Tag Archives: New York environment

Will the Governor say OK to fracking New York?

Posted on July 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

With the end of the moratorium on hydro-fracking today, July 1, the issue of what will happen to New York’s land and water comes to a head.  Later today we’ll hear from Governor Cuomo who will probably simply restate what has already been stated on the DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) website, that hydro-fracking will be allowed to go forward in the “less sensitive” areas of the state.  New York City water, Syracuse water, state parks, wilderness areas, will be protected while the farmlands of the western and central areas will get fracked.

Politics being the art of compromise, caught between two imperatives, on the one hand, money for the unemployed in the rural areas (money that New York State can’t supply but the Gas Industry can) and on the other, the health of the public at large, the governor has compromised.  But some things can’t be solved by a compromise that simply cuts down the middle.  Abraham Lincoln once asked, “Can America continue as a nation, half slave and half free?”  King Solomon in his wisdom knew that when he  offered to cut the baby in half, giving half to each who claimed to be its mother, that the one who gave it up was the true mother, because she knew it would kill the baby!
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Friends, this is something that can’t be cut in half.  Having spent several months studying the results of fracking in other states through online sources (so far the broadcast media has completely ignored the issue) and the statements of friends who’ve seen what’s happening in Pennsylvania, I have no doubt whatsoever that what’s happened there, and in Arkansas and Texas and the other states where fracking has taken hold, will happen here as well.
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The controls the DEC claims will be put in place will be ignored here as they’ve been ignored in Pennsylvania and everywhere else, for who will monitor these rigs?  Where will the money come from to pay for the kind of oversight that will prevent the gas leaks and the poisoned ponds and rivers?  Where will the money come from to clean the millions of gallons of water used to flush the gas from miles underground?  Who will pay to fix the damage where wells have run dry?  Who will pay the bills for the poor farmers and landowners when their kids get sick and their animals die? The industry isn’t even paying the landowners the money they promised them.  What makes us think they will pay when the wells run dry?
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Geologists warn that there’s no way to control what direction the fractures in the shale rock will take.  Economists warn that the promises of the Natural Gas Industry are creating a bubble that can’t be sustained.  Health officials warn of the deadly results to human and animal health of drinking the water and breathing the air where gas is being drilled.  Individuals in Pennsylvania who have signed leases, and who have yet to see a penny from the Industry, warn us that the same thing will happen here.  Who will protect the property rights of the landowners who’ve been forced to allow their land to be drilled because over 60 percent of their neighbors have signed leases under a 2005 New York law known as “compulsory integration.”
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What can stop this panicky effort to squeeze every last drop of petroleum out of the earth, no matter how much water is polluted, how many animals and humans sickened, how much natural beauty laid waste?  New York is in a position to do just that, but no matter how dedicated they may be to a clean environment, our elected officials can’t stop this without our help.  When economic and political forces are too much for them, it’s we the people who must make known our will to protect what belongs to all of us who dwell on the earth and live by its food and water.  Beginning in August, we will have 60 days to make it clear to the governor and the DEC that when it comes to public health, there can be no compromise!
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I will continue to put links here under REPORTS that show the kind of damage being done elsewhere in the US and abroad by the frackers, the concerns of scientists and public health officials, and under SOLUTIONS, to the development of clean energy alternatives, the way of the future.
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There are hopeful indications that the tide is turning.  Two days ago New Jersey declared their state off-limits to fracking. Yesterday France was the first nation to pass a total ban on hydro-fracking.  Which path will New York take?  Is this the government of the Oil and Gas Industry, by the Oil and Gas Industry, and for the Oil and Gas Industry, or is it the government of, by, and for the people?

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Posted in Big Oil, fracking, hydro-fracking, water safety

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Midsummer’s Day

Posted on June 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

History tells us that, throughout time, in every nation and culture in the world, Midsummer’s Day has always been a holiday.  In religious times it was a religious holiday, in pagan times, a time of tribal ritual; even the Freemasons used it as one of their major occasions.  As the second most important turn of the season, when the energy of expansion that comes with days getting longer and nights shorter reaches its apex and turns to the falling half of the year, with gradually shortening days and lengthening nights, people’s thoughts turn naturally to conservation.

