Fracking Gets Its Own Occupy Movement
Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com
This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen’s lore.
Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb to unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing -- “fracking” for short.
Fracking uses prodigious amounts of water laced with sand and a startling menu of poisonous chemicals to blast the methane out of the shale. At hyperbaric bomb-like pressures, this technology propels five to seven million gallons of sand-and-chemical-laced water a mile or so down a well bore into the shale.
Up comes the methane -- along with about a million gallons of wastewater containing the original fracking chemicals and other substances that were also in the shale, among them radioactive elements and carcinogens. There are 400,000 such wells in the United States. Surrounded by rumbling machinery, serviced by tens of thousands of diesel trucks, this nightmare technology for energy release has turned rural areas in 34 U.S. states into toxic industrial zones.
Shale gas isn’t the conventional kind that lit your grandmother’s stove. It’s one of those “extreme energy” forms so difficult to produce that merely accessing them poses unprecedented dangers to the planet. In every fracking state but New York, where a moratorium against the process has been in effect since 2010, the gas industry has contaminated ground water, sickened people, poisoned livestock, and killed wildlife.
At a time when the International Energy Agency reports that we have five more years of fossil-fuel use at current levels before the planet goes into irreversible climate change, fracking has a greenhouse gas footprint larger than that of coal. And with the greatest water crisis in human history underway, fracking injects mind-numbing quantities of purposely-poisoned fresh water into the Earth. As for the trillions (repeat: trillions) of gallons of wastewater generated by the industry, getting rid of it is its own story. Fracking has also been linked to earthquakes: eleven in Ohio alone (normally not an earthquake zone) over the past year.
But for once, this story isn’t about tragedy. It’s about a resistance movement that has arisen to challenge some of the most powerful corporations in history. Here you will find no handsomely funded national environmental organizations: some of them in fact have had a cozy relationship with the gas industry, embracing the industry’s line that natural gas is a “bridge” to future alternative energies. (In fact, shale gas suppresses the development of renewable energies.)
New York’s “Little Revolution”
While most anti-fracking activists have been responding to harms already done, New York State’s resistance has been waging a battle to keep harm at bay. Jack Ossont, a former helicopter pilot, has been active all his life in the state’s environmental and social battles. He calls fracking “the tsunami issue of New York. It washes across the entire landscape.”
Sandra Steingraber, a biologist and scholar-in-residence at Ithaca College, terms the movement “the biggest since abolition and women’s rights in New York.” This past November, when the Heinz Foundation awarded Steingraber $100,000 for her environmental activism, she gave it to the anti-fracking community.
Arriving in the state last October, I discovered a sprawl of loosely connected, grassroots groups whose names announce their counties and their long-term vision: Sustainable Otsego, Committee to Preserve the Finger Lakes, Chenango Community Action for Renewable Energy, Gas-Free Seneca, Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, Catskill Mountainkeeper. Of these few (there are many more), only the last has a paid staff. All the others are run by volunteers.
“There are so many people working quietly behind the scenes. They’re not in the news, they’re not doing it to get their names in the paper. It’s just the right thing to do,” says Kelly Branigan, co-founder of the group Middlefield Neighbors. Her organization helped spearhead one of the movement’s central campaigns: using local zoning ordinances to ban fracking. “In Middlefield, we’re nothing special. We’re just regular people who got together and learned, and reached in our pockets to go to work on this. It’s inspiring, it’s awesome, and it’s America -- its own little revolution.”
Consider this, then, an environmental Occupy Wall Street. It knows no divisions of social class or political affiliation. Everyone, after all, needs clean water. Farmers and professors, journalists and teachers, engineers, doctors, biologists, accountants, librarians, innkeepers, brewery owners. Actors and Catskill residents Mark Ruffalo and Debra Winger have joined the movement. Josh Fox, also of the Catskills, has brought the fracking industry and its victims to international audiences through his award-winning documentary film Gasland. “Fracking is a pretty scary prospect,” says Wes Gillingham, planning director for Catskill Mountainkeeper. “It’s created a community of people that wouldn’t have existed before.”
Around four years ago, sheltered by Patterson's stay against fracking, little discussion groups began in people’s kitchens, living rooms, and home basements. At that time, only a few activists were advocating outright bans on fracking: the rest of the fledgling movement was more cautiously advocating temporary moratoria.
