Why We Should Not be Fracking for Natural Gas
RDA - Responsible Drilling Alliance
RDA Bus to Harrisburg on June 7th
Seats are still available on the RDA bus heading to the rally and lobby day in Harrisburg next week. The purpose of this state-wide event is to show support for the broad and sweeping regulatory changes needed to protect Pennsylvania citizens from contaminated drinking water, toxic chemicals in our rivers, hazardous air pollution, safety problems, and destruction of our state forests; consequences that have already begun, as the gas industry is rapidly industrializing our farms, forests and fields.
The bus will make 3 stops both down and back as follows:
7:30AM Depart Williamsport (from Giant Market on Williamsport’s Golden Strip)
8:00AM Depart Lewisburg (from Big Lots on Rt 15)
8:25 AM Depart Shamokin Dam (from Lowes on Rt 15)
9:45AM Arrive State Capitol Harrisburg
3:00PM Depart Harrisburg
4:20 Arrive Shamokin Dam
4:45 Arrive Lewisburg
5:15 Arrive Williamsport
Seats are $15, sold below cost. Please contact Carmalene Churba at 610-389-3220 or e-mail carm...@responsibledrillingalliance.org to make a reservation. Please plan to arrive at least 10 minutes before scheduled departure. Bus will be prompt. Kindly forward this message and invite your friends and neighbors.
Why We Should Not be Fracking for Natural Gas
Adrian Kuzminski presented the following speech to the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on May 24, 2011.
My name is Adrian Kuzminski. I'm the Moderator of Sustainable Otsego, an advocacy group in the Cooperstown, NY area. We have played a key role in the growing grassroots resistance to fracking for natural gas in the Marcellus shale region. As part of this effort, we have brought together a collection of documents, "Frack Facts," which covers most aspects of gas extraction from leases to pollution problems to effects on economics and property values. This collection, periodically updated and expanded, currently has hundreds of items running to over 2000 pages.
This document was originally undertaken at the request of Congressman Michael Arcuri in 2008. Earlier versions of it were submitted to the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation and to the EPA during their recent public comment periods on gas drilling. Copies are available here today. My remarks are based on the findings presented in these documents. Our conclusion is that the practice of fracking for natural gas should NOT be allowed to go forward.
Let me go through the major pro-industry arguments one by one, and point out why they fail:
1. "We have an insatiable appetite for energy and need to find replacement resources for oil."
Natural gas is not a replacement resource for oil; it is an extension of oil, with all its problems. It is a polluting fossil fuel apparently as bad if not worse than oil and coal. The methane gas, which escapes during the full cycle of production and distribution, ends up polluting groundwater locally, and compounding the greenhouse effect globally. A recent Duke University study of drilling in PA and NY show methane frequently migrating thousands of feet to contaminate drinking water. Methane is a worst greenhouse gas than CO2 by many orders of magnitude. Robert Howarth's recent research at Cornell -- based on data from the state-of-the-art Russian gas system -- shows unacceptable levels of methane emissions from wellheads, compressors, and distribution lines. There is nothing "clean" about natural gas; it's just another fossil fuel.
We should be putting our diminishing investment capital into conservation and sustainable, decentralized, renewable energy sources. Investment in a dead-end technology like fracking starves out the sustainable renewables of the future, leaving us that much worse off. The short-term benefits go mainly to a few leaseholders and the gas companies. Every dime invested in natural gas is a dime in T. Boone Pickens' pocket, and that's a dime denied to desperately needed renewables. We can no longer afford to subsidize an obsolete oil and gas industry that provides energy and profits only at the cost of cannibalizing our most basic resources, both locally and globally. We shouldn't have to choose between water and energy. Shale gas development and subsidies to increase gas use are bridges to nowhere.
2. "We need national energy independence and the Marcellus shale will help provide it."
