US Citizens Ramp Up Battle Against Fossil Fuel Industry

Friday, September 9, 2011 by the Inter Press Service

by Kanya D'Almeida 

 

WASHINGTON -- The fight against oil and gas giants is heating up in the U.S., with new waves of protest and civil disobedience springing up across the country.


The last three weeks saw over 1,200 people arrested outside the White House in Washington D.C. in protest of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. If approved, it would travel from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, through the heartland of the U.S., threatening huge swathes of fresh water supplies and destroying communities and wildlife habitats along its way, activists say.

Then, on Wednesday, hundreds of local residents, scientists and environmentalists stormed the Shale Gas Insight conference in Philadelphia, demanding a moratorium on increased hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – which they say is contaminating water supplies, devastating animal habitats and paving the way for a major "public health hazard".

Organized by a coalition of environmental and ecological justice groups, including Food & Water Watch (FWW), Protecting our Waters and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, the "Shale Gas Outrage" rally continued Thursday with close to 2,000 demonstrators chanting "Ban it Now!" on the sidewalks lining the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

The groups are urging a ban on drilling in Marcellus Shale, the gas- rich underground rock formation beneath Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and New York, which is home to one of the biggest deposits of natural gas on the planet.

The gas is extracted using a drilling process that pumps millions of gallons of water, as well as sand and chemical additives, at high pressure to "fracture" or crack into gas-bearing rock.

While oil and gas companies have repeatedly insisted that the process is safe, environmentalists and residents from areas that have borne the brunt of fracking argue that the process contaminates underground fresh water supplies, poisoning consumers as well as the environment.

"Our immediate goal is to get a moratorium on fracking in the Delaware River Basin because, as of right now, not a single cumulative health assessment has been made about the safety issues involved in the extraction process," Francesca Lo Basso, communications director of the Shale Gas Outrage, told IPS.

"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently conducting an analysis, but until the results of that study are made public, the process needs to be halted," she said.

"The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is issuing a permit every two to 30 minutes, without having any idea what this could mean for the community or the environment," Lo Basso stressed. "The DEP's own website has recorded 11 violations by gas companies each day, yet there is no regulation of the process."

According to FWW, 15 million people rely on the Delaware River Basin for their fresh drinking water, a fact that has spurred over 80 state and local governments around the U.S. to take action to protect their residents from the impacts of the drilling process.

"People [across the U.S.] are sick from, and sick of fracking," FWW's executive director Wenonah Hauter said in a press release Wednesday.

"We can't stand by and allow the natural gas industry to endanger any more lives or natural resources. We're here to send a message to the industry that it's time to put public safety before corporate interests by banning fracking throughout the U.S," she added.

The gas companies are not backing down, claiming a range of economic incentives in favor of fracking.

"These extremist activists want us to [halt] drilling altogether," Aubrey McClendon, the chief executive of Chesapeake Energy Co., told conference participants Wednesday. "Which is fine if you don't like heat in your home, electricity in your office, a job to go to, and food on your plate."

A study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and undertaken by the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie was released Wednesday, claiming, among other things, that oil-and-gas development could add 1.1 million U.S. jobs over the coming decade and rake in 36 billion dollars in federal revenues by 2015.

The study advocates for an immediate loosening of federal regulations, calls for a green-light on the Keystone XL pipeline and urges the government to deregulate areas where drilling is currently banned, including the Atlantic and Pacific Coast, Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

In turn, critics accuse the industry of fear-mongering.

"It's shameful that the oil and gas industry is seeking to horse trade environmental regulations on the false premise that it will create jobs," Hauter said Wednesday.

"Even though President (Barack) Obama is under fire to stimulate the economy, deregulating oil and gas drilling won't necessarily create jobs. Instead it will increase industry profits and pose an unacceptable risk for our nation's water resources, which are absolutely vital to our economy," she said.

According to Mitch Jones, a senior legislative and policy analyst in the water program of FWW, the API study that is currently being widely circulated among lobbyists and industry CEOs makes no promises of employment.

"If you look closely at the report, you will notice it only talks about the possibility of job creation," Jones told IPS.

"Which means we have to take the energy industry's word that it will reinvest the money it might save on energy standards into increased production and, therefore, job creation, rather than channeling those savings into profits," he added.

"With prices low, and a huge glut in the energy market already, this is a tough call," Jones told IPS. "If corporations are allowed to drill as freely as they want to, they can't avoid a bigger drop off in prices, especially with the economy still stagnant and no increased demand."

