• Keystone Recreation, Park and Conservation Fund
• Growing Greener (the Environmental Stewardship Fund)
• farmland preservation program and more

The PA Land trust explains what this could mean and how YOU can help. Please do your part to preserve Pennsylvania!

If this proposal moves forward — and it will unless conservationists push back hard — there will be NO state money for community parks, open space protection, farmland preservation, community-centered environmental restoration and other conservation efforts. There will be NO Growing Greener grants, NO Keystone grants, NO allocations for counties for farmland preservation.

Tell your state senators and representatives to take a stand against any budget that would cut these critical sources of funding. Instead of raiding environmental funding, the General Assembly should raise additional funds by levying a severance tax on natural gas drilling, with a significant portion dedicated to Growing Greener.

PLEASE ACT IMMEDIATELY:

1ST ACTION – Call your state representative and senator and demand that they stop the raid on environmental funding. Tell them that these funding sources are critical to your community’s well being. Tell them that environmental programs have already undergone far more than their fair share of cuts in recent years.

2ND ACTION – Follow up with an email and old-fashioned letter.

3RD ACTION – Get as many people as you can to do the same. We have to put immediate pressure on legislators and keep the pressure up as the budget enters a critical negotiation stage.

Find Your Legislators

Only strong outcries from many people can stop this. Pennsylvania needs your voice!

American Rivers Names Upper Delaware River Most Endangered in U.S.

Philadelphia Leaders to DRBC: Cease Construction on Exploratory Wells; Deny Water Withdrawal, Drilling Permits

Industry Response:  Unconventional Drilling, Conventional Obfuscation Strategies

Iris Marie Bloom

Philadelphia:  June 3, 2010

The Upper Delaware River, the drinking water source for 17 million people across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, is at risk from shale fracking for natural gas, a process that poisons groundwater and creates toxic pollution.  This threat landed the Upper Delaware in the number one spot in America’s Most Endangered Rivers 2010, a report released yesterday by the national nonprofit group American Rivers.

In Philadelphia yesterday, American Rivers spokesperson Liz Garland opened a press conference at City Hall, “In shining the spotlight on gas drilling in the Upper Delaware River, we chose a time when preventive action is still possible.  The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) is making major decisions right now which will affect the fate of this river, and the people who drink this water have a chance to weigh in on that decision.”

Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper, said, “The Delaware River is the longest free flowing river east of the Mississippi, much of it designated Wild and Scenic.  Many, many people have worked and billions of dollars have been spent to bring the Delaware back to life after decades of abuse.  As we face the advent of gas drilling in the Upper Delaware River Watershed, we face the possibility of losing everything.”

Philadelphia City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, who introduced a successful resolution earlier this spring calling on the DRBC to ban shale gas drilling until an Environmental Impact Statement is assessed for the Delaware River Watershed, drew parallels to the Gulf disaster. “The BP rig which blew up was an exploratory well.  It had special exemptions.  We have to learn something from this.  The DRBC is exempting exploratory wells right here in our watershed, which supplies our drinking water.  The have to stop letting companies drill without a DRBC permit, and they should deny the Stone Energy water withdrawal permit, and all drilling-related permits, until we have the Environmental Impact Statement.  We don’t need a disaster here.”

Albert Appleton, former Commissioner of New York City Department of Environmental Protection, asserted, “If the true environmental costs, including construction, extraction, and cleanup, were included in the cost of drilling, this fossil fuel would be unaffordable and drilling impractical.  This is not something we need, and it’s not something we want.  This stuff is not clean-burning at all.  This is not green, and if it goes forward, it will make it even harder to get to the green energy economy.  We can build that economy right now.  We are being asked to risk our clean water, environment, and public health, and for what?”

“If the Delaware River Basin Commission does not carry out its mandate to protect the waters of the Delaware River, New York and Pennsylvania will have an economic, social, and public health disaster of unprecedented dimension,” Appleton concluded.

