeded its permitted discharge of chemicals into this lake. It is wrong for a company to claim that basic geological knowledge about the bedrock itself, is a proprietary trade secret and hide it from the public and from the scientific community. It is wrong to deepen our dependency on fossil fuels in a time of climate emergency.

I could express these ideas more eloquently if there were coffee in jail. There is not.

I was led to cell #1 in block D of the Chemung County jail by three things. One is the decision of Inergy to industrialize the Finger Lakes region where I live and, in so doing, aid and abet the fracking industry by erecting a massive storage depot near the birthplace of my son. I consider this an act of desecration. That’s what biologists call the proximate cause of my decision to commit an act of trespass by blockading the Inergy’s compressor station driveway.

The ultimate cause is a commentary published last fall in the journal that all biologists read – Nature – by Jeremy Grantham, who is not a scientist, but an economist. He noted that all the projections for climate change – even the worst case scenarios – were being overtaken by real-life data. In other words, our climate situation is worse than we thought – even when we assumed the worst. Mr. Grantham then exhorted scientists who have this knowledge to be bold – noting that no one is paying attention to this data: “Be persuasive, be bold, be arrested (if necessary).”

So, here I am, ringing the alarm bell from my isolation cell on Earth Day. May my voice be as un-ignorable as Stingray’s.

The third reason is this one: seven years ago, when my son was four years old, he asked to be a polar bear for Halloween, and so I went to work sewing him a costume from a chenille bedspread. It was with the knowledge that the costume would almost certainly outlast the species. Out on the street that night – holding a plastic pumpkin will with KitKat bars – I saw many species heading towards extinction; children dressed as frogs, bees, monarch butterflies, and the icon of Halloween itself – the little brown bat.

The kinship that children feel for animals and their ongoing disappearance from us literally brought me to my knees that night, on a sidewalk in my own village. It was love that got me back up. It was love that brought me to this jail cell.

My children need a world with pollinators and plankton stocks and a stable climate. They need lake shores that do not have explosive hydrocarbon gases buried underneath.

The fossil fuel party must come to an end. I am shouting at an iron door. Can you hear me now?

Yoko Ono Imagines a Future Without Fracking

Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:50:00 -0700

Ono's campaign against hydraulic fracking calls to New Yorkers through a dramatic window installation.

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

Artist Yoko Ono has an impassioned message for America: We don't have to poison our water supply to make money.

On Friday evening at Manhattan's ABC Carpet & Home, environmentally minded New Yorkers, including a sprinkling of celebs like Susan Sarandon, gathered to celebrate the opening of "Imagine No Fracking," a striking window installation designed by Ono, who recently caused a stir by tweeting a photograph of John Lennon's bloody glasses to protest gun violence.

Riffing on Lennon's unforgettable song "Imagine," Ono sends out a call for unity in the fight for clean drinking water and alternative approaches to natural gas extraction. The project involves several 6-foot-high posters showing an antifracking message in stencil lettering, signed Y.O. In addition to “Imagine No Fracking,” posters show a variety of slogans, including “Don’t Frack New York,” “Fracking Kills,” and the straightforward -- if not exactly catchy -- “Pretty Soon There Will Be No More Water To Drink.”

"Imagine No Fracking" is part of a larger series at ABC Carpet & Home this month designed to open a dialogue with industry leaders, politicians, activists, and citizens on a highly divisive issue. Paulette Cole, CEO & creative director of ABC Carpet & Home, emphasized the importance of protecting our most essential natural resourse: water.

Yoko Ono, looking trim and stylish at age 80, with a jauntily tipped fedora, made a plea for halting a practice whose dangers may far outweigh any short-term gains. Mind-body guru Deepak Chopra offered a meditation on our human connection to nature, while Sarandon urged artists to find creative ways to address the public on the issue.

New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo was called upon by several speakers, including Josh Fox, the director of the new documentary Gasland 2, to stand up to the gas industry and ban fracking.

Musical performances included the always powerful Amy Ray of Indigo Girls and the astonishingly talented Sara Bareilles, who, in honor of the night's theme of water, sang a soulful rendition of Otis Redding's "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay."