Empty Threats Unraveled"It is deeply disconcerting that the industry not only has a swarm of lobbyists here in Washington, as well as in all the state legislatures where decisions about drilling are made, they've also got multimillion dollar advertising campaigns pushing their agenda and commissioning think tanks to put out reports in support of the industry," Mitch Jones of FWW told IPS.

Dangling potential economic destruction and mass job losses as a result of clean energy practices is an old industry tactic.

In 1997, while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was attempting to secure stricter regulations on ground-level ozone emissions – or smog – corporate giants such as the American Petroleum Institute, Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers were spending millions to convince the public that tougher clean air standards would "cripple the U.S. economy" by destroying millions of jobs.

Over 14 years later, a comprehensive study by the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that the industries' predictions were completely unfounded.

CAP's detailed analysis of economic growth and employment rates at the time found that smog- choked metropolitan areas that were forced to implement tighter regulations "experienced very similar economic growth [and] employment rates to the nation as a whole".

In fact, CAP found that average GDP per capita in areas predicted to be "devastated" by the EPA's revised standards grew by .7 percent from 2004-2008, while it grew by .87 percent nationwide, a negligible difference.

Similarly, unemployment in the 54 areas affected by the 1997 ozone standard grew by 2.21 percent from 2004- 2008, while unemployment nationwide grew by 2.3 percent.

According to CAP, this data makes abundantly clear that the fear generated by the energy industries was baseless.

Industry Giants Come Full CircleIndustry lobbyists launched an almost identical attack on the most recent attempt by the EPA to update smog pollution.

Last Friday, President Barack Obama announced that he would be abandoning the new air pollution rule brought to him by EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, a move that shocked scores of environmentalists in his camp who had drafted celebratory press releases ahead of the official announcement, so convinced were they that their president would not renege on yet another promise.

According to the EPA, smog is created when pollutants from motor vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions and gasoline vapors from power plants combine with sunlight to form air that "could trigger a variety of health problems including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, congestion and [worsening] of bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma."

In 2006, the EPA revisited the science and found that ground- level ozone was actually doing far more damage than simply aggravating respiratory problems - it was actually killing people.

In July 2010, administrator Jackson informed the Senate that the Bush-era smog standards allowing 75 parts per billion (ppb) - which will now remain in place as a result of Obama's decision - "were not legally defensible given the scientific evidence in the record" and called for a tougher standard of 60 ppb, to no avail.

Immediately after the president's announcement Friday, CAP said in a statement, "Today's [decision] grants an item on Big Oil's wish list at the expense of the health of children, seniors and the infirm. A new standard for smog would save 4,300 lives and prevent 7,000 hospital visits and tens of thousands of cases of asthma and other serious respiratory illnesses each year."

Factory Farms Produce 100 Times More Waste Than All People In the US Combined and It's Killing Our Drinking Water

"Factory farms are dangerous to the environment; they are ticking time bombs of manure just waiting to be spilled into public waters." 

By Jill Richardson, AlterNet
Posted on May 25, 2011

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently delivered a major victory to factory farms. Under a 2008 EPA rule, any confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) "designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in a manner such that the CAFO will discharge" animal waste must apply for a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit under the Clean Water Act. The livestock industry ridiculed the notion that a farm must apply for a permit to discharge manure whether it intended to discharge it or not. And while, when phrased that way, it might sound ridiculous to you too, the details of the case betray a different story.

David Kirby, author of Animal Factory, The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, tells story after story in his book of factory farms discharging waste irresponsibly -- sometimes on purpose, and sometimes not. As Karen Hudson, whose story is told in the book, says, "Factory farms are dangerous to the environment; they are ticking time bombs of manure just waiting to be spilled into public waters."

The simple fact is that factory farms produce over 100 times more waste than all American humans produce combined. In the past, a pastured cow might disperse waste over an acre or more; how can farmers responsibly deal with the waste of 1,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 or more animals when they are crammed in tightly together? And, unfortunately for the farmers, they are often working under contract for major meat or dairy conglomerates who own the animals and leave the farmer with a tiny profit margin (or none at all) -- plus all of the liability, dead animals and manure. Therefore, in addition to simply disposing of manure responsibly, they also need to dispose of it cheaply if they are to stay in business.