After elected representative, officials, and professional environmentalists concluded their remarks, community leaders had their say.  “As we know from the coal mine and Gulf disasters, accidents happen, particularly when short cuts are taken to increase profits, and those accidents will endanger Philadelphia’s drinking water,” commented Gerry Kaufman, a spokesman for Protecting Our Waters.

Dennis Mulligan, a lawyer, commented, “BP said the environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico would be ‘very, very modest,’ and the gas companies are giving us the same empty assurances.  We don’t want bottled water advisories telling us we might not want to drink our tap water, as already happened in Pittsburgh due to Marcellus Shale waste.”  Mulligan lives near the Delaware River in New Jersey and directs a agency serving immigrants and refugees in Philadelphia: “I count on clean Delawre River water in both states,” he said.

Reverend Jesse Brown, a longtime public health advocate, emphasized, “This gas drilling presents an unacceptable risk to public health, and it also puts us on exactly the wrong road: extracting even more fossil fuel instead of investing in renewable energy.”

“Let’s wait til the studies are in,” concluded speaker after speaker at Philadelphia’s press conference responding to the American Rivers designation yesterday.  State Representative Gregory S. Vitali, Philadelphia Water Department Director of Watersheds Howard Neukrug, Cliff Westfall of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, Jim Black of Clean Air Council, and Robert J. Ryan, Ph.D, P.E., of Temple University’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, also spoke.

Unconventional Drilling, Conventional Obfuscation Strategies

Gas industry public relations spokespeople responded to the designation of the Upper Delaware River as endangered by providing assurances of the industry’s long experience and clean record.

“I don’t know how they can conclude that, when hydraulic fracturing has never harmed a drop of drinking water,” said Jim Smith, spokesman for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York. “In 60 years of hydraulic fracturing across the country, more than a million wells have been fracked, including 14,000 in New York,” he said in a Times-Leader story by Mary Esch on June 2.

In fact, the Pennsylvania DEP slapped a $240,000 fine on Cabot Oil and Gas for contaminating drinking water in Dimock, PA, this spring.  Cabot was ordered to cap several wells and provide drinking water permanently for fourteen of the affected families, who had been forced to buy their own drinking water for over a year after unconventional gas drilling began.  The DEP action was one of the most punitive in Pennsylvania history.

Last year, a New York Times series documented hundreds of incidents of water contaminated due to drilling; ProPublica and Toxics Targeting have also reported on water contamination incidents.  Filmmaker Josh Fox’s documentary, GASLANDS, shows health impacts from gas drilling out West and in Pennsylvania.  Because the industry is exempt from major provisions of federal environmental regulations including the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Superfund Law, Safe Drinking Water Act, and wastewater treatment laws, the EPA has had difficulty studying the safety of hydraulic fracturing.  The EPA has now launched a new two-year study of hydraulic fracturing, acknowledging that their 2004 study, which only looked at fracturing in shallow, or conventional, formations, was flawed.

The industry claim that “we’ve been fracturing for 60 years” is technically true but clearly designed to obfuscate a more important truth.  Fracturing in unconventional formations such as shale only began in 2002, and only began in earnest after the Halliburton Loophole of 2005 granted the industry multiple exemptions from federal environmental laws.  Compared to conventional drilling, unconventional gas drilling uses about 67 times more water and toxic chemicals, and the flowback waste from deep underground is much more dangerous and difficult to treat.  Unlike conventional brine, flowback contains, in addition to the original toxic fracturing chemicals, arsenic, Radium 226, and is five times saltier than the ocean due to ancient ocean deposits underground.

Because much of the toxic contamination comes from inevitable spills and accidents, creating fish kills and wildlife deaths as well as long-term contamination of streams and wetlands, the industry public relations spokespeople parrot the phrase, “hydraulic fracturing,” to mean the fracturing process itself rather than other aspects including fracking chemicals transportation, mixing, other stages of drilling, flaring, waste storage, flowback reuse, transportation, and disposal.  Aside from direct toxic chemical contamination and methane migration, there are cumulative negative environmental impacts to air, climate, land, and ecosystems as a whole.