Since then a veritable ban cascade has washed across the state. And in local elections last November, scores of anti-fracking candidates, many of whom had never before run for office, displaced pro-gas incumbents in positions as town councilors, town supervisors, and county legislators. As the movement has grown in strength and influence, gas corporations like ExxonMobil and Conoco Philips and Marcellus Shale corporations like Chesapeake Energy have spent millions of dollars on advertising, lobbying, and political campaign contributions to counter it.
Shale Shock
Autumn Stoscheck, a young organic apple farmer from the village of Van Etten just south of New York’s Finger Lakes, had none of this in mind in 2008 when she invited a group of neighbors to her living room to talk about fracking. She’d simply heard enough about the process to be terrified. Like other informal fracking meetings that were being launched that year, this was a “listening group.” Its ground rules: listen, talk, but don’t criticize. “There was a combination of landowners, farmers like us, and young anarchist-activists with experience in other movements,” she told me. Stoscheck’s neighbors knew nothing about fracking, but “they were really mistrustful of the government and large gas corporations and felt they were in collusion.”
Out of such neighborhood groups came the first grassroots anti-fracking organizations. Stoscheck and her colleagues called theirs Shaleshock. One of its first achievements was a PowerPoint presentation, “Drilling 101,” which introduces viewers to the Marcellus Shale and what hydraulic fracturing does to it.
When Helen Slottje, a 44-year-old lawyer, saw “Drilling 101” at a Shaleshock forum in 2009, she was “horrified.” She and her husband David had abandoned their corporate law careers to move to Ithaca in 2000. “We traded corporate law practice in Boston for New York State and less stressful work -- or so we thought. New York's beauty seemed worth it.”
When news reports about fracking started appearing, the Slottjes thought about leaving. “I kept saying, ‘What’ll happen if fracking comes to New York? We’ll have to move.’” “Drilling 101” made her reconsider. Then she visited Dimock, Pennsylvania, 70 miles southeast of Ithaca and that sealed the deal.
By 2009, Dimock, a picturesque rural village, had become synonymous with fracking hell. Houston-based Cabot Oil & Energy had started drilling there the year before. Shortly after, people started to notice that their drinking water had darkened. Some began experiencing bouts of dizziness and headaches; others developed sores after bathing in what had been their once pure water.
For a while, Cabot trucked water to Dimock’s residents, but stopped in November when a judge declined to order the company to continue deliveries. The Environmental Protection Agency was going to start water service to Dimock in the first week of January, but withdrew the offer, claiming further water tests were needed. Outraged New Yorkers organized water caravans to help their besieged neighbors.
“When I went to Dimock,” says Slottje, “I saw well drilling, huge trucks, muddy crisscrossing pipeline paths cutting through the woods, disposal pits, sites of diesel spills, dusty coatings on plants, noisy compressor stations -- you name it. So I decided to put my legal background to work to prevent the same thing from happening where I lived. We’d been corporate lawyers before. We know the sort of resources the energy corporations have. The grassroots people have nothing. And they have this behemoth coming at them.”
In May 2009, the Slottjes became full-time pro bono lawyers for the movement. One of their first services was to reinterpret New York’s constitutional home rule provision, which had allowed local ordinances to trump state laws until 1981. In that year, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation Division of Mineral Resources exempted gas corporations from local restrictions.
“I spent thousands of hours on the research,” says Slottje. “And then last August we were brave enough to go public and say the emperor has no clothes.” The Slottjes’ reinterpretation of the provision was simple enough: the state regulates the gas industry; towns and villages can’t regulate it, but what they can do is keep its operations off their land through the use of zoning ordinances.
Zoning Out Fracking
The town of Ulysses is nestled in the heart of the state’s burgeoning wine country in the Finger Lakes region. In 2010, a grassroots group, Concerned Citizens of Ulysses (CCU), asked the Slottjes to speak with members of the town board, which controls Ulysses’s planning and its zoning laws.
