A GRASSROOTS PERSPECTIVE: Is the DEC Spending Taxpayer
Funds on Propaganda to Promote ‘Safe’ Fracking?
A Look at New
York Governor Cuomo’s Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel
Part I:
Why
Did Governor Cuomo Establish the Hydrofracking Advisory
Panel?
Part II: How Appointed "Environmentalist"
Organization Representatives Betray, Rather than
Represent the Environmentalist Movement Against
Hydrofracking
Part III: Conclusions and
Demands
Part I
Why Did Governor Cuomo Establish the
Hydrofracking Advisory Panel?
On July 1, Joseph Martens, New York Governor Cuomo's
selection for Commissioner of the Department of
Environmental Conservation (DEC), announced
his choices for an advisory panel
on hydraulic fracturing.
The taxpayer-funded panel’s initial* 13 members were:
Eric A. Goldstein -
Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council
Kate Sinding -Senior Attorney, Natural Resources
Defense Council
Mark Brownstein - Chief Counsel, Energy Program,
Environmental Defense Fund
Robert Hallman - Board Chair, NY League of
Conservation Voters
Robert Moore -Executive Director, Environmental
Advocates
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – President, Waterkeeper
Alliance; Honorary member NRDC; Board of LCV
Kathleen McGinty - former Chair of White House
Council on Environmental Quality under Pres. Clinton
Stan Lundine - former New York State Lieutenant
Governor
Thomas W. Libous – New York State Senator (R,
District 52) Deputy Majority Leader
Donna Lupardo – New York State Assembly member
(D, 126th District)
Heather Briccetti - Acting President and CEO,
Business Council of New York State, Inc.
Robert B. Catell - Chairman, Advanced Energy
Research and Technology Center at SUNY Stony Brook
Mark K. Boling - Executive Vice President,
General Counsel and Secretary, Southwestern Energy
The declared purpose of the panel
(see previous link) is:
•To develop recommendations to
ensure DEC and other agencies are enabled to properly
oversee, monitor and enforce high-volume hydraulic
fracturing activities
•To develop recommendations to avoid and mitigate
impacts to local governments and communities
•To evaluate the current fee structure and other revenue
streams to fund government oversight and infrastructure
related to high-volume hydraulic fracturing.
Within days, Commissioner Martens
claimed that "(W)e've deliberated,
we've considered the (public) comments (to earlier drafts of
the Generic Environmental Impact Statement issued by the
DEC), we have looked at what's gone on in other states …and
at the end of this stage of the deliberations, we've
concluded that high-volume hydrofracking can be undertaken
safely, along with strong and aggressive regulations".
Taken together, both Martens’ statement and the assigned
purpose of the Governor’s advisory panel indicate that,
prior to any public comment on the DEC’s (i.e. the relevant
regulatory agency’s) final draft regulations, prior to the
DEC even having completed its full report, taxpayer funds
are being spent to generate propaganda to promote ‘safe’
hydraulic fracturing in New York State. And this coincides
perfectly with the current rule-making process in New York
State, which is nominally democratic but in reality treats
unpopular ‘development’ projects as fait accompli.
This process resulted on July 8, 2011, with the NYSDEC
release of the full
Preliminary Revised Draft SGEIS,
which recognized the unpopular and dangerous nature of
hydraulic fracturing by banning it in some watersheds with
high population density with populations informed about and
mobilized against it, while permitting it in other
watersheds with dispersed populations where politicians have
done little to inform or reunite the populations around
opposition based on sound science and economics
The advisory panel is not being asked to consider whether
hydraulic fracturing should or should not be permitted. It
is not asking whether methane extraction from shales and
tight sands formations, let alone from more permeable
formations, can ever be considered safe. This is a quite
astounding subversion of the democratic process given the
widespread opposition in New York State (and across the
country) to any such industrializing process.
How dispassionate or objective can we expect Cuomo’s
advisory panel to be? Let’s examine its composition.
Seven of the original thirteen (and twelve of the
current eighteen) panelists are either politicians,
lobbyists or lawyers for politicians, or boosters of
methane, all of whom can lay no claim to expertise on the
relevant environmental or economic issues. Of the remaining
six panelists, all are staffers or executives of
professional environmental groups, ostensibly chosen to
represent the widespread concerns of New Yorkers about the
damaging environmental impacts of proposed shale gas
extraction.