Cuomo has been accused of delaying the decision-making process on fracking in the Marcellus Shale. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that for the first time, New Yorkers reject the idea of drilling for natural gas by a margin of 46 to 39 percent.

Josh Fox's 'Gasland' Sequel Opens, a Tour Through a Land of Abandoned Homes and Broken Promises

Alison Rose Levy, AlterNet — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:59:00 -0700

Gasland Part II contends that an industry should not be allowed to break what it cannot fix.

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

Gasland Part II, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, takes us deep into the heartland of America, a land overtaken by gas extraction via fracking. The iconic and recurring depictions of water-on-fire seen in the first Gasland, in the new film serve as postcards from a travelogue through a land of broken promises, abandoned homes, and extinguished rights.

The first Gasland, (which was released in 2010 and nominated for a 2011 Academy Award) became this country’s wake-up call about fracking, the first prod for millions to look beyond the industry-engineered PR facade. Banjo music played throughout the soundtrack revealed director Josh Fox’s chosen musical instrument. But Fox became a kind of Pied Piper for a growing grass roots movement that questioned the need for fracking. Challenging the inroads claimed by the multinational gas and oil industry, fractivism is a popular and youth-driven pushback that these powerful industries are neither accustomed nor equipped to deal with.

Gasland and Gasland Part II (and films like them) unmask the human debt incurred by an array of corporate Goliaths. It turns the lens on those joining the ranks of the Davids—ordinary citizens that awaken from the American dream to discover their way of life has been redefined by impersonal corporate entities, intent on constructing new superhighways towards profits‑—right over the lives of tens of thousands of people.

Gasland Part II continues Fox’s exploration by offering textured, in-depth profiles of half a dozen or so families in geographically diverse locations, from Australia, to Wyoming to Pennsylvania. Fox’s camera takes us into the homes of straight-talking folks who worked hard to secure their corner of the heartland.

Over the course of the film, we watch them move from disbelief to indignation to disillusionment, as they learn that no one’s willing to make industries accountable, even when a town loses its water. Texas homeowner Steve Lipsky built a million dollar plus dream home for his wife and family. With ample square footage, the Lipsky home was surrounded by sky-high picture windows, stunning views, and cascading pools. The customized bathroom came complete with an oversized whirlpool tub that now stands empty. Test results showed water so contaminated by nearby fracking activities that EPA officials privately advised the family never to drink it. But in a theme of civilian betrayal that recurs throughout the film, Lipsky claims that mid-level government regulators retracted their findings, rejected key opportunities to rein in the offending companies, and kept revelatory test results locked away from public access.

Gasland Part II documents what happens when people discover that the standard American protections are as prone to fail as the cement casings on gas extraction pipelines. (Industry documents shown in the film reveal that all casings fail over the next thirty years, and many much sooner, thus setting the stage for aquifer contamination by fracking chemicals, and methane.)

For me, it was a poignant Earth Day reminder that (as the film notes) the destruction of communities by the fossil fuel extraction industry is as old as the industry itself. For decades, this took place among indigenous populations, though few noticed. As Gasland Part II poignantly reveals, what’s different now is that it’s happening to white Americans. In some cases the film’s subjects are former Republicans, even a few who once clambered for drilling, without understanding that the hope of a fair partnership between Goliath and David is as doomed as a Kardashian marriage. Especially, when, as Gasland Part II uncovers, industry documents recommend the use of psy-ops (psychological operations, a military tactic deployed in combat zones) to manage community divisions in fracking regions. This may not be the change people were wanting to believe in.

No longer are the old forests clear-cut for drill rigs located in outlying areas inhabited by ethnic “others.” Now it’s Pennsylvania’s public lands and forests, which were industrialized by Governor Tom Corbett, elected, as the film shows, with substantial gas and oil industry contributions. Now it’s America falling far beneath its first world allies (according to a wide range of measures compiled in international studies) and transitioning into a new status. As the film documents, a government once so proud of its democracy, it sought to export it, now over-rules the rights of its citizens. In Dimock, Pennsylvania, the film tracks the history of the town’s aquifer contamination, which affected the drinking water in many homes. The PA government first promised to construct a pipeline of potable water at industry expense, but following Corbett’s election, retracted that plan and left many townsfolk permanently without water.