The industry’s success in winning exemptions, delaying studies, and ensuring that permits are expedited at breakneck speed in Pennsylvania has puzzled some.   Common Cause released a study, “Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets,” on May 11, 2010, elaborating on the campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures of the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania.  The report sheds light on the industry’s sheer might.

“This industry has an enormous financial incentive to exaggerate their confidence, minimize risk, and provide unrealistic assurances to the public,” commented Brady Russell, another of the speakers in Philadelphia yesterday.  Russell, Director of Clean Water Action’s southeastern Pennsylvania office, gave an anecdote of receiving a public rebuttal from a Chesapeake Energy spokesperson who said that Russel’s account of the 17 cows who died in Louisiana after drinking fracking fluid was wrong.  “That wasn’t fracking fluid, that was ethylene glycol,” the Chesapeake Energy spokesman claimed.

Brady Russell, being a fact-checker, went back and did his research.  Official Louisiana state documents showed that the cows died, bellowing and bleeding from the mouth, after drinking fracking fluid.

In Pennsylvania, farmers in Clearville and Hickory have reported losing over 100 head of cattle due to drilling operations (Weekly Press, April 2010: “Shale Shame.”  Out  West, veterinarians and ranchers report losses of goats, and mares have difficulty reproducing due to the endocrine disrupting impacts from gas drilling (Amy Mall, NRDC columnist; GASLANDS footage).  In Dimock, Norma Fiorentino reported that local wildlife disappeared after drilling started.  “They’ve all left, rabbits, deer, they’re all gone from here now,” she told a reporter last month, on May 15th.

Senator Casey, Congressman Sestak Speak Up for Delaware River

Senator Bob Casey, co-sponsor of the FRAC Act, a bill which would restore the Safe Drinking Water Act and require drilling companies to disclose exactly which chemicals they are using and injecting underground to fracture the shale, releasing natural gas, sent a representative, Kurt Imhof, to the gathering.  Congressman Joe Sestak issued a statement, which read in part:

“I would first like to commend the work of American Rivers, Protecting Our Waters, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, and Damascus Citizens for Sustainability for their efforts to educate the public on this important issue.  The Commonwealth is blessed with an abundance of natural resources. We should never have to sacrifice our health and safety, clean air and water, natural lands, and communities to companies seeking access to our natural wealth. I applaud efforts, such as this, to bring to light the very real risks of underregulated development.  I am not convinced we currently have strong enough environmental, health, and property safeguards — and I am not satisfied that people will have the access to just compensation should even the best safeguards fail.”

On Wednesday, June 2, American Rivers, a national environmental organization based in Washington, D.C., will launch a campaign to protect the Upper Delaware River.  This river system provides drinking water for 17 million people, including Philadelphia.  It is also valued for its biodiversity and beauty.  Three events this week will highlight the threat to the Upper Delaware River, now at risk due to imminent gas drilling.  Drilling companies plan to hydrofrack thousands of wells within the watershed.

The Philadelphia press conference takes place at 12 noon Wednesday at City Hall, Fourth Floor Caucus Room.
 
It is preceded by an event in Narrowsburg, NY at 11 AM.  American Rivers will also hold an event in Washington, D.C. on June 4th regarding the state of the nation’s rivers.
 
In Philadelphia, City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, who earlier introduced a successful City Council resolution calling for a ban on gas drilling in the watershed until an Environmental Impact Statement is assessed, will speak.  Albert F. Appleton, internationally respected water systems expert, former Commissioner of New York City DEP and former director of NYC Water and Sewer systems, will speak, along with PA State Rep. Gregory S. Vitali of the 166th Legislative District Delaware County, Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown of the 190th Legislative District, Philadelphia County, and Howard Neukrug, Director, Philadelphia Water Department Office of Watersheds.  Community and faith-based leaders, including Reverend Nate Walker and Reverend Jesse Brown, along with environmental groups including Delaware Riverkeeper Network, Protecting Our Waters, Clean Air Council, Damascus Citizens, Clean Water Action, and PennEnvironment, will urge action from citizens and policymakers to protect the Delaware River.
 