But on closer inspection, these groups do not represent the
grassroots movement in New York State. Grassroots groups
have gathered by far the greatest numbers of proponents for
a specific position on hydraulic fracturing, namely, the
position that it be banned within New York State. It is
they, and not the groups chosen by Governor Cuomo ostensibly
to represent environmentalists, who have forced politicians
and the media to acknowledge that the rosy picture of
‘natural’ gas as a 'clean burning' ‘bridge’ fuel is even
less accurate than the industry propaganda regarding ‘clean
coal’. The groups chosen by Cuomo work against the interests
and goals of grassroots environmentalists and communities
across the state; they do so by advocating ‘safe’
hydrofracking. Following is more information about these
misrepresentative professional ‘environmentalists’.
The appointments to Governor
Cuomo’s Advisory Panel should be
as much a scandal as the
composition of President Obama’s Federal Advisory Panel on
hydraulic fracturing. We know that Governor Cuomo receives
his ‘advice’ on hydraulic fracturing from a number of
sources, one being the lobbyists from this and other
hydrocarbon industries who pour millions into the coffers of
the Democratic Party. Grassroots Democrats, in large numbers
dedicated to protection of the environment, may be forgiven
for believing, based on the activities of these lobbyists,
that they are indifferent to the degradation of the Gulf of
Mexico, the overheating of the planet, and the devastation
of entire communities and rich agricultural areas by
freakish weather events and abnormal temperatures. Another
source of advice to the governor is the leadership of the
Democratic Party, which has ignored the climate impacts of
methane extraction, underfunded the single EPA study that
would look at groundwater contamination risks of this
process, allowed the industrial wreckage of nationwide gas
extraction to contaminate perhaps billions of gallons of
water forever while subverting the competitiveness of
renewables, and has established a program to promote
hydraulic fracturing worldwide in some of the least
regulated and most corrupt countries in the world.
* Five more people were appointed in mid-August, including
two elected officials and a representative of the oil and
gas industry, and another from a landowners’ association
interested in seeing drilling expedited.
back to
top
Part II: How Appointed "Environmentalist" Organization
Representatives Betray, Rather than Represent the
Environmentalist Movement Against Hydrofracking
Below are backgrounds of some
members of Governor Cuomo’s ‘advisory panel’ who would
pretend to speak for us as counterpoints to the industry and
the Democratic Party leadership. If you agree that the panel
is a misuse of taxpayer funds for the illegal purpose of
propagandizing in favor of ‘safe’ fracking, call or write to
your newspaper editors, journalists and elected
representatives and demand that Cuomo’s panel be disbanded
and replaced by one constituted of independent
scientists, engineers, and economists who can advise
Governor Cuomo honestly regarding the terrible deal
hydraulically fracturing New York State would be for our
region’s communities, our economy and our environment.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
A Summary of the panel’s positions, past alliances and
actions:
1, 2. Natural Resources Defense Council: Eric A.
Goldstein and Kate Sinding, Senior Attorneys
The nineteen pages of concrete,
regulatory suggestions to the 2008 Draft SGEIS end with
NRDC attorney Kate Sinding stating (pdf file)
stating,
"(W)e are committed to
working with the Department to ensure that any development
of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale is done only where
appropriate and in such a manner as to ensure protection of
the environment and public health.”
•NRDC
supported the Clean
Energy Jobs and American Power Act† S.1733 which
promotes so-called "clean coal" technology
(carbon capture and storage, carbon capture and
disposal), a system that promotes the myth of clean
coal.
•As
a founding member of U.S. Climate Action Partnership,
NRDC worked closely with invested industry (including
BP, Duke Energy, ALCOA, DuPont, and PG & E) on
polluter-friendly cap and trade legislation with offset
credits, and gave only lip service to clean sustainable
energy in their report.
•NRDC was instrumental in drafting
the FRAC Act, which, if
passed, would leave unprotected and sacrificed to ‘safe’
fracking large areas of rural America because much of
rural drinking water is drawn from private wells.
•For years, the NRDC has promoted gas as a transitional
fuel without any peer-reviewed scientific basis for
arguing that it would have a better impact on the
climate than coal or oil. This
concise analysis
describes how groups, including the NRDC, have misled
and misrepresented the environmental movement at great
cost to our environment.
•They have worked hand-in-glove with polluting
industries, both in
advocating disastrous polluter-friendly climate
legislation
and in
promoting 'safe'
hydrofracking.