As a result, many were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements in exchange for buy-outs so that they could move for the sake of their health. In one poignant scene, Fox films an outspoken and charismatic community leader named Victoria Switzer, as prior to signing, she “practices” being silent. Many of those profiled in Gasland II have undergone a similar fate and abandoned their zero value homes or accepted buyouts in exchange for silence. Louis Meeks, a Wyoming farmer, explains that he received such an offer. His reply, “Move and leave my neighbors here? What kind of an axxxxxe do you think I am?”

And for what, this loss of rights, of homes, of voices? In order to exploit resources now destined for export to other countries. In the film, economic analyst Deborah Rogers explains her view that once gas is liquefied for export to China (where gas prices are high), the currently low U.S. gas prices will mount, creating a consumer squeeze. Americans will have invested their tax dollars in gas infrastructures based on the promise of cheap energy. But that energy won’t be there.

Gasland Part II contends that an industry should not be allowed to break what it cannot fix. The aftermaths of contamination often endure. The film opens with the use of Corexit, (a product banned in Britain) that dispersed and hid the massive amounts of oil released into the Gulf of Mexico by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill. But Corexit didn’t remove the oil or redress the damage. Instead, it “killed the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico,” according to biologist Wilma Subra, interviewed in the film.

There is no current technology to purify the fracking waste that is shale gas extraction’s by-product. There is no current technology to restore the water supply of the 15 million Americans reliant on the Delaware River, should the Delaware River Basin, which flows through five states, becomes contaminated through nearby fracking or pipeline infrastructural activity. Nor is climate change, which climatologist, Robert Howarth reveals is greatly increased by both methane release and the entire life cycle of drilling activity, reversible.

Fortunately, there is existing technology that can solve the energy problem—it’s renewable energy technology. As the film makes clear, shale gas is no bridge to a renewable energy future. It’s a detour away fromrenewables, a dead-end. As Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson discloses in the film, the technology for renewables has evolved so thoroughly that 100% of U.S. energy needs could now be supplied by wind, complemented by some use of solar and water energy. Jacobson and his colleagues at the Solutions Project are devising a detailed plan to meet the needs of New York State spelling out all of the requirements, along with the jobs to be created.

In its evocative human scale report, Gasland Part II zooms in on the early stages of social disruption due to extreme energy extraction leads. The people profiled in the film are earthy and real. Their voices can be heard and counted. Though tens of thousands may be affected globally, the devastation has not currently progressed to a point where news reports detail mind-numbingly large numbers of the afflicted. Unless the concerns the film highlights are heeded, more extreme forms of devastation could lie ahead. Why undergo such risks when there are economically viable ways to meet our energy needs now and into the future, that don’t entail contamination, earthquake activity, and displacement?

Gasland Part II will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival and will debut nationally on HBO this summer.

What Will Inspire You to Take Action? 5 Earth Day Photos You Should See

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 14:24:00 -0700

What will it take before we have a critical mass to move us toward a sustainable future?

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

Since 2011, when I first read Deep Green Resistance by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Aric McBay I’ve been haunted by a question Jensen posed in the book’s preface.

He asks, “Where is your threshold for resistance?”

He goes on to write that 90 percent of the large fish in our oceans are gone. At what point do you get angry and fight back? “Is it 91 percent? 92? 93? 94? Would you wait till they killed off 95 percent? 96? 97? 98? 99?” he writes. “How about 100 percent? Would you fight back then?”

The question doesn’t just pertain to fish. “There is 10 times as much plastic as phytoplankton in the oceans, 97 percent of native forests are destroyed, 98 percent of native grasslands are destroyed, amphibian populations are collapsing, and so on,” he writes. “Two hundred species are driven extinct each and every day.”

The dark cloud of climate change hangs over us, each new report bringing worse news. And the political climate is no better -- anyone not concerned with oil industry profits is branded anti-American or anti-jobs, and our elected officials have run from any meaningful action, straight into the arms of industry. Add to this a slurry of articles that have either declared environmentalism dead or the movement itself a failure, and it would seem we’re in a pretty tough spot.