In Narrowsburg at 11 AM on June 2nd, at the town Gazebo overlooking the Upper Delaware River, the following speakers will focus attention on the threatened river: Congressman Maurice Hinchey, representing the 22nd District of New York; Marcia Nehemiah, representing Damascus Citizens for Sustainability; Ramsay Adams, Executive Director of Catskill Mountainkeepers; Sean McGuinness National Park Superintendent of the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River; and Bruce Ferguson of Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy.

###
 
American Rivers is the leading national organization standing up for healthy rivers so communities can thrive. American Rivers protects and restores America’s rivers for the benefit of people, wildlife and nature. Founded in 1973, American Rivers has more than 65,000 members and supporters, with offices in Washington, DC and nationwide. Visit www.AmericanRivers.org

Contact:
Amy Kober, American Rivers, 206-898-3864
Patrick Carullo, Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, 570-685-8774
Tracy Carluccio, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, 215-369-1188 x 104
Iris Marie Bloom, Protecting Our Waters, 215-840-6489

Regulations that would safeguard our drinking water and public health have cleared one hurdle but we need you to speak out now to keep the momentum going.

Last week the Environmental Quality Board (EQB) approved new regulations that would protect our drinking water, rivers and streams from gas drilling wastewater and wastewater from other industries including mining – thanks to your help.

Now these vital regulations will go before the Independent Regulatory Review Commission (IRRC), as well as the House and Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committees. These new standards will force drillers and other polluters to pay the costs of protecting our waterways; it’s no surprise that they are fighting back, urging the IRRC and legislators to stop the regulations.

We need you to counter the big industry lobbyists by sending a message to the IRRC and key legislators. Email them now, and let them know that the health of residents, and our economy, relies on clean safe drinking water and rivers and streams.

HB 2235, which would put a three year freeze on new leases for gas drilling in state forests, was passed by the House yesterday by a vote of 157-33! In addition to the freeze on new deep drilling leases in our state forests, the legislation would give the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) discretion to decide if state forests can withstand additional drilling, and requires the agency to compile a yearly report on the impact of drilling in state forests.

Go to PennFuture’s Website to read more or to send your local representative a letter thanking them for voting to pass HB 2235.

Drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale is growing at a breakneck pace – often destroying water supplies and damaging local communities, with no tax in place to restore and repair the damage and reimburse our citizens – it’s clear that taming the Marcellus Shale drillers is Job 1 for next year.

National gas drillers from around the world are coming to Pennsylvania to tap one of our most valuable natural resources – natural gas in the vast Marcellus Shale formation that underlies most of the state. Some of the drillers are conscientious about protecting the environment, but many are not. This brings tremendous risks to our land and water. And right now, those risks are being shouldered by local communities and environmental treasures.

In almost every state that has substantial natural gas deposits, drillers must pay a severance tax on the extraction of the resource to compensate for the depletion of the resource and for damage done to the environment and public infrastructure.

But not in Pennsylvania. This past year, we successfully pushed for a vote in favor of the tax in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, but the Republican-controlled Senate and the oil, gas and drilling industries blocked any consideration in the Senate.

We are determined to push the tax through in 2010…

Visit PennFuture’s website to learn how you can help! Also check out our past posts on Marcellus Shale to learn more about the issue.

Here’s some of the latest news from PennFuture:

A gathering solution for stormwater?
Sprawl, inadequate policies, lack of effective legal and financial tools for local governments, and changing climate patterns all add up to extraordinary problems with stormwater and flooding in Pennsylvania. On Tuesday House Local Government Chair Robert Freeman (D-Northampton) will ask his committee to approve House Bill 1390, comprehensive stormwater management legislation.

HB 1390 requires local governments to address existing stormwater problems and to plan to avoid new problems. It also allows local governments to form stormwater authorities, which will give them the right to charge fees to those who are causing the problems. In Philadelphia, PennFuture advocated for and defended a similar program, which we believe will lead to better stormwater management practices across the city.

PennFuture supports HB 1390 and urgescommittee members to support the bill on Tuesday.