The board members opposed fracking, but couldn’t see how to prevent it. While the board talked with the Slottjes, CCU activists drafted a petition. If enough registered Ulysses voters signed on, the board would have the popular backing it needed for declaring a ban. Ann Furman, a retired schoolteacher who helped found CCU and write the document, recalls, “The petition was pretty specific: ‘We the undersigned want to ban hydrofracking in the town of Ulysses.’” A six-month-long door-to-door campaign followed.
“There was a lot of education going on in Ulysses at the town board and at forums, as we were going house to house. Even people who would sign the petition would say, ‘Tell me a little bit more about it.’ And in that next 15 to 20 minutes you would do a whole lot more education.” In the end, 1,500 out of 3,000 registered voters signed. This past summer the Ulysses town board voted to ban fracking.
Middlefield, 119 miles east of Ulysses and home of the grassroots group Middlefield Neighbors, enacted a similar ban. So did Dryden, 22 miles east of Ulysses. An out-of-state gas corporation that leased land for drilling in Dryden is suing to get the zoning ban declared illegal. A Middlefield landowner is suing that town on the same basis. The cases are pending.
Meanwhile bans proliferate. Six upstate New York counties have zoned out fracking, including Binghamton, which declared a ban in December. An organic brewery in Cooperstown, the Ommegang, mobilized 300 other businesses, including Cooperstown’s Chamber of Commerce, to support more bans in the region.
Chefs for the Marcellus, a group headed by Food Network star Mario Batali, has urged Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban fracking at the state level. “Call it home-rule democracy,” says Adrian Kuzminsky, chair of the Cooperstown-based organization Sustainable Otsego. “If local communities can seize control over their destinies, a giant step will have been taken toward a sustainable future.”
This past October, activists were preparing to take on the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). That agency finds itself caught in a perpetual conflict of interest: on the one hand, protecting the environment; on the other, regulating the industries that exploit it. In fact, the 1981 legislation exempting gas corporations from New York’s home rule had been written by Greg Sovas, then head of DEC’s Division of Mineral Resources.
Guidelines for the hydraulic fracturing industry were first issued by the department in late 2009 and rejected in 2010 under withering public criticism. Then-Governor David Paterson declared a moratorium on fracking in the state pending DEC revisions. Revised guidelines appeared this past September in the form of 1,537 mind-numbing pages bearing the title, “Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement,” aka the “SGEIS.”
A World of Water
In study groups and online tutorials, activists prepared to write letters of commentary and protest to the Department of Environmental Conservation and Governor Cuomo, and to speak out in public hearings the department was organizing around the state. Thousands attended these. Pro-gas speakers predictably stuck to the twin themes of the jobs fracking would produce and the economic renewal it would bring about.
Opponents included an impressive line up of scientists (among them Robert Howarth, co-author of last year’s landmark Cornell University study, which established the staggering greenhouse-gas footprint of fracking), engineers, lawyers, and other professionals. A letter sent to Cuomo by 250 New York State physicians and medical professionals deplored the DEC’s failure to attend to the public health impacts of fracking.
Part-time Cooperstown resident James “Chip” Northrup, a retired manager for Atlantic Richfield (ARCO, America’s seventh largest oil corporation), in one public agency hearing called the performances of pro-gas speakers “disgraceful” and the SGEIS “junk science.” Citing an industry study that shows 25% of frack wells leak after five years and 40% after eight, he said, “Everybody in the industry knows that gas drilling pollutes groundwater… It’s not... whether they leak. It’s how much.”
As 2012 began, the movement was demanding that the department withdraw the SGEIS. In mid-January, DEC spokesperson Lisa King said that once all the comments are tallied, “We expect the total to be more than 40,000.” Earlier, agency officials had told the New York Times they didn’t know of any other issue that had received even 1,000 comments. (Ten thousand letters were mailed from the Catskills’ Sullivan County alone on January 11th, just before the commentary deadline.) Gannett’s Albany Bureau has reported that anti-drilling submissions outnumber those of drilling supporters by at least ten to one.
Sustainable Otsego’s website lists 52 serious and fatal flaws in the document. A letter posted at the website of Toxics Targeting, an environmental database service in Ithaca, elaborately details 17 major SGEIS flaws. By January 10th, when the Toxics Targeting letter was sent to the DEC and the Governor, it had more than 22,000 signatures representing government officials, professional and civic organizations, and individuals. (The DEC counts this letter with its signatures as only one of the 40,000 comments.)