In 2009, NRDC spent $29 million
promoting climate policy that was riddled with giveaways to
the worst polluters and involved setting up a Wall
Street-friendly failed carbon trading scheme that would have delayed effective action on climate change for decades.
This has not been lost on the
grassroots,
which has demonstrated
against the "Natural Resources Destruction Council" for
years. See
here and
here.
3. NY League of Conservation
Voters: Robert Hallman, Board Chair
Robert Hallman is a partner at the
law firm Cahill Gordon Reindel where he also heads their
Environmental Practices Group. Their
website boasts that they
have defended clients against “alleged violations of
environmental laws with representation in administrative
proceedings, including negotiation of consent decrees and
compliance schedules.” Additionally, they “are experienced
in a wide variety of environmental litigations, and have
handled multi-million dollar cost recovery litigation
involving hazardous waste sites, claims for natural resource
damages, claims arising out of environmental indemnities,
governmental enforcement proceedings, and toxic tort and
related insurance matters.” An
announcement on the law
firm's website says that Robert Hallman, a partner for the
firm, was appointed to the Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory
Panel tasked with "provid(ing) guidance on natural gas
production from shale deposits" - not to stop
production.
While it seems at first promising that
an experienced environmental lawyer
has been appointed to the panel, a closer examination of
his work
and
that of the firm, raises
serious questions about whose side Mr. Hallman will
represent.
Here's
their tepid position
on the DEC's release of
proposed hydrofracking rules on June 30th, 2011. And here is
their statement in support
of the disastrous Free Water Withdrawal bill which
grassroots environmentalists, water policy experts and
environmental lawyers warned would undermine riparian
rights, facilitate large scale withdrawals as a permit-based
right, and allow administrative judges and the DEC to
supplant access to the courts by†plaintiffs harmed by
hydrofracking contamination.
Haltman’s law firm’s website
explains that “Bob has
conducted investigations, risk analysis and negotiations in
varied corporate transactions in the US and foreign
jurisdictions, including…carbon trading transactions, real
estate investment (including brownfields development
projects), and privatization of governmental projects, and
involving many industrial and commercial sectors, such as
pulp and paper, vehicle manufacturing, chemical,
pharmaceutical, forest products, oil and gas production and
refining, electric power, natural gas transportation, coal
mining, shipping, coal gasification, nuclear power and
bio-fuels”. Not very reassuring.
•LCV supported the Water
Withdrawal Regulation Bill (S.3798) which will
facilitate large-scale withdrawals as a permit-based
right, undermining riparian rights, and allowing
administrative judges and the DEC to block access to the
courts by plaintiffs harmed by hydrofracking
contamination. Although cloaked as an environmentally
sound bill, this legislation actually exposes New York’s
rivers, streams, and lakes to depletion and
contamination through hydrofracking and other water
withdrawal uses.
•LCV
takes the usual accommodating regulation-friendly stance,
saying it “will be watching closely to make sure that if
hydrofracking is allowed in New York, our state has the
most rigorous regulatory protocols and enforcement in
place to make sure our drinking water and environment
are protected."
Other NYLCV board members
include:
John H. Adams
- NRDC's executive director and later president from
1970 – 2006
Richard A. Kassel - Senior Attorney for NRDC
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - honorary member of NRDC,
also on Cuomo ’DEC panel
Frances Beinecke - honorary member of NRDC
Larry Rockefeller -Trustee of NRDC
Kevin S. Corbett
– V.P. of Corporate Development for a subsidiary of
AECOM, a major player
in the gas industry
Suri Kasirer -
founder of Kasirer
Consulting, LLC whose clients include General Electric,
manufacturer of a mobile frack fluid evaporator (23) the
company hopes to sell under the guise of “recycling”
frack wastewater.
Denise M. Richardson
- Managing Director of General Contractors Association
of New York, a trade association that represents New
York City's unionized, heavy construction & public works
contractors
4. Environmental Defense Fund:
Mark Brownstein - Chief Counsel, Energy Program
The Environmental Defense Fund
accommodates the worst-polluting industry (see NRDC link to
US Climate Action Partnership) and are masters at dividing
and conquering the grassroots on behalf of corporate
polluters. EDF was also a party to the
shameful and frankly revealing Aspen Energy Summit
where they too agreed (alongside the NRDC, the national
Sierra Club, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr) to work to promote
hydrofracking as 'safe' and to work with industry to
identify 'trusted local intermediaries' to front for this
effort to promote, e.g., hazardous waste and water treatment
requirements, closed loop water systems, and 'best
practices' in general.