Help protect Pennsylvania’s water from drilling
The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has proposed new regulations for industrial wastewater that is high in TDS, which stands for total dissolved solids (or totally disgusting stuff).

DEP needs the new regulations to ensure that wastewater generated at Marcellus Shale gas drilling sites does not damage streams and rivers. Marcellus wastewater contains high levels of TDS in the form of salts and can be two to four times saltier than seawater. High TDS levels can harm aquatic life, ruin the taste of drinking water and render river water unfit for industrial users.

Please voice your support for these important new regulations that limit the volume of TDS that new sources of pollution can discharge into our rivers and streams. Next week the Environmental Quality Board is holding public meetings in Cranberry (Butler County), Ebensburg, Williamsport and Allentown to receive comments on the TDS proposal. Citizens can also send written comments on the proposed rule to:

Environmental Quality Board
P.O. Box 8477
Harrisburg, PA 17105-8477
regcomments@state.pa.us

Read more on the PennFuture site!

But TTF staff recently attended a DRBC presentation held by the American Water Resources Association: Philadelphia Metropolitan Area Section, and we were saddened to learn that natural gas drilling will take place in the Marcellus Shale regardless of the efforts of environmental organizations.

According to Carol Collier, Executive Director the DRBC, “We are looking to provide directional signs, not stops signs” in discussing the proposed drilling. But from our perspective, some projects deserve to be stopped!

The headwaters for the Delaware River is one of the areas likely to be significantly impacted by this project. The Delaware River serves nearly 15 million citizens in parts of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Hydrofracing, the process used to obtain natural gas, uses somewhere between three to five million gallons of water per well. About 40-60 percent of that water is reclaimed as wastewater and contains not only additives from the hydrofracing process, but heavy metals, dissolved solids and chemicals picked up from the layers of earth it has passed through. A satisfactory plan for treating this wastewater has not yet been developed. Where will this wastewater go except right back into our drinking water? We can’t stand for big business polluting OUR drinking water!

To read more about natural gas extraction from the Marcellus Shale deposits click here. To voice your opinion about the natural gas extraction, read our previous post on this topic.

From the article:

Philadelphians tend to take their abundant, cheap drinking water for granted. However, the quality, quantity, and price tag of clean water in the Delaware River basin, source of Philadelphia’s drinking water, may be at risk due to a new natural gas extraction process called hydrofracking, or fracking. Fracking uses huge amounts of water, mixed with toxic chemicals and injected at high pressure, to fracture the Marcellus Shale, releasing the shale’s natural gas. The Marcellus Shale formation stretches from Ohio through Pennsylvania to New York and is believed to contain enough natural gas to fuel the U.S. for 13 years. But fracking creates polluted wastewater (”frac water”) which is several times saltier than the ocean and contains heavy metals and toxic chemicals. Municipal wastewater treatment facilities are not equipped for this level of pollution, and according to Sierra Club testimony before Congress, “a technological solution may be years away.”

Chesapeake Appalachia, LLC has applied to the Delaware River Basin Commission for approval of a major hydraulic fracturing project for exploration and development of natural gas wells in New York and Pennsylvania. This could have some major consequences for Philadelphia’s drinking water. However, public comment on this plan is welcome. Written comments should be mailed to Commission Secretary, DRBC, P.O. Box 7360, 25 State Police Drive, West Trenton, NJ 08628-0360. They also may be faxed to “Attn: Commission Secretary” at (609) 883-9522 or emailed to paula.schmitt@drbc.state.nj.us. All written comments should include the name, address, and affiliation (if any) of the commenter, along with “Chesapeake Withdrawal” in the subject line.

More information, including the entire plan, is available on the DRBC website.

You can also find a sample letter at The Delaware Riverkeeper Network.

Mexico City becomes the second large metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw the bags. San Francisco in March 2007 enacted an ordinance that gave supermarkets six months and large chain pharmacies about a year to phase out the bags. Los Angeles is set to impose a ban if the state of California does not enact a statewide 25-cent fee per bag by July.

About 90 percent of the bags used in the United States are not recycled.

Read the whole thing here.