Towns could set trend with fracking bans » Local News » The Daily Star, Oneonta, NY – otsego county news, delaware county news, oneonta news, oneonta sports

April 8, 2011

Towns could set trend with fracking bans » Local News » The Daily Star, Oneonta, NY – otsego county news, delaware county news, oneonta news, oneonta sports.

April 8, 2011

Towns could set trend with fracking bans

By Tom Grace Cooperstown News Bureau

Otsego County’s municipalities could be in the vanguard of governments using land use laws to ban natural gas drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing.

Otsego County Planner Psalm Wyckoff said Thursday that county Planning Director Terry Bliss recently attended a gas conference of county officials in the Southern Tier, and “he asked whether anyone there had municipalities moving to ban drilling with zoning.”

Attendees from other counties reported knowing of no municipality within their counties that had done it, she said, adding that the conference was not a statewide meeting.

Other municipalities have taken steps to ban fracking — the injection of horizontal wells with millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals to stimulate production. The city of Buffalo banned it in February, following a similar move by Pittsburgh.

The Buffalo law bans drillers from fracking in the city, and bars the disposal of drilling wastewater or other production wastes within city limits, according to Frack Action, a group that opposes the practice.

Tompkins County has banned fracking on county land. And the New York City and Syracuse watersheds have been exempted from a set of rules being considered by state Department of Environmental Conservation that would allow firms to drill horizontally and frack without a local environmental review.

But these actions are not based on the concept that well-constructed zoning laws can sometimes trump statewide regulation.

As the argument about fracking continues, with industry spokesmen and land coalition members saying it’s safe and opponents warning it threatens drinking water and air quality, four towns in northern Otsego County are moving to ban it, and others in the county are taking steps that might allow them to follow suit.

Three towns, Middlefield, Otsego and Cherry Valley, are moving forward with initiatives to use their land use laws to ban heavy industry, including drilling and fracking. Middlefield is farthest along and might adopt a zoning law at the town’s Tuesday meeting, according to Neal Newman, acting co-chairman of the town Planning Board.

“It could happen that night, but it might also be next month,” he said Thursday.

Town officials want to make sure they have the law worded just right, he said.

Cherry Valley is considering a law that would prohibit “heavy industry,” including “the exploration for natural gas, extraction of natural gas, natural gas processing facilities, exploration for crude oil, extraction of crude oil, oil refineries, coal mining and coal processing.”

Earlier this week, the town’s Zoning Committee voted to forward the proposed Land Use Law to the Town Board with a recommendation for approval.

The town of Otsego has proposed changes to its land use law regarding drilling and fracking, and these are likely to be reviewed at the county Planning Board’s May meeting.

The town of Springfield, which does not have a zoning law, last week sent a proposed law meant to ban drilling and fracking to the county Planning Board for review. But this week, the town withdrew its request for review.

Bliss noted by e-mail that Springfield Town Supervisor Bill Elsey “explained that town officials have chosen to re-examine the document and make some changes. He expects that the referral will be resubmitted in the near future.”

Wyckoff said other towns, including Butternuts, have been looking at ways that drilling and fracking might be zoned out, and Roseboom has been working on a comprehensive plan.

“A comprehensive plan doesn’t regulate anything. It’s a vision, an assessment of where the town is now and what the town’s people want for the future,” she said. `It’s a list of goals and usually includes a lists of actions to achieve those goals.”

While comprehensive plans don’t ban anything, they can lead to land use laws — specific measures to accomplish those goals, which in Middlefield and Cherry Valley, at least, may include a ban on drilling and fracking.

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Pennsylvania Calls for More Water Tests – NYTimes.com

April 8, 2011

Pennsylvania Calls for More Water Tests – NYTimes.com.

ennsylvania Calls for More Water Tests

By IAN URBINA
Published: April 7, 2011

Pennsylvania environmental regulators said Wednesday that they were calling for waste treatment plants and drinking water facilities to increase testing for radioactive pollutants and other contaminants, to see whether they are ending up in rivers because of the growth of natural gas drilling in the state.