Just as Greshem's law tells us that 'bad money drives out good money,' so in ecological economics bad energy drives out good energy. A bad energy like natural gas requires us to sacrifice more and more of our environment to keep our over-consumptive lifestyles going a little longer; in effect, we are burning the furniture in the house to stay warm. That's not energy independence; that's energy suicide, whether the fossil fuel comes from Pennsylvania or Saudi Arabia. We're addicted to bad energy for a good reason: because there isn't enough good energy to keep all the lights on. To get to energy independence we need conservation, rationing, and downsizing of our fossil fuel lifestyle, plus all-out investment in renewables. It's going to be rough.
3. "Marcellus gas is an economic shot in the arm to depressed rural economies who need it most."
Who wants to buy a house in a gas field? Realtors report residential buyers avoiding leased areas. Many banks will not give mortgages on leased property, and many insurance companies will not cover for damages from gas extraction.
Fracking for natural gas compromises property rights through "compulsory integration" and other unfair leasing practices. It leaves communities to pay for a host of direct and indirect costs of a degraded environment. It puts water and air at serious risk of long-term and permanent pollution. It introduces a transient but intensive, widespread heavy industry on a massive scale. This immediately compromises public health, tourism, recreation, cultural and educational settings, residential development, organic agriculture, and other value-added industries that depend on clean water, air, and soil, not to mention community life in general.
Fracking for natural gas replaces steady economic activity with a destructive boom and bust cycle, in the process reducing property values and the tax base, while raising mitigation costs for local governments. All of this is a drain, not a boost to the economy.
In my part of NY, where Cooperstown is an international tourist destination, many prominent businesses and institutions have seen the threat and called for the outright prohibition of fracking. These include the Ommegang Brewery, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce, the medical staff of Bassett Healthcare, and the Board of Trustees of the Village of Cooperstown. In typical language, Cooperstown "unanimously supports all efforts to stop natural gas drilling and hydrofracking in New York State." These reactions are similar to many others across NY and the Northeast.
In sum, the transient jobs and short-term tax opportunities the industry promises do not appear to compensate for the multiple losses the industry brings to the community.
4. "Drilling allows farmers to continue farming instead of going bankrupt."
The main agriculture growth in the Marcellus region has come from the small-scale, organic, localvore movement, for whom drilling is death. A gas well puts nearby water and air at risk, something neither organic farmers nor the value-added industries they support can tolerate. If agriculture has a future it's in this new non-industrial, specialty, boutique kind of farming; the kind we see in Europe and read about in the Leisure section of the New York Times. Here, local varieties, quality, and high environmental standards are the key. The old-time dairy industry in the Northeast died a generation ago, a victim of a punishing national milk-pricing system and mega-farming in the mid-West, and it's not coming back anytime soon. Most leased land in the Marcellus region is not under cultivation; much of it is held by absentee owners. Those gas royalty checks will be great for a few lucky leaseholders in rural communities -- if their wells come through as predicted. Little if any of this money is going to be invested in agriculture.
5. "Industry CAN extract gas safely under the watchful eye of our regulators."
If drilling is so safe, why does the industry insist on exemption from environmental review? The fracking process uses very high pressures -- many thousands of psi -- to forcefully release gases trapped in shale; these gases and fracking residues can follow fissures and faults to reach and contaminate groundwater.
This concern, confirmed by the recent Duke University study, was a principal reason for NYC to call for a ban on fracking in its upstate NY watershed. They did so on the basis of the Hazen and Sawyer study, perhaps still the most thorough independent study done of fracking in the Marcellus shale region. If fracking is too dangerous for NYC's watershed, then why isn't it too dangerous for the whole Marcellus region?
Millions of gallons of toxic wastewater are produced by each fracked well. As reported in a recent New York Times series, this water is a permanent hazardous waste, often containing radioactive residues and other toxins for which there is no satisfactory purification or disposal option: either it will be diluted into surface waters, or injected underground.