“We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet,” Bill McKibben wrote this month in Rolling Stone. “In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, ‘So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?’”

What did you do?

Forty three years after millions of people gathered for the first Earth Day, this is where we stand. It’s a precarious spot at best. I keep coming back to that poem attributed to Martin Niemöller; there are various versions, but it goes something like this:

First they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Written during the rise of Nazi Germany, it became a powerful reminder of the consequences of staying silent. Today, the poem takes me to a different frame of mind. I wonder, as we destroyed our fisheries, who spoke up? What about our forests, our farmlands, our wildlife? What about our wild lands and sacred places? Our clean air and clean water? Who will speak up for the people of Appalachia being devastated by mountaintop-removal mining? What about those fighting against fracking or the Keystone XL pipeline or tar sands mining?

When the next toxic spill or superstorm happens in your neighborhood, who do you think will stand up and say something? When the planet we live on tips past the point of repair, what is left to say?

“Where is your threshold for resistance?”

I’m not among those who count the environmental movement as dead. I think it’s reinventing itself; I’m just hoping it happens in time.

If the environmental movement succeeds, it will be because it becomes something else entirely; because people stop seeing these issues as something for lefties or treehuggers or liberals or the like and start realizing that these issues are important if you’re human – if you care about your community, your family and essentials like healthy food, a livable climate, clean air and water.

“There are plenty of horrors to make you weep this Earth Day,” Jim Hightower wrote this week. “But tears don't bring change. That comes only from the determined effort of ordinary grassroots people to organize, strategize and mobilize. The good news for our Earth and our own existence is that such people are on the move in every part of America. They're confronting the greedheads and boneheads, creating effective energy alternatives, forging fresh and sensible polices, lifting heads out of the sand -- and producing the change we must have.”

Today is a good day to take stock of the things that keep us going: the people who inspire change. Here are five images I’ve seen lately that are reminders of such things.

1. What Love Looks Like

Tags:

tim dechristopher

Photo Credit:

Ed Kosmicki/ Yes! Magazine

(Photo by Ed Kosmicki/ Yes! Magazine)

Today, after serving two years in federal prison, Tim DeChristopher was released. You may have heard of him, “Bidder 70,” and how he disrupted an oil and gas lease auction, but perhaps you don’t know the whole story, or what motivated him. “When I jumped into that auction, I had no idea who would be there to catch me,” he said. “But people came from many different paths to form this activist community that holds one another.”

The activist community he helped to start, Peaceful Uprising, wrote, “Tim urged activists to take the long view, and be ready to go to jail to defend their principles and their cause. ‘We don’t need to figure out how to keep me out of jail,’ Tim explained to a concerned Santa Fe supporter. ‘We need to figure out how to get more people intojail.’”

So what motivated Tim? His action wasn’t premeditated; it was an act of courage and love. Peaceful Uprising explains:

While Tim was taking his final exams at the University of Utah, advocates for Utah’s wilderness like Robert Redford and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance were attempting to bring attention to a controversial auction of Utah public lands, orchestrated by the outgoing Bush Administration. The auction included parcels adjacent to cherished natural resources like Canyonlands National Park. SUWA and other regional advocates brought a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management in efforts to halt the auction pending further review and public comment. Through no fault of SUWA or their allies, the lawsuit could not settle the issue prior to the auction. On December 19th, Tim finished his last final exam and took TRAX to the protest that SUWA and others had organized outside of the auction. On arrival, Tim decided that the protest needed to be moved from outside of the auction to inside, where the action was happening. With no prior plan of action, Tim entered the building where the auction was held and approached the registration desk. When asked if he was there to bid, Tim made a quick decision. He registered as Bidder 70 and entered the auction.

Tim intended to stand up and make a speech or create some other kind of disruption. Once inside, however, Tim recognized the opportunity to stop the auction in a more effective, enduring fashion. He sat quietly with his bidder paddle lowered, until he saw a friend from his church openly weeping at the sterile transfer of beloved red rock lands away from the public trust and into the hands of energy giants. It was then that Tim decided to act.