On a page from their website titled Natural Gas Must Be
Safe, Sustainable, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)
admits that “Southwestern
Energy (whose Executive VP, Mark Boling, is also a member of
Cuomo’s DEC panel) and EDF among other prominent drilling
companies and NGOs are currently working on a set of model
standards for safe drilling that can be utilized by state
governments in implementing their own regulatory regimes.”
Mark Brownstein, EDF’s Chief Counsel for their Energy
Program, is either misled or misleading or both
in a blog post when he
claims that “America is awash in natural gas, and this
promises to be a good thing both in terms of national energy
security and air quality, at least in comparison to coal,
which is America’s other abundant domestic energy resource”.
Brownstein thereby perpetuates the unfounded and unsupported
claim about methane serving as a 'transitional' fuel more
than a year after the only peer-reviewed study comparing
hydrocarbons’ greenhouse gas emissions showed these claims
were empty. Brownstein apparently hasn’t read or is ignoring
the Howarth Cornell study.
This quote best clarifies the group’s outlook: “EDF’s Senior
Policy Advisor Scott Anderson and Southwestern Energy’s
Executive Vice President Mark Boling [again, on Marten’s DEC
panel] teamed up to find common ground on proposed model
rules focusing on regulations that would ensure gas well
integrity and underground water source protection. ‘Our
philosophy at EDF is that we don’t pick winners,’ Anderson
said. ‘We’re not fans of coal; we’re not fans of natural
gas. We see our job as making sure that the technology and
fuels that are relied on in the marketplace are regulated in
a way that minimizes their environmental footprint.'
Anderson also said, 'If natural gas is to fulfill its
potential, we need much cleaner drilling practices. Results
will be gauged by the improved health and safety of citizens
and the earth in the short and long term'."
But shouldn't results be judged by the current evidence of
the ruined health and safety of citizens everywhere drilling
has already occurred? Sadly, advocacy for what the
grassroots are demanding and what climate scientists
urgently call for is clearly not on EDF's agenda.
5. Environmental Advocates of New York: Robert Moore,
Executive Director
Environmental Advocates (along with
the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Sierra Club) are the
model of compromised 'environmentalist' organizations paving
the way for 'safe' fracking. On the national level, their
parent company, the National Wildlife Federation, was one of
the groups featured in in Jonathan Hari's
"The Wrong Kind
of Green,"
about the misdirection and compromise of the environmental
movement by such organizations.
For an example of the clear position for 'safe' fracking
promoted by Environmental Advocates of New York, listen to
this interview about
regulating fracking on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC from
July 1st, 2011.
The organization is exemplary of
the sell-out "environmentalist" species. Their spokesperson
argues for better regulation of the process: maybe setbacks
of 1000 or 1500 feet instead of 500 feet from wells!
•EANY supports the (free) Water
Withdrawal Bill
•EANY
believes that fracking
can be done safely with regulation (note climate impacts
and widespread calls for a ban ignored by
EANY).
•EANY is a
member of the Clean Water Not Dirty Drilling network
alongside pro-‘safe’ drilling Citizens Campaign for the
Environment, Riverkeeper (with Robert F. Kennedy working
as its Director), Catskill Mountainkeeper, Natural
Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice and Earthworks.
6. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr,
president of†Waterkeeper Alliance; board member of
NY League of Conservation Voters; chief prosecuting
attorney for Riverkeeper; honorary member of†NRDC,
and along with Mark Boling (executive VP of Southwestern
Energy; Cuomo DEC panel member)
is
an active stakeholder of The Aspen Science Center.
•What has been documented above
about NRDC's anti-environmental positions on climate
change, the environment, and 'safe' hydrofracking, can
be said equally about lead NRDC Counsel and Waterkeeper
Alliance President, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. See
here for list of
participants and signatories to the 'executive summary'
of the Aspen Energy Summit. At the meeting, gas industry
reps and environmental NGOs agreed to work together to
use the environmental groups to front for gas, "change
the frame" to shift public perception of the natural gas
industry. The group is setting a national agenda that
promotes natural gas to replace the coal industry.
•Robert F. Kennedy has served as a deal-making shill for
the gas industry for years, his pro-fracking position
being
quoted
in the February 11,
2009 New Yorker magazine advertisement (page 61) by the
Clean Skies Foundation, a gas industry front group.