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The move follows a March 7 letter that the federal Environmental Protection Agency sent to the state, instructing it to perform testing for radioactivity within 30 days and to review the permits of state treatment plants handling the wastewater.

“Over the past three years, we have taken the actions necessary to protect the environment and public health without stifling the growth of the natural gas industry,” said Michael Krancer, acting secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

He added that his office had sent letters requiring new testing to 14 public water authorities. It also contacted 25 wastewater plants, requesting that those with older permits “voluntarily” begin testing for radium, uranium and other pollutants.

The letters from federal and state regulators follow reports in The New York Times about gas industry wastewater with high levels of radioactivity being discharged into rivers and streams by sewage treatment plants that were not designed to remove radioactive materials.

The state’s letter also comes almost a month after a lengthy conference call among E.P.A. officials and state regulators, during which they discussed how to improve regulation of natural gas industry wastewater in Pennsylvania.

During the call, federal regulators raised concerns about sludge, often called biosolids, from waste treatment plants receiving drilling wastewater.

When wastewater is sent through these plants, some of the heavier contaminants settle out during the treatment process. Radioactive elements like radium may also settle and concentrate in the sludge, which is sometimes sold by treatment plants for use as fertilizer.

E.P.A. officials said they were concerned that the state had not forbidden treatment plants to distribute the sludge for such purposes. Asked by E.P.A. officials about this issue, Pennsylvania regulators said they planned to address it in a new guideline.

“It’s not really a requirement, but it’s in guidance,” said Ron Furlan, an official from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, according to a transcript of the March 15 conference call.

Mr. Furlan added that the reason for the new guidance on biosolids is that “we don’t have a good handle on the radiological concerns right now, and in any case we don’t want people land-applying biosolids that may be contaminated to any significant level by Radium 226-228 or other emitters.”

During the conference call, E.P.A. officials said they had been informed that the Johnstown Plant in western Pennsylvania was still receiving biosolids and distributing them to be spread on fields.

“I don’t know for a fact,” Mr. Furlan said, “but I’m sure that there are some P.O.T.W.’s that are accepting brine natural gas wastewater and are still land applying, but we are still trying to stop that basically.” P.O.T.W.’s refers to publicly owned treatment works, or sewage treatment plants.

A message seeking comment from officials who oversee the Johnstown plant was not responded to. On its Web site, the plant says that it “produces 20,000 tons of lime-stabilized biosolids per year.”

Documents reviewed by The Times in February indicate that the Johnstown plant has accepted wastewater with levels of alpha radioactivity roughly 2,157 times higher than the drinking water standard.

In an interview last December, an official from the Johnstown, Pa., plant said his plant usually accepted 50,00 to 100,000 gallons of drilling wastewater per day.

In Pennsylvania, waste treatment plant operators have to test sludge for a range of contaminants before they can distribute it to be used for fertilizer. The list of contaminants does not include radium, according to a 1999 report by Pennsylvania State University. State officials did not respond to questions about whether these standards had been updated.

During the conference call, E.P.A. officials pushed state regulators to consider re-evaluating all of the permits at wastewater treatment plants that are accepting drilling waste and adding stricter standards for testing of radionuclides and other contaminants.

“It’s basically out of the question,” Mr. Furlan said, rejecting the idea and explaining that “it’s too resource intensive” and that industry would push back too strongly.

Mr. Furlan also said that the real threat of radionuclides from drilling wastewater being sent through sewage treatment plants was that it would settle in the sediment at the bottom of rivers.

The letters sent this week by Pennsylvania regulators made no mention of any plans to test river sediment or to restrict applications on land of sludge from these waste treatment plants that are accepting drilling waste.