In Karen's story, the CAFO in question perhaps did not intend to discharge manure. The farmer, if given the choice, may not have decided to apply for a permit. In February 2001, heavy rains coupled with melting snow and ice raised the levels of the nearby megadairy's manure lagoon to just inches below the rim. Panicking, the farmer, David Inskeep, decided not to hire tankers to haul away his cows' waste, as investigators had ordered him to do. Instead he ran hoses from the lagoon to a nearby ravine over a mile away and pumped two million gallons of "a foamy, brown-yellow stew" into it. The 10-foot-high berm that dammed the ravine gave way, and the result was "the worst livestock spill in Illinois history."

The permits in question in the recently decided case would require farmers like Inskeep to make a plan for how to handle animal waste, and to follow that plan or face penalties. A version of this law has been in place for decades, but the details of the law have changed several times in the last few years. The major question of the case is: Can a CAFO be held liable for failing to apply for a permit?

Under a 1976 rule, all large CAFOs (those with more than 1,000 cattle or equivalent amounts of other species) and some medium-sized CAFOs were required to have permits to discharge waste. If a CAFO discharged waste without a permit, it faced civil or criminal penalties. The only permissible, unregulated pollution was "agricultural stormwater discharges," when a storm carried animal waste into navigable rivers.

This changed in 2003, when a new rule required all CAFOs to apply for permits or to ask the EPA for a "no potential to discharge" determination to become exempt from needing a permit. Additionally, the 2003 rule required all CAFOs to design and implement a "Nutrient Management Plan" (i.e. a plan to responsibly deal with animal waste). So long as the farmer followed his or her Nutrient Management Plan, any pollution of waterways was to be included in the "agricultural stormwater discharges" exemption.

After some legal wrangling, both by industrial farming interests and by environmental groups, the rules were changed again in 2008. The 2008 rule only requires CAFOs to apply for a permit if they are "designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in a manner such that the CAFO will discharge." Unless a CAFO can prove it does not meet that criteria (and thus does not need a permit), a discharge of manure would result in penalties both for the discharge itself and for failure to have a permit.

The recent court decision ruled that the EPA has no right to require CAFOs to apply for permits unless they actually discharge waste. Once a CAFO discharges waste, however, the court decided that the EPA can then require it to apply for a permit.

The industrial farming groups -- the National Pork Producers Council, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Oklahoma Pork Council, United Egg Producers, the North Carolina Pork Council, the National Chicken Council, the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association, Dairy Business Association Inc., and the National Milk Producers Federation -- also challenged the EPA's right to force CAFOs to design and implement Nutrient Management Plans and to penalize them if the plans are not followed and waste is discharged into waterways. On this issue, the court sided with the EPA.

What is the impact of this decision? Could it perhaps have no impact at all, as the CAFOs exempted from applying for permits are those that are not polluting? Sadly, this is likely not the case. By forcing CAFOs to apply for a permit, the EPA was forcing them to create a plan to manage the large amounts of waste their animals would inevitably generate. Without planning ahead for responsibly disposing of manure, how many CAFOs will wait until the last minute, like Inskeep, and then dump millions of gallons of manure into the environment? Even though the EPA will still be able to penalize them once they do, the damage to the environment will already be done.

These are not hypothetical scenarios. Just ask Rick Dove, an ex-Marine who serves as a Riverkeeper on his beloved Neuse River in North Carolina. After retiring from the Marines, he lived his dream of becoming a small-scale commercial fisherman on the river briefly -- until enormous hog operations moved in, each producing as much waste as a town of 20,000 people, and their waste killed the fish.

Dove has seen hog farmers oversaturating their "sprayfields" -- cropland intended to absorb the unfathomable amount of manure generated by the hogs -- resulting in contamination of local waterways, but he has also seen the farmers illegally dumping the manure directly into the rivers. And then he's seen the Neuse turn red, green, yellow, orange, and black with various types of algae blooms that precede fish kills that kill millions or even a billion fish at a time.

In addition to irresponsible spraying or dumping of manure, there are the many lagoon spills that occur. In these cases, farmers likely have no intention of dumping manure into the environment, but it happens all the same. Kirby says that when writing his book, "there were so many lagoon spills that my editor had me take some out." And because such spills are accidents, farmers won't necessarily apply for permits ahead of time, since they don't intend to discharge manure.

The losers in this story are not just "tree-hugging" environmentalists or even fishermen. In far too many cases, the losers are drinkers of water -- which is all of us.