Today we lengthen our days artificially with electricity, so we don’t notice the change the way we did in earlier times.  Still the change of seasons is more than just a decrease in daylight.  It signals, as it always has, a turn in our attention, away from future prospects and towards conserving what we already have. Planting turns to maintenance; creating towards harvest.  This takes place at a cellular level in everything that lives on the earth.  We can no more change this than we can change the moon or the sun or the earth’s movement through space.

In early times a holiday, a word derived from “holy day,” was not only a time for worship and for getting together to eat, drink, and be merry.   They were also moments for pausing in ordinary routines to consider problems facing the community at large.  This may have been done with a glass of mead or a peace pipe in hand, but whether sitting in a circle around a campfire or around a table over cigars and port, gathering to consider important changes has always taken place at this moment in the year’s cycle.

This year the first weekend following the summer solstice, Saturday, June 25, let’s take a few hours to return to this ancient mode of human relations, gathering at the second most powerful turn of the yearly cycle to consider a great problem presently facing us as a community, one we’ve labelled with the great and powerful Oil Industry’s own term, fracking, (from fracturing rock to squeeze out any lurking oil or gas) a problem arising from the Industry’s fear that the planet’s oil reserves are running out.

To all extents and purposes, today our lives in the so-called developed nations are run by oil: using it, finding it, owning it, buying it, selling it.  Our international relations with the rest of the world are tightly tied to their connections to the sources of the petrochemicals that power our lives.  And as these resources appear to be running out, the industry that has grown on our appetite for oil has begun hunting for other means to maintain its hold on world power, not only here in the US but all over the world.

Part of the problem is that our appetite is not only for gasoline and jet fuel, it’s also for things like plastic, solvents for cleaning metals like benzene, for dissolving plastics like acetone, for coal tar in lipstick, disinfectants, and antioxident food preservatives like BHA and for “permanent press” fabrics like nylon and polyester.  In fact, there’s some petrochemical in just about everything we use.  This can’t be good for our health.

The good news

Many of these things can be made from materials grown on top of the ground.  What’s even more exciting, one of the more important fuels, methane, the main constituent of “natural gas,” can be fairly easily manufactured from the waste and trash that presently fill our dumps, streams, roadsides, septic tanks, hog and cattle farms, chicken ranches that are a major cause of air pollution and global warming.  Making fuel from the huge quantities of waste we generate not only keeps us safe from poisons released from drilling, it rids us of another very poisonous problem.

If we can stop wasting coal and oil on things that can be more easily gotten through other means, like electricity from solar panels or cooking gas from yard waste, using them only for those things for which there are no substitutes, there will be enough of both to last us for centuries without continuing to destroy the earth to get at them.  Nature is full of pollutants that it can manage easily in small quantities.  We don’t need to elminate petrochemicals, only reduce their use to what’s necessary.

The need to research renewable energy sources falls equally on all of us, not just on scientists and entrepreneurs.  While the broadcast media industry remains silent on the subject of fracking, and even the print media is equivocal, all too often giving “equal time” to the industry spinners, Google is at our fingertips, ready to take each of us into the world of energy experiment going on in places all over the world.

If you google biogas, or biofuels, I promise you, you’ll come away with a good deal more hope for the future than you might have at this moment.  All of us who are concerned about the future of our planet need to find out the truth for ourselves, and to start talking to each other, about fracking, about energy, and about what we want our future to look like.  Everything that happens in our world begins in the minds of men and women.  We need a vision.  We need to know what we want, and we’ll only find that by listening, learning, and talking to each other.

Come to the picnic at the Hook on June 25th and hear what those who have done some thinking along these lines have to say.  Solutions are out there, and it’s up to all of us to help find and promote them.  Only by working together will we be able to turn the great machine that presently driving us into a ditch towards a better future for humanity and everything else that shares this time and place.  The future will come, no matter what we do.  Let’s get ready for it.