“There is no sediment testing as far as I know,” Mr. Furlan said when asked by E.P.A officials. “But if you were really looking for radionuclides, that’s the first place I would look.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 8, 2011, on page A20 of the New York edition.

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The Truth About Climate Change, Still Inconvenient – NYTimes.com

April 8, 2011

The Truth About Climate Change, Still Inconvenient – NYTimes.com.

 

The Truth, Still Inconvenient

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 3, 2011

So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

The deniers’ response was both predictable and revealing; more on that shortly. But first, let’s talk a bit more about that list of witnesses, which raised the same question I and others have had about a number of committee hearings held since the G.O.P. retook control of the House — namely, where do they find these people?

My favorite, still, was Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in which the lead witness was someone best known for writing a book denouncing Abraham Lincoln as a “horrific tyrant” — and for advocating a new secessionist movement as the appropriate response to the “new American fascialistic state.”

The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite the same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that greenhouse gas emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making this up.

Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of “analogies to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably intended to show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental regulation.

But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case.

You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.

Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”

Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for a moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.

For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.

But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

But it’s terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for that’s what it is — has probably ensured that we won’t do anything about climate change until catastrophe is already upon us.

So on second thought, I was wrong when I said that the joke was on the G.O.P.; actually, the joke is on the human race.

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Pa. to expand post-drilling water testing | Press & Sun-Bulletin | pressconnects.com

April 8, 2011

Pa. to expand post-drilling water testing | Press & Sun-Bulletin | pressconnects.com.

Pa. to expand post-drilling water testing

7:01 PM, Apr. 7, 2011  |

7 Comments

Written by
Marc Levy
Associated Press

HARRISBURG — Prodded by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Pennsylvania said it is expanding the scope of water tests to screen for radioactive pollutants and other contaminants from the state’s natural gas drilling industry.

The state Department of Environmental Protection’s acting secretary, Michael Krancer, wrote Wednesday to the EPA to say he has requested additional testing from some public water suppliers and wastewater treatment facilities.

Those steps, he said, were in the works before the EPA’s regional administrator, Shawn Garvin, sent a March 7 letter asking Pennsylvania to begin more water testing to make sure drinking water isn’t being contaminated by drillers. The state’s requests for additional testing, however, were made later in March, Krancer said.

The tests should check for radium, uranium and the salty dissolved solids that could potentially make drilling wastewater environmentally damaging, according to the letter.

In his letter, Garvin pointed out that most treatment facilities are unable to remove many of the pollutants in the drilling water.

Garvin also asked Pennsylvania to re-examine permits issued to the treatment plants handling the waste, saying they lacked “critical provisions.”

Krancer responded that requirements to monitor for substances of concern will be added to permits upon renewal and where warranted.

An EPA spokeswoman, Donna Heron, said Thursday that her agency is reviewing Pennsylvania’s letter.

“We will continue to work closely with the state of Pennsylvania on all the issues involving Marcellus Shale,” she said.

Shale drilling requires injecting huge volumes of water underground to help shatter the rock — a process called hydraulic fracturing. Some of that water then returns to the surface.

Pennsylvania allows partially treated drilling wastewater to be discharged into rivers from which communities draw drinking water.

Some Pennsylvania drilling wastewater is reused or trucked out-of-state for disposal underground. Of the wastewater that was taken to treatment plants in recent months, the great majority went to seven plants that discharge into rivers, including the Susquehanna.

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Gulf Oil Spill

April 7, 2011

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1007197

The Gulf Oil Spill

Bernard D. Goldstein, M.D., Howard J. Osofsky, M.D., Ph.D., and Maureen Y. Lichtveld, M.D., M.P.H.