At first, Tim simply pushed up the parcels’ prices (some starting as low as two dollars per acre, and were ultimately sold for $240 per acre). Once almost half of the parcels had been sold to oil and gas companies, Tim felt he could no longer bear to lose any more public lands. Tim bid on and won every subsequent parcel, until he was recognized as an outlier and escorted from the auction.

Tim refused to take a plea deal and was sentenced to two years. He offered these words at the end of his trial:

You can steer my commitment to a healthy and just world if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow.

2. Direct Action

(Photo by Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance)

A few weeks ago I wrote about Nancy Zorn, the 79-year-old Oklahoma grandmother who decided to take action against construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and locked her neck to a piece of heavy machinery. She is one of many people who have been engaged in direct action for months to stop pipeline construction. For those who think this kind of monkey wrenching is the domain of young radicals, think again. Actions against the Keystone have involved people of all ages, backgrounds and political affiliations.

Here is what Zorn had to say about what motivated her:

… There is the Cree Indian prophecy, which inspired Greenpeace. “There will come a time when the Earth grows sick and when it does, a tribe will gather from all the cultures of the world who believe in deeds and not words. They will work to heal it… they will be known as the “warriors of the Rainbow.” Scientists estimate that burning more than 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide risks catastrophe for life on earth. Energy corporations now have five times that amount in their reserves and will burn it all unless we stop them. The time for speculation and debate is over. I hope this one small action today will inspire many to become warriors of the rainbow. The earth needs us all.

3. Solidarity

(Photo by 350.org, India Beyond Coal)

Last November 10, actions took place all across India to move the country beyond coal. India gets 66 percent of its electricity from coal and is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. India Beyond Coal, a project of 350.org, raised awareness through creative actions.

The group wrote:

Our excessive dependence on coal threatens a future where we can pull millions of Indians out of poverty. Rising costs of coal, reduced availability, excessive deforestation, negative health impacts and the climate crisis are strong reasons to begin the transition towards renewable energy and energy efficiency.

There were many great photos from the action, but I loved this one in particular because it spoke to our interconnectedness, and how much more apparent that becomes every day we face environmental catastrophes.

This photo captures the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance of South Africa standing in solidarity with India. If anyone knows the problems coal burning and mining can create, it’s South Africans. The country gets 90 percent of its electricity from coal and is the fourth largest coal exporter in the world.

If we’re going to solve our climate crisis, it will be through looking at the big picture and thinking about other people – even if they live on different continents.

4. Bright Lights

(Photo by Solar Lancaster)

We can’t spend all of our time fighting against things like dirty energy, we have to also fight for things. The brightest light in the latter fight is likely solar energy. It will never be our entire saving grace – it can be poorly used and it still has environmental impacts. But, we’ve only just begun to understand its potential if we actually put some resources and smarts behind it -- and it’s encouraging.

In Lancaster, California, the New York Timesreported that the high desert city will “require that almost all new homes either come equipped with solar panels or be in subdivisions that produce one kilowatt of solar energy per house.” About time!

And there are other exciting efforts happening. Earlier this year Mosaic launched as a crowd-sourcing project to let ordinary people help invest in solar development. If big business and big donors aren’t willing to move this change along, let’s see if the rest of us collectively can.

Small, distributed solar projects that can be made available to all people, regardless of their income, is an enlightening idea.

5. One Watershed at a Time

(Photo by Doddridge County Watershed Association)

Last week the local watershed group in Doddridge County, West Virginia got together for a cleanup day. Earth-shattering? No. But really awesome, anyway. There are thousands of local watershed groups across the country. They’re usually small, volunteer-driven and underfunded, but their impacts can be great -- especially if you consider all their actions collectively.

I got to meet some members of the Doddridge County Watershed Association and they’re an admirable bunch. They formed after a significant spill or dump of chemicals by the gas drilling industry endangered nearby Buckeye Creek, posing a threat to wildlife and drinking water.

Since that time members have learned how to use monitoring equipment to test water supplies. In an area of the Marcellus Shale where the fracking industry has run rampant, the group is now a key watchdog and community asset.