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Posted in Big Oil, bio-fuels, bio-gas, fossil fuels, fracking, hydro-fracking, Marcellus Shale, water safety

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Dear NY Environmentalist

Posted on May 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

Please help stop the threat of fracking in New York by joining the statewide protest on JUNE 25.

If June 25 turns into a statewide protest, it might finally get the attention of the broadcast media, which, so far as I know, has said absolutely nothing about the issue.  Is that because they’re taking in millions (billions?) from the gas and oil industry in advertising how “natural gas” is the solution to our energy needs for the next 100 years?

The problem 

Those of us who are tuned in to environmental networks, or who read the New York Times, TIME magazine, or Newsweek, know something about this issue even if only that it exists.  However, most people today get their information from mainstream television, which, so far as I know, has been utterly silent on the issue.  Mention fracking to your friends from areas other than environmental activism.  Unless you live in the area that’s targeted for drilling, you’ll be shocked at how many intelligent and thoughtful people know nothing about it, or even what the word fracking means.

We have a lot of catching up to do, for after explaining the problem, we then have to explain that there is a solution.  Good news indeed, but only to those who understand the problem.

The solution

Along with the dangers of drilling, we have to let people know that there’s no need to dig down thousands of feet into the earth for gas that’s so much easier and cheaper to make right up here on the earth’s surface.  America is lagging behind in the worldwide effort to provide cooking and heating gas from the methane that arises naturally from rotting vegetation and animal manure.  Type biogas into google and you’ll find dozens of articles on gas creating systems of all sizes from little ones on small dairy farms in Scandinavia and rice paddies in India to big municipal plants in Sweden and jobs in Kansas.

These installations, if created with government help, would solve at once five of our worst problems:

1)  they would provide cooking and heating fuel at a fraction of the price of the gas being sold by the industry, using the same delivery systems already in place; 2) they would remove a large percentage of the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming; 3) they would rid our towns and cities of their stinking, disgusting landfills; 4) they would eliminate any incentive to destroy our national heritage and pollute our drinking water with invasive drilling; and 5) they would bring employment to areas of the state where it’s  most needed, both temporary jobs, to build the facilities, and permanent jobs, to run them.

Because each situation is different, building biogas plants will also give employment to engineers in the field and chemists working in the lab on gas mixtures that will achieve the goal of total neutralizion (zero carbon footprint).  True, biogas is highly flammable, but no more so than the “natural” gas and propane we’ve been using for years.  With modern engineering and proper maintainence there need never be an accident, certainly nothing to compare with the explosions, leakage and spills associated with hydro-fracking.

With a governor who’s dedicated to the environment it looks like we’ve got a chance in New York that they didn’t have in Pennsylvania, but he needs to hear from us how much we hate fracking and how much we want biogas installations instead.  As our representative, we can’t expect him to stand alone, and no one, including the Governor himself, will know how many voters would be behind him if only they got their news in some other way than television.  It’s great to go to Albany and protest in person, and we should certainly continue to do that, but unless we can find a way to get our protests into the broadcast news reports, the message will go no further than the capitol steps.  With a deadline of sorts coming up in July, we can use this June 25th demonstration as a way of standing together against mindless corporate greed.

Here in Rockland

On June 25th we’ll be having a picnic on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River where we’ll hear speakers explain the different factors involved in the dispute, and where we, and our elected officials, will have an opportunity to ask questions and discuss with each other the best way to proceed.  Earlier in the month, on June 1st, there will be a showing of the film Gasland at the Nyack Community Center.  Its Oscar nomination was a major factor in getting the EPA to force Halliburton just this past December to tell us what’s in the solvent they’ve been using to flush out the gas and poison the soil and water of dozens of states in the process.

Not all communities are the same.  What works in one may not be what’s right for another.  Even if all you do is to stand on a corner near where people do their shopping and hand out leaflets, it can count as a public event and will help to swell the count of environmental organizations around the state joining the protest.  It could be a showing of Gasland, a lecture in a hall, a private party with key county politicians, a dance to benefit the local food bank that breaks for a speech by an environmentalist.  Imagine if we could get several events on that date in every county in the state!