Dr. Theo Colburn of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange has identified many of these chemicals not only as carcinogens but also as endocrine disruptors. Endocrine disruptors are unusual stealth toxins for which no safe thresholds have been found.
Methane and other volatile organic compounds are emitted in the vicinity of the production and distribution of natural gas, compromising air quality. Ground-level ozone concentrations in previously pristine rural areas with fracking, like Wyoming, now rival those of metropolitan areas.
Until now, deregulation and defunding pushed by the industry have left state and federal agencies unable to effectively monitor gas industry activities, let alone regulate them. By exempting itself from public accountability for its actions, the industry -- ironically -- has only succeeded in undermining its own credibility. So far fracking has not been done safely, and apparently can't be, and there is no "watchful eye."
Some concluding points:
The true long-term harms and costs of natural gas extraction, considered cumulatively, decisively outweigh, in our assessment, any short-term benefits. Yet these direct and indirect costs are conspicuously ignored or dismissed by the industry. Defunding and deregulation have ensured that few objective studies of natural gas extraction have been done, allowing the gas industry to claim, as the tobacco industry used to do, that harms are unproven.
Individually, fracking harms are as well documented as can reasonably be expected. If they have not received the attention they deserve it is because the industry has kept the dots from being connected. But when you connect them, the rationale advanced for public policy promoting natural gas as an energy source using current technologies disappears.
Indeed, reports of the baleful consequences of drilling have become so widespread as to be undeniable. Thousands of incidents -- spills, contaminations, blowouts, etc. -- are now on record. In upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the drilling areas, awareness of these multiple harms has galvanized local citizen responses into a widespread, grassroots movement against fracking.
The national public should know that local communities in the frontline of gas development in New York State, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere are mounting an impressive resistance. This is an unreported grassroots revolution, an outbreak of populist democracy, of people fighting to take back their communities. Given the failures to date of federal and state governments to protect local communities, municipalities are taking matters into their own hands.
NY has home rule, which allows cities and towns to prohibit uses such as heavy industry, including fracking for natural gas, through local zoning and land use laws. A number of towns in NY -- in Otsego, Tompkins, and Sullivan counties, among others -- have begun passing or improving such ordinances, which effectively prohibit fracking within their borders. The cities of Buffalo NY and Pittsburgh PA, and a number of PA townships, have also banned fracking within their borders.
In sum, the entire issue of natural gas and other fossil fuel production needs to be reframed. The conventional financial analysis of profit and cost fails to calculate the true costs involved. In addition to conventional marketplace calculations, we need to determine the oil and gas industry's longer-term ecological and social costs.
Though we don't have all the tools needed to make these calculations definitively, the approximations we have gathered in our document collection strongly suggests that the industry, if it continues to develop, will do more harm than good.
Adrian Kuzminski is the author of FIXING THE SYSTEM: A HISTORY OF POPULISM, ANCIENT & MODERN, and other works. Contact: 607-547-8586; 279 Donlon Road, Fly Creek, NY 13337
Conference scheduled at Ithaca College
Dubbed the “Epic No Frack Event”, a day-long conference is scheduled for Saturday, June 25th at Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY. Mark your calendar. Registration details to follow.
Speakers:
Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., Ithaca College, Dept. of Environmental Studies & Sciences, author of Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis and Living Downstream. Recipient of Rachel Carson Leadership Award, heralded as “the new Rachel Carson” by the Sierra Club, named last year as one of the “25 visionaries who are changing the world” by Utne Reader magazine
Weston Wilson, former EPA environmental engineer who challenged the EPA study thatconcluded that fracking “poses little or no threat” to drinking water supplies.
Robert Howarth, Ph.D., Cornell University, David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology & Environmental Biology; a preeminent scientist who has done extensive research on the impact of natural gas on climate change.
