RENewsletter July 29, 2012

RENewsletter | July 29, 2012

The Free environmental newsletter from RochesterEnvironment.com

“Our Environment is changing: Keep up with the Change.”

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[07/22/2012 – 07/29/2012]

Opening Salvo: “Towards a more realistic baseline for sound actions on Fracking”

As the deadline for lifting the New York State moratorium on Fracking (horizontal Hydraulic fracturing) looms, the news, rallies, and articles are getting more strident. There’s a hullabaloo over a recent study on Fracking that has critics questioning the motives of the study Local watchdog group blasts Texas university fracking study - The Buffalo News and there’s criticism on the other side that the anti-fracking groups are cherry-picking the science to push their agenda Some experts fault fracking critics’ science. Bringing everything to a fevered pitch is the Stop the Frack Attack rally this weekend at the capital: Fracking protesters to storm national Capitol Saturday - MPNnow

Hard to imagine that anyone in New York State doesn’t know about the Fracking controversy by now, but I suppose there are. And, I’ll bet there are many who still don’t care. As long as the quiet majority in our state think they might get a job, free our energy security from other nations, get a windfall by signing a lease on their property for drilling rights, or not get sidetracked from the fun stuff they’re doing by this issue, they will remain mum. As our species tends to do, far too many will sit back and think this environmental issue has nothing to do with them.

One person at least who isn’t remaining quiet is NYS Senator Avella-- , Ranking Minority Member, Standing Committee on Environmental Conservation. Hold on to your hat and listen to Senator Avella speak about Fracking on this 11 minute video: Sen. Avella on Fracking Forum.

Regardless of where you stand on this issue, it does threaten to be the biggest environmental story in our state since Love Canal. If Fracking comes there will be change, which brings up many questions. Are local moratoriums, like the one just passed in Rochester, NY, going to hold or will Home Rule be gutted by the gas industry, making us second class citizens in our own state? (In Pennsylvania, their weaker home rule law was upheld: Court Rejects a Ban on Local Fracking Limits - NYTimes.com) Is the New York State Department of Conservation going to have enough employees to monitor the new Fracking wells: Regulation: How many wells per inspector? In some states, answer is elusive -- 07/25/2012 -- www.eenews.net.

But the question that all of us, no matter where we stand on this issue, should be asking is whether we have a realistic baseline for sound actions on Fracking at all? In other words, do we know the state of our water and our public health well enough so that when there is a drilling accident, we’ll be able to identify damage due to gas drilling? One group is not waiting for the state to chase their tails over this issue and is on it:

Water monitors prepare for fracking in New York | Innovation Trail On a humid Wednesday in July, Kathy Cronin crouched in Pierce Creek in the City of Binghamton. The creek empties into the Susquehanna River just upstream from the city's water treatment plant. Houses line the creek banks and the sounds of the freeway drown out the urban waterway's churn. Cronin, who lives in Binghamton, dipped a small, electronic meter into the water. Another local resident, Scott Lauffer, stands just downstream, waiting to hear Cronin read off results. (July 24, 2012) Innovation Trail

Over the last 10 millennia, as humans developed agriculture, burned forests, killed top predators, or decimated and brought to extinction many other species, it never occurred to our brainy species to assess whether or not our actions would irrevocably change our environment—maybe even cause it to collapse. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are supposedly smart enough to do that before we chase headlong into some fantastic venture. Our scientific discoveries for the last hundred years have given us a great wealth of knowledge about our environment and revealed many of the repercussions of our actions on our environment. For example, our agricultural practices contributed to the greatest man-made environmental disaster to date on this continent, the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.

What’s the point of finding all that out, educating all those environmental experts, if we aren’t going to use that knowledge before we do something crazy—instead of after? There is no getting around this fact: we can and do change our environment, our climate, our water quality, and much, much more—and usually not in a good way.

Here’s a great quote by Steve Nicholls, author of Paradise Found – Nature in America at the Time of Discovery:

“Part of the reason for writing this book is to illustrate the sheer abundance of nature just a few centuries ago, to give a more realistic baseline against which to judge our current actions.” (Page 42)

It’s worth pausing and thinking about this statement before we rush off and radically change our New York State environment with Fracking. Do we know the state of our environment well enough before we start Fracking, or are we so blinded by our immediate wants that we’ll continue to act the way we have in the past?