•   Please sign on to this protest and plan and advertise in your community some sort of public action for June 25.  It doesn’t have to be a blockbuster, although if it is we’d love to hear about it.  Whatever you decide to do, please let us know about it so we can add your group and your county to our list.  And please take photos and videos to share on Facebook and YouTube.

•   Please share this website with your fellow environmentalists and with other organizations that you belong to or know about.  By signing up you’ll automatically  become a member of the New York Environmental Coalition.  All this means is that your name and email address will be listed here along with other New York and national environmental organizations in lists based on divisions of primary focus.  There are many such lists available online, but this one is aimed directly at turning the search for more sources of energy in the right direction, for starting something good, not just stopping something bad.

•  Please give us your input.  You can do this best through comments here and by emailing us.  We want to hear your discoveries, your personal experiences, your ideas, what you’ve written.  As word of more events in more counties comes in we will share it through our website.  We want to build a statewide network for the benefit of all, for no change ever comes about without dedicated people working together for the common good.

•  Let’s talk about fracking, then work together to stop it by starting something better.

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Posted in fossil fuels, fracking, gas company advertising, hydro-fracking, Marcellus Shale, water safety

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Let’s work together to keep New York green

Posted on May 5, 2011 | Leave a comment
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We feel compassion for the people of Japan and our own Midwest as we see them suffer from forces unleashed by Nature, but most of us here in New York may also have another feeling, somewhat less noble, namely relief that we ourselves are safe, for here, although we might get hit by a tornado or an earthquake at some point, it isn’t so likely as to give us sleepless nights.
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The bad news is that we are under threat of something that is just as terrible, if not so immediate, namely the threat by the big gas companies that they’ll frack (fracture) the earth under the farms, meadows, ponds and streams of western and central New York and thereby poison the nearby aquifers (underground water reservoirs) that all New Yorkers, whether they have wells or municipal systems, depend on for their drinking water, not to mention the animals, birds and vegetation that will also suffer.
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The immediate danger presently facing us in Albany is that the gas companies with their big campaign contributions and powerful lobbies combined with pressure from western/central county representatives to bring home some bacon, will overwhelm normal environmental considerations and get the go-ahead from the DEC sometime this summer to start drilling for gas in western and central New York, at which point we can look down the road to see some of the horrors that have been perpetrated on parts of Pennsylvania.
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Those of us who live in eastern New York have as much cause to be alarmed at this as if we lived farther west, for the chemicals that are being used in the fluid compound that drives the gas out of the ground in Pennsylvania could already be making their way to us through the vast underground porous shale deposit known as the Marcellus Shale, near which lie the underground reservoirs that give us the water that we need for drinking, cooking, and washing, not only in western New York, but also in New York City and in all its northern, western and eastern suburbs.  Since 2005, Halliburton (of Iraq War fame) has drilled close to half a million wells in the US already, with a potential for 200,000 more to come online, half of them in New York, if the state gives them the right to drill.
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Those residents of central and western New York who will be most directly affected are also those most in need of jobs and financial security.  If the State and Federal government will arrange for some of the financial support that goes at present to the big gas-guzzling food conglomerates to go instead to support small farms that are able to make do on much less energy per day, the economy would be in fine shape in no time.  In the old days, a single windmill provided enough electricity to keep a farm going.
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There’s no less wind today than there ever was.  With a few animals, their own agricultural waste and the right chemicals, farms could potentially create enough methane to cook their food and even heat their homes, particularly if the homes had solar panels, courtesy of an inexpensive government program or two to boost the economy.  This would be killing, not just two, but three “birds” with one stone:  1) fixing the economy; 2) showing we can make do with less fossil fuels; and 3) providing Americans with  a healthy diet from small organic farms, thus reducing the stress on Medicare while raising everyone’s quality of life.
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To know how bad this will be for the farmers of western New York––and for us––go to YouTube, type in hydro-fracking, and read what’s happened to landowners in other states who’ve yielded to the temptation of upwards of a million dollars each for the right to drill their land.  Read what is happening next door in Pennsylvania.