At a November 17th rally in Trenton, New Jersey, to celebrate the postponement of a vote on allowing fracking in the Delaware River Basin, Pennsylvania and New York activists pledged future civil disobedience. “The broad coalition of anti-frackers has been operating on multi-levels all at once,” says Sustainable Otsego’s chair, Adrian Kuzminsky. If the governor approves the SGEIS “there will be massive disillusionment with the state government and Cuomo, and from what I'm hearing there will be ‘direct action’ and civil disobedience in some quarters.”
At the moment, in fact, the anti-fracking movement in the state only seems to be ramping up. Should the government approve the SGEIS in its current form, lawsuits are planned against the Department of Environmental Conservation. And a brief “Occupy DEC” event that took place in the state capital, Albany, on January 12th may have set the tone for the future. Meanwhile some activists, turning their backs on established channels, are already working on legislation that would criminalize fracking.
This past November, Sandra Steingraber told a crowd of hundreds of activists why she was donating her $100,000 Heinz Award to the movement. The money, she said, “enables speech, emboldens activism, and recognizes that true security for our children lies in preserving the... ecology of our planet.”
She raised a jar of water. “This is what my kids are made of. They are made of water. They are made of the food that is grown in the county that I live in. And they are made of air. We inhale a pint of atmosphere with every breath we take... And when you poison these things, you poison us. That is a violation of our human rights, and that is why this is the civil rights issue of our day.”
Ellen Cantarow’s work on Israel/Palestine has been widely published for over 30 years. Her long-time concern with climate change has led her to explore, at TomDispatch, the global depredations of oil and gas corporations. Many thanks to Robert Boyle, sometimes called “the father of environmentalism on the Hudson,” for sharing his expertise for this article.
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You get much more than natural gas from these wells. You get the feed stocks for plastics and various chemicals. This is bringing back the chemical/plastics industry in the US which feeds into increased manufacturing and jobs in general.
Forbidding fracking would be a devastating blow to national prosperity for the foreseeable future. If you want manufacturing to make a comeback here, cheap chemical/plastic feed stocks are an essential component to any significant manufacturing build up. Its a process with problems that have to be mitigated, but outright bans are purely NIMBYism responses that are not at all in the national interest.
Or this statement,
"fracking has a greenhouse gas footprint larger than that of coal." Um, you mean fracking a well over a few days is somehow is worse than the carbon dioxide released when millions of tons of coal are continuously burned for coal powered plants? The numbers don't add up.
And I wanted to add about Greg Sovas --
Mr. Sovas now is a principal in a company that wants to "recycle" fracking water. http://www.fracwaterrecyclers.com/management.html
Yes, Nuclear energy has the may produce more energy than any other source, however, I personally believe that more research needs to be done before this can be used predominantly. We are still studying the effects of nuclear waste. I believe that what we really need is to put more time and effort into renewable energy sources such as the sun, wind, water, geothermal energy and energy from bio-mass. Plants have the most efficient method of converting sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into energy. "But an artificial photosynthesis system or a photoelectrochemical cell that mimics what happens in plants could potentially create an endless, relatively inexpensive supply of all the clean "gas" and electricity we need to power our lives -- and in a storable form, too"- science.howstuffworks.com. If people put more time and focus into these sources, we wouldn't need to rely on natural gas.
See, that simplistic choice is a concept someone of limited scientific education would come up with.
Life is never that simple!
No offense!
As for solar or wind we will need a few more superfund sites like Tar Creek to have enough batteries for when the sun or wind does not blow. If you are worried about water then lithium is a worse choice than fracking.
We all know the damage dams have done to the environment.
Of course geothermal also requires hyrofracturing or hyrdoshearing.
As for bio-mass that requires lots and lots of water also and I don't believe we can grow our way into energy independence without significant reduction of lifestyles.
The Mineral Rights of this Country are being sold to the lowest bidder and highest political contributors. Stop letting the Government sell the wealth of the citizens and fire them when they do - vote for somebody who actually gives a crap for a change.
However, I would like to see some articles that would suggest methods for replacing the gas with another form of energy. There really is only one feasible method, nuclear power. Until the greens drop their opposition to nuclear power, we will not have a way out of this crazy carbon economy.