To be sure, we need to act at every level of society, from individuals and small communities, right up to international bodies. We need people asking, “What is my threshold for resistance?” and faced with all our envrionmental problems, “What did I do?”

This Earth Day Should We Be Weeping or Cheering?

Jim Hightower, AlterNet — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:31:00 -0700

There are plenty of horrors to make you weep this Earth Day. But tears don't bring change.

Earth Day cometh -- the 43rd year of this national focus on the state of our globe. So, how is Earth doing? Should we be weeping ... or cheering?

Both.

The first step to any recovery is recognition of the obvious: Earth has a problem. In fact, beaucoup of them. For example, despite the squawking of profiteering polluters and professional deniers, our very atmosphere -- without which everyone and everything is dead -- is rapidly being degenerated by our own addiction to fossil fuel, literally altering Earth's climate in disastrous ways. Yet, as we burn, energy corporations blithely fiddle.

They're fiddling with tar sands oil in Alberta, Canada, uncaring about the vast amounts of ozone-destroying carbon that will be released by ripping open Northern Alberta's boreal forest to get at the junk oil, or about the extra carbon-dioxide contamination that will come from processing this especially toxic sludge at Big Oil's Gulf Coast refineries.

Also, they're fiddling with the Earth itself, by fracking deep underground shale to bring gas and oil -- plus more ozone-depleting methane -- to the surface. And they're still fiddling with the priceless ecology of America's ancient Appalachian Mountains and streams by exploding off the mountaintops -- merely to make it easier and cheaper for Big Coal to extract the ozone-killing carbon.

There are plenty of horrors to make you weep this Earth Day. But tears don't bring change. That comes only from the determined effort of ordinary grassroots people to organize, strategize and mobilize. The good news for our Earth and our own existence is that such people are on the move in every part of America. They're confronting the greedheads and boneheads, creating effective energy alternatives, forging fresh and sensible polices, lifting heads out of the sand -- and producing the change we must have.

The courageous and tenacious mountaineers of Appalachia, for example, are at last beginning to score big victories in their long, hard fight against the coal giants, including winning an agreement last November from one, Patriot Coal, to cease all mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Also, from Vermont to California, the frackers are getting fracked, as local groups are winning fights in city halls, legislatures and courts to stop the rampant exploitation of their land, water and communities. And, all across the country, including in the reddest of red states, grassroots advocates are producing a sensible shift from fossil-fuel dependency to renewable fuels and conservation.

That's what Earth Day is about, so don't weep -- cheer the progress we've made, and join the movement for more.

In fact, some communities are going so far as to imagine achieving "net zero." That's the wonky name attached to an elegant idea, namely a conversion to total renewable energy, complete recycling and a culture of conservation to bring humankind's carbon footprint into a sustainable balance with a healthy earth.

Now, imagine the least likely place you'd expect this net zero ideal to take root -- and even flourish. How about oil-saturated Texas? Yes! On an Army base, no less. Astonishingly, America's sustainable energy future is being pioneered in El Paso on a sprawling military base named Fort Bliss, home to 35,000 soldiers.

The post already has a 1.4 megawatt solar array and rooftop solar panels on all base housing (generating 13.4 megawatts of energy), and it's in partnership with El Paso Electric to complete a 200-acre, 20-megawatt solar farm by 2015.

It also has a plan with the city of El Paso to convert the post's waste into energy, and it's engaged in wind, geothermal and conservation projects. Adding to the effort, base officials are encouraging the use of energy-efficient vehicles -- and even building bicycle lanes throughout the base.

The Army! Who knew they cared?

Practically everyone on the base is committed to achieving the goal of net zero by 2018, meaning the base will generate all of the energy it uses -- and do it with renewables. The troops have planted nearly 15,000 trees and have become converts to recycling. To encourage the latter, the base commander, Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, has put the million-dollar-a-year recycling revenue that Fort Bliss earns into skating parks, exercise facilities and other morale-boosting recreation projects.

"Everybody is getting involved," he says, noting that the effort is changing behavior and fostering a conservation culture, which he hopes "our soldiers will take with them when they go on."

There's hope for the Earth when even the Army begins to care, take action and change attitudes. In this case, let's all "join the Army."

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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