N Engl J Med 2011; 364:1334-1348April 7, 2011

Article
References

One year after the Gulf oil spill (also known as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the BP oil spill, or the Gulf of Mexico oil spill), the full magnitude of the environmental, economic, and human health effects of this major disaster remain unknown. Despite a growing literature describing the impact of oil spills on health1-28 (Table 1Table 1Studies of Effects of Oil Spills on the Health and Safety of Workers and Communities. and Table 2Table 2Studies of Effects of Oil Spills on Mental Health of Workers and Communities.), it is difficult to respond to the many questions asked by clinicians and the public about this spill or the risk of future spills. The uncertainty is exemplified by the study of 55,000 Gulf oil spill workers by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), which is open-ended rather than focused on a specific number of end points.29 The uncertainty also has consequences for the economic and psychosocial well-being of Gulf Coast residents.

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Oil Spills May Leave More Emotional Than Physical Scars, Study Finds – NYTimes.com

April 7, 2011

Oil Spills May Leave More Emotional Than Physical Scars, Study Finds – NYTimes.com.

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Pollution rules could be eased despite increase in asthma

April 7, 2011

Pollution rules could be eased despite increase in asthma.

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Proposed Bill Allows PA Universities to Keep Marcellus Drilling Revenues for Building Projects | Marcellus Drilling News

April 6, 2011

Proposed Bill Allows PA Universities to Keep Marcellus Drilling Revenues for Building Projects | Marcellus Drilling News.

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Hartwick 4/5/11 Response on Local Environmental Questions

April 6, 2011

Hartwick to Host Lecture, Response on Local Environmental Questions Hartwick College will host the inaugural Dr. Arthur E. Rasmussen H’95 President’s Lecture at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 5 in the Anderson Center for the Arts Theatre on the Hartwick College campus. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Kate Watters, co-founder and executive director of Crude Accountability, and is titled “Thinking Globally and Living Locally: Communities and Corporate Social Responsibility.” Following her presentation, guest respondents Orville Cole, president of Gastem USA; Dr. Mark Davies, Chair of the Department of Education at Hartwick College and Chair of the Oneonta 2030 Taskforce; and Rich Murphy, Otsego County Representative and member of the Natural Gas Advisory Committee, will reply. The lecture and discussion will be moderated by Amy Forster Rothbart, Hartwick College Assistant Professor of Political Science. It is free and open to the public. Watters’ talk will discuss a number of environmental justice and human rights campaigns that have tried to address the inherent inequities of local communities attempting to demand justice and fairness from internationally financed projects impacting their environments, economies, and ways of life. In Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, activists have struggled to make their voices heard internationally, and to understand and impact the multinational structures threatening their communities and ways of life. Working in partnership with these local communities, Crude Accountability has put together a tool kit of strategies for empowering local activists to engage in meaningful ways with international corporations, financial institutions, and the governments that encourage and support globalization as an economic tool for “progress.” Cole will be asked to speak about the challenge to a corporation to act responsibly when being invited into a community by one segment of its members while encountering resistance from another segment. How does a corporation demonstrate a balance between their investor goals and the interests of the community? Dr. Davies will speak about the concept of pseudo-choice, the fact that neither choice in natural gas drilling is beneficial to the entire community. He will attempt to reconceptualize the issue as one of community sustainability through the development of a shared long-term vision and personal accountability. Murphy will speak from the perspective of government; what is its role in determining what is in the best interest of a community and, once determined, how does government protect a community’s interest as well as what are the benefits and limitations of protectionism. Through the presentation of a comprehensive menu of perspectives, accompanied by robust and civil debate, audience members will think deeply about their answers to the following questions: How does a community make a decision about what is in its best interest? What, if any, is the role of government in protecting a community? When a corporation partners well with a community, what are the benefits and limitations? What, if any, are the costs of protectionism? For additional information, contact Alicia Fish, Director of Donor Relations, at 607-431-4021 or fisha@hartwick.edu.

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Citizens of the Shale: Well worth the read as Dallas gas decision looms | Opinion Blog | dallasnews.com

April 6, 2011

Citizens of the Shale: Well worth the read as Dallas gas decision looms | Opinion Blog | dallasnews.com.

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