Too often we evaluate the impact of our solutions for on the shifting baseline of our own experiences, our religious views, whatever constitutes conventional wisdom at any given time, our prejudices, on the lack of research, and our notion of economics—which by the way has always treated our environment as an externality, a magical resources generator and our collective toilet. We’ve been irresponsible stewards of our environment for a long time and much of it is due to an economic theory that is oblivious to Nature. Why not start thinking about our environment (our very life support system) as an intelligent species would do—look before you leap.

An analogy: Before you start downloading and installing a beta program that tells you it has not been completely tested and is probably full of bugs, wouldn’t you create a restore point on your computer’s hard drive? A restore point is a spot along a continuum of your operating system’s history, that point just before you start downloading that iffy program, so when everything goes haywire, you can just bring your operating system back to the place before you tried installing that program.

In other words, because Fracking includes an industry reluctant to divulge what chemicals it’s using, and a state reluctant to make them divulge that information, shouldn’t we find out for ourselves what the place looked like before they meddled in it?

Shouldn’t New York State do a comprehensive monitoring of our environment and find out how it is behaving before we launch thousands of Fracking sites? Why is the state sitting on its butt while concerned citizens have to go out and do their job? Why isn’t the state monitoring our water now so we’ll know what we are risking? Because once we allow Fracking, we’ll be another state than the one we are now.

FrankRegan@RochesterEnvironment.com (Click on my email for feedback)

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* Got news? | Go to my blog: Environmental Thoughts - Rochester, NY or Tweet me @ http://twitter.com/#!/FrankRrrr On Twitter and Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RochesterEnvironment and Examiner/RochesterEnvironment, I post local environmental events, news, and commentary as soon as it happens. If you think this newsletter, which continually informs our community on our local environmental news, events, actions, is worthwhile, please encourage others to sign up. We who care about our environment and future need to ‘Occupy’ the Rochester media to change how the public views environmental news.

The great conundrum of our times is that in a time of rapidly occurring Climate Change and a rapid disintegration of the environment that we need to thrive and survive, mainstream media still marginalizes environmental concerns. [Check often for this continually updated list on the possible consequences of Climate Change in our region--supported by facts.] If there isn’t a quick and substantial change in how environmental concerns are reported, edited, and chosen in mainstream media, the public will continue to believe that environmental concerns are merely special interest matters, issues they can avoid if they choose. How can we inform the public and monitor our environment without abridging our Freedoms--in enough time to safe ourselves?

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet. -- Carl Sagan

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NewsLinks – Environmental NewsLinks – [Highlights of major environmental stories concerning our area from the past week]

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Updates – Daily Updates – [Connecting the dots on Rochester’s environment. Find out what’s going on environmentally in our area—and why you should care? Clicking on -DISCUSSION – will take you to my blog “Environmental Thoughts, NY, where you can add your comments.]