James Northrup, former gas/oil industry planning manager
Janette Barth, Ph.D., President of J.M. Barth & Associates, Inc., an economic research and consulting firm. As a landowner in Delaware County, NY, in the Marcellus Shale region, Dr. Barth authored a report, “Unanswered Questions About the Economic Impact of Gas Drilling in the Marcellus Shale: Don’t Jump to Conclusions”.
Debra Anderson, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker ofSplit Estate.
Joseph Heath, Esq., General Counsel of the Onondaga Nation who has worked tirelessly on environmental and social justice causes.
Walter Hang, President of environmental database firm Toxics Targeting.
Thomas Shelley, Ph.D., Health & Safety Officer from Cornell Univ., retired.
Stephen Penningroth, Ph.D., Founding director of the nonprofit Community Science Institute and its certified water testing lab; author, “Essentials of Toxic Chemical Risk”.
Earl Robinson, M.D., Respiratory and Critical Care Specialist who spent $50,000 of his own money in a battle to keep radioactive PA drill cuttings out of a NY landfill.
Doug Stern & Lukie Strydom, Two farmers from Karoo, South Africa will speak about the threat of shale gas development to South Africa’s heartland.
Crystal Stroud, PA resident poisoned with barium from her drinking water after a gas well was drilled in her neighborhood.
Leslie Lewis, Esq., Trial attorney who has worked with Dimock, PA residents for recovery of damages to their property and person, speaks on the legal rights of citizens. Mel Packer, of Marcellus Protest; helped to protect Pittsburgh with a fracking ban.
Stephen Cleghorn, Ph.D., Organic farmer with a doctorate in sociology; writer, researcher and activist for a drilling moratorium. His 50-acre farm is a split-estate threatened by drilling.
Craig & Julie Sautner, Residents of Dimock , PA whose water well was poisoned and property value devastated by fracking.
Tara Meixsell, Colorado resident and author of Collateral Damage.
Rick Roles, appeared in Gasland and Split Estate. His Colorado ranch was destroyed by fracking.
Jeff & Jodi Andrysick, farmers turned filmmakers of All Fracked Up: Water Isn’t Water Anymore
David Morris, filmmaker of Frack.
Shira Golding, filmmaker of Frac Attack
Cecile Lawrence, Ph.D., 2010 NY Green Party candidate for US Senate, advocate for health & social change, and writer.
Simona Perry, Ph.D., social geographer and community ethnographer working in the rural Susquehanna River communities in PA to open up national dialogue about the environmental, economic, social, and political impacts of the rapid development of Marcellus Shale.
Robert Myers, Ph.D., Prof. of English and Director of Environmental Studies at Lock Haven U of PA; life-long resident of northcentral PA and an activist for 3 years.
Matt Greacen, eco-entrepreneur; owner of Nature’s Chemistry LLC.
Yvonne Taylor, teacher; Co-Founder of Gas Free Seneca: group in opposition to the storage of LPG and natural gas in salt caverns near Seneca Lake.
Sam Maggio, inventor, lives off-grid, speaks on green energy now
Barbara Jarmoska, lives on 20 unleased acres in the Loyalsock State Forest region on PA – an area that has been called the “Marcellus Sacrifice Zone”; life-long environmental activist, teacher, business owner, and writer; serves on the Board of Directors of the Responsible Drilling Alliance, a grassroots group based in Williamsport, PA.
Movies:
All Fracked Up: Water Isn’t Water Anymore, by Jeff + Jodi Andrysick
Frack, by David Morris
Split Estate, by Debra Anderson
Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D.
Frac Attack, by Shira Golding
Fracking Hell: The Untold Story, Earth Focus + UK’s Ecologist Film Unit/LinkTV Production
“What You Need to Know About Natural Gas Production”prerecorded powerpoint presentation by Theo Colborn, Ph.D.
Music:
Jayne and Bram Pomplas
Lisa Wright with Uncle Joe & the Rosebud Ramblers
Janet Burgan
Joel Cabrera
Wendy Woods