They want solar because wind kills birds. But to get solar to work we will need a dozen; Tar Creek Superfund sites like in Picher and Cardin, Oklahoma to make it work.
But some will say no we can use lithium. Not a much better source if your opposition to fracking is clean water!
http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/Lithium_Problem_2.pdf
Well we could build a bunch of nuclear plants next to the ocean and extract lithium?
No easy solutions but the hysterical groups among us aren't helping.
The author of this article is a perfect example. Telling half trues and lies just like a Climate Change Denier.
What's makes this whole situation really funny is Anti-Frackers quote a movie by JOSH FOX and the Climate Change Deniers quote talking heads from FOX NEWS. How ironic is that?
Climate Change Deniers & Anti-Frackers have two more things in common, if the science is against you, it has to be wrong and your political views are what are scientifically correct. Only people that have yet to comprehend the concept of cause & effect think like this.
Is Fracking a perfect system? Of course not, but after 400,000 examples and a hand full of mistakes we all intellectual know this, it's just that some of us let our emotions govern our intellect.
Anti-Frackers & Climate Change Deniers share equal scientific I.Q.'s - very low scientific I.Q.!
And both sides share one more quality - it is OK to lie for their cause because the end justifies the means.
The vast majority of my friends and neighbors in NYS that are anti-fracking have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours reading and assessing the science.
Until this last year, the gas companies had a lock on what research was done and when or if it was publicized. From water quality, air quality, economic indicators, social indicators, to seismic activity, the science is increasingly and repeatedly showing that this is a nightmare.
For what? Energy independence? Not likely. Gas companies are lobbying hard to sell to China and foreign companies are buying up leases (France, for example, which has banned fracking there but is buying leases in NYS.)
I have seen NO ONE in the anti-fracking movement lie. Not once. Not ever. Why should they? If fracking is so fabulous, why shouldn't they stand back and just rake in the profits?
The lying is being done by the industry.
First let's look at this silly statement, "Gas companies are lobbying hard to sell to China"!
Links?
Ever study geography? You think the Russians with their easy access natural gas and their lucrative markets in Europe are going to let U.S. companies move into China? Here's your example of a lie, a really silly one.
As spending hundreds if not thousands of hours reading and assessing the science - lay off the propaganda read some peer review papers.
No offense.
From: dennisbaker2003@hotmail.com
Dennis Baker
penticton bc canada V2A1P9
250-462-3796
dennisbaker2003@hotmail.com
How do we get there from here?
Think globally, and this is a global idea.
7 Billion humans generate vast quantities of excrement.
I believe this excrement is capable of providing all human electrical demands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiolysis
Right now hydrogen is perceived as a negative by product, of Nuclear Energy, when it should be the product, as the Pentagon has considered.
reference info
Request for Information (RFI) on Deployable Reactor Technologies ...
The cover sheet and abstract must be submitted by Friday, April 30, 2010 by 4:00 p.m. (Eastern) to the following email address: DARPA-SN-10-37@darpa.mil
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=d0792af88a6a4484b3aa9d0dfeaaf553&...
Large scale conversions sites are intended to replace fossil fuel powered electrical facilities
the Primary Source of Carbon Emissions.
Pure water is the commodity of the future. Because fracking and pollution in general will make H2o hard to find ... corporations and financiers will make gazzillions. There will be a per barrel standard (just like oil). Water futures contracts will proliferate.
CUOMO, you don't seem to get it ... yours will be a legacy of pollution resulting from your support for fracking.
What does the EPA say; if anything, about the amount of fresh water available? We can get by without oil-based products (though the transition, taking as long as it has, may not be easy); but how many hours can we get by without fresh water? It is a matter of hours vs years as much as greed-based power vs common sense.
It is time common sense prevailed.
The same thing is being done down here in North Texas. People are now starting to wake up and realize the damage that is being done. There are a few groups starting to spring up to challenge the drilling companies.
Get a grip: China is now the world's largest polluter. Wealthy white people like this author should go preach to the Chinese; I won't hold my breath waiting for them to do so.
How can the US have clean, air, water while at the same time resettling more than a million people a year here many of whom bring large families with them.
Look up the future population growth rate of US..then get back to me.