7/28/2012 - Seeing Climate Change is believing: Flash Drought in U.S. Explained in 14 Seconds | Climate Central This animation shows the rapid progression of the U.S. drought during the late spring into mid-summer, based on U.S. Drought Monitor maps. (July 24, 2012) Climate Change | Climate Central
7/28/2012 - I often get requests to solve issue with wildlife encounters. Sure RochesterEnvironment.com provides a lot of information, but how to handle a bear or a coyote should be left to the experts: Nuisance Species - NYS Dept. of Environmental Conservation "It is a different matter when a skunk is in the woods compared to when a skunk is under the porch or digging up the yard. Encounters with wildlife have become more numerous as a result of urban growth into an animal's natural habitat. Information on this page is intended to help landowners learn some best practices for preventing negative encounters with wildlife. Need a Professional to Help? Contact a Nuisance Wildlife Control Operator "
7/28/2012 - Critical, getting baseline information about our environment before our planet warms more. Besides this (see story below) startling discovery that Climate Change may be destroying the ozone layer over the US, is this, “there are no historical data about how much water vapor has been moved upward by such storms over time.” As scientist look more deeply into how Climate Change is going to change our environment they are doing to come across items like how warming affects our planet’s ozone layer and when they do there won’t be the information they need to nail this down. Increasingly, I believe, because we don’t have an idea of what a healthy environment actually looks like, a baseline from which to measure change against, we will be hampered severely in our attempts to adapt and mitigate Climate Change. more...
7/27/2012 - For those who do ‘get’ #climatechange and feel despair, maybe it’s too early for that. Some efforts work: What the Beijing Olympics could mean for climate change | Innovation Trail As the 2012 Summer Olympics get underway this weekend, the world's attention will be focused on London. But a team of scientists has recently been keeping a very close eye on the city that hosted the games four years ago: Beijing. They've discovered that China's efforts to cut back on traffic and clean up its air during the 2008 Olympics could have big implications for curbing climate change. (July 26, 2012) Innovation Trail
7/27/2012 - Public official linking #climatechange with present drought in an election year? Oh no, I don’t think so, it’s too toxic. Activists Call on Agriculture Secretary to Discuss Links between Drought and Climate Change FoodDemocracyNow! and Forecast the Facts In light of the crushing drought currently sweeping the nation, more than 10,000 Americans are calling on Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to directly address the massive implications of manmade climate change for our entire farming sector. Scientists are clear that climate change is already leading to more extreme weather, such as longer and more severe droughts. But in multiple press appearances last week, Secretary Vilsack dodged questions about what drought-stricken farmers need to know about climate change, saying that he’s “not a scientist,” and the department is focused on the “near term.” (July 26, 2012) EcoWatch: Uniting the Voice of the Grassroots Environmental Movement
7/26/2012 - Interesting speculation about whether a local politician is a climate change denier, but the critical issue this election year is whether Romney or Obama are. Might be good for our mainstream media to get on that. U.S. Rep. Buerkle — sweltering, yes, but still doubting? | 520 – An Environmental Blog | Rochester Democrat and Chronicle As my colleague Jessica Alaimo noted in a blog Tuesday, the League of Conservation Voters has denounced U.S. Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-Onondaga, for being a global-warming denier. The nationwide group placed the first-term congresswoman among its “Flat Earth Five” because of statements she made two years ago casting doubt on whether the climate is, indeed, changing. “Rep. Buerkle’s extreme views put her at odds with scientists, the Pentagon and her constituents,” the group’s president said in a statement. (July 25, 2012) [more on Climate Change in our area] 520 – An Environmental Blog | Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
7/26/2012) - There are those who think #cliimatechange is a future issue only dealing with polar bears and Arctic ice melt, but this one will hit you in the stomach: Food Prices to Rise in Wake of Severe Drought - NYTimes.com WASHINGTON — Scorching heat and the worst drought in nearly a half-century are threatening to send food prices up, spooking consumers and leading to worries about global food costs. On Wednesday, the government said it expected the record-breaking weather to drive up the price for groceries next year, including milk, beef, chicken and pork. The drought is now affecting 88 percent of the corn crop, a staple of processed foods and animal feed as well as the nation’s leading farm export. (Jult 25, 2012) The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia [more on Climate Change in our area]
7/26/2012 - How does New York State stack up on state’s ability to monitor Fracking? Does NYS have enough inspectors for wells that are going to be drilled? Regulation: How many wells per inspector? In some states, answer is elusive -- 07/25/2012 -- www.eenews.net Figuring out the number of wells each oil and gas inspector must handle in North Dakota is pretty simple. In Pennsylvania, easy. In Oklahoma? Not so much. A recent overview of state shale gas regulations showcases major gaps in data available to compare, state by state, the force of oil and gas agencies. Oklahoma, for one, doesn't know how many producing wells it has. (July 25, 2012) E&E Publishing -- The Premier Information Source for Professionals Who Track Environmental and Energy Policy.
7/26/2012 - Maybe there are more benefits to bicycling than reducing greenhouse gas emission and increasing your health. Check this out:Bicycle Benefits ®

"Bicycle Benefits is a progressive bicycling program designed to reward individuals and businesses for their commitment to cleaner air, personal health, and the use of pedaling energy in order to create a more sustainable community. The program's continual growth decreases parking demand, increases helmet use, and improves cyclists' safety and health by putting more people on bikes. This site has all of our Bicycle Benefit Business Members that can be found by clicking the links to the left (including their discounts/rewards, addresses, and maps to get there). Get your helmet sticker at any of the participating Bicycle Benefits Business Member locations or become a participating Business Member today and start experiencing Bicycle Benefits! "