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What is fracking?
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Fracking is short for fracturing, that is, breaking and crushing the shale rock that underlies the farms, woods, and streams of western and central New York and the other states involved.  Engineers for the gas and oil companies have devised a giant drill that, deep in the soil, turns horizontal to churn and fracture a section thousands of feet long through the shale that holds the gas in droplets, much as a sponge holds water.  A combination of millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and a variety of very deadly chemicals then forces the broken shale and gas into a facility that separates the water from the gas, sending the poisoned water into holding pits, whence it is supposedly sent to water treatment plants for purification and the gas into tanks to be refined into the stuff we use to heat our homes and cook our food.
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The problem with this process is that millions of gallons of water are being contaminated beyond recall, water that will eventually reach our faucets.  You’ve seen the ads for natural gas that fill the spaces between chapters of every news and talk show on TV, how “natural” gas makes our lives beautiful, how it’s the promise of hope and prosperity for America for at least another hundred years.  Now go to YouTube and see the people who are getting sick.  Whose farms won’t produce.  Whose animals are dying.  See a man open his faucet and hold a match to it.  See it burst into flame.
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How did this happen?
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In 2005 the gas industry successfully lobbied to have removed from the safe water drinking act the requirement that they divulge the chemicals used in fracking. This allowed Halliburton to go ahead and drill wells all over the US, polluting the water with chemicals like diesel fuel and radioactive salts, without anyone being the wiser, including the government and the landowners who sold them the rights.  Finally, this past September the EPA forced disclosure by requiring 9 gas companies to list their additives; 8 responded; only Halliburton held out.  Forced by court judgement to disclose in November, it is only since then that the full story has begun to emerge how much harm has already been done in Pennsylvania, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, and West Virginia.
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What can we do?
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There are solutions.  All over the world individuals and small companies are working to show how we can make fuel out of waste without destroying anything but garbage.   But will we have time?  Unfortunately most New Yorkers still don’t know it’s happening.  Many have never even heard the word fracking.  The rallies in Albany have helped by raising awareness among legislators, but aside from an article or two in the inside pages of local newspapers, these haven’t gotten much attention.  Major print media have acknowledged it with articles in the New York Times, TIME magazine and Newsweek, but nowadays most people get their news from broadcast media, where the issue has basically been ignored (while the gas and oil industries deluge them with ads).
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We need to get the message out to the people of New York.  Here in Rockland County we’re organizing a picnic on June 25 at the upper meadow at Hook Mountain park in Upper Nyack where we can enjoy the wonders of our beautiful landscape, share a meal, hear from environmentalists, and discuss the issues as they stand at that time.  At the same time  we’re hoping that enough environmental groups around the state will create a similar event on that day so that we can promote June 25 to the broadcast media as a statewide event.
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If we can get them the message that the whole state is engaged in the fight to protect our land and water, and they pick up on it, it may help our officials find a way to put a stop to this threat long enough to explore some of the solutions outlined here.  The governor and others involved in the decision-making process may be on the side of the angels, but they are also dealing with some real devils, giant corporate machines on the one hand and on the other, high levels of unemployment and discontent in the rural areas where the drilling will take place.   Our elected officials need help from us.  They need to feel the wind of our concern at their backs so they can act with the authority given them, not by their wealthy campaign contributors, but by “we the people” as proclaimed in the Constitution.
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Please put the date, June 25, noon to five, on your calendars.  Those of you who are involved in environmental activities in your communities, please discuss having an informational event on that date and begin to advertise it.  And please let us know so we can help promote it and promote June 25 as a statewide event.  And keep checking this site. We’ll be posting more information as we have it.  Share this site, and the date June 25th, with your friends and associates.  We need to get the word out.
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Stephanie Hughes
New York Environmental Coalition
Nyack, NY

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Posted in fossil fuels, fracking, gas company advertising, hydro-fracking, Marcellus Shale, water safety

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