•In a
letter dated March 25,
2010, written to The Denver Post, titled The
Nation Should Follow Colorado’s Lead, Mr. Kennedy
showed strong support for the Colorado Clean Air-Clean
Jobs Act, which would require Colorado utilities to
replace coal fired power plants with facilities fueled
by ‘natural’ gas and other lower or non-emitting energy
sources. “In the short term, natural gas, abundant in
the Rocky Mountain state, is an obvious bridge fuel to
the ‘new’ energy economy. Indeed, many large-scale wind,
solar and distributed energy projects rely on natural
gas to provide stable ‘base loads’.“
Grassroots outrage directed at
Riverkeeper has made Kennedy recant some of his outright
boosterism of gas but his actions suggest he believes that,
if only we have regulation and enforcement,
industrialization of rural areas is acceptable. In an
interview with Maureen
Nandini Mitra published July 17, 2011 he says, “the natural
gas industry has been reckless and irresponsible and
dishonest with the American public and they've lost much of
their credibility. I think a year or two years ago I would
have said that natural gas was a really strong alternative
to coal and a very, very good local fuel we've found ... But
because of the lack of candor by the industry, because of
their reckless behavior, it's unclear whether we can get
that natural gas out of the ground without causing
cataclysmic environmental damage."
The corporate media has made RFK, Jr. the go-to
'environmentalist' bolstering his credibility. This is often
done to support 'environmental' groups that pursue
market-based non-solutions to environmental challenges or
retail-level shakedown operations of one polluting
corporation after another, leaving the possibility of
systemic changes by the wayside. For example, Greenpeace and
Rainforest Action Network have been promoting a failed
market-based approach to deforestation through their support
of and membership in the Forest Stewardship Council, which
certifies industrial logging of old growth forests. They are
often quoted in the corporate media as 'left-leaning' or
'radical'. A recent example: the right-wing New York Post
labeled Robert F. Kennedy a 'radical environmentalist' in
July, 2011.
back to top
Part III: Conclusions and Demands
With the deck this stacked and the
agenda so narrowly defined, how can anyone seriously believe
that Governor Cuomo’s panel will lead to anything except
allowing hydraulic fracturing to become firmly entrenched in
New York State?
Putting a few groups on the panel with the words
“environmental” in their name is a cruel and increasingly
transparent farce. For years there has been a massive
movement against fracking by many grassroots organizations
demanding a statewide ban. But the people whose lives have
been devastated by hydraulic fracturing (so far), who have
been exposing the industry’s destructive practices for
years, are unrepresented in this taxpayer-funded propaganda
panel. Scientists have studied and broadcast their findings
widely, but what the public can expect from this panel of
“experts” is promotion of a few regulations and 'safe hydrofracking.
Trying to regulate the gas drilling industry is like trying
to plug the BP oil gusher with a few Band-Aids. Labeling
hydraulic fracturing “safe” is not just a Band-Aid approach
- it’s a state of Orwellian denial. Regulations cannot
protect us. Only by preventing disaster can we
protect people, their communities and the land. Regulations
cannot prevent the extraordinary squandering of fresh water,
or prevent the waste from going somewhere, or prevent the
eventual deterioration of steel and cement casings over
decades, or create permanently safe waste disposal systems,
or accurately predict the eventual results of earthquakes
and toxic plumes emanating from fracturing and waste
disposal sites, or recover the billions of gallons of
contaminated water lost from the hydrological cycle in
underground fractures. Regulations cannot prevent hydraulic
fracturing and the lost opportunity costs of investments in
hydrocarbon path dependency from contributing to global
climate change. We need to pull the plug on hydraulic
fracturing and turn instead to alternative, renewable energy
solutions today. This panel will not challenge the
short-sighted and irresponsible political elite, hydrocarbon
industry, or professional environmentalists to do what is
necessary.
We know the Democratic Party will
point to their partners in industry and in the Republican
Party to justify the push to industrialize, fracture, and
destroy New York State agriculture, tourism, rural
communities and environment, much as did Energy Department
spokesperson Tiffany Edwards when she
defended
the
stacked (and much criticized)
federal ‘advisory’ committee's composition, saying it is
"balanced" and that each member has experience and
expertise, including technical and practical knowledge.
"Some have said that the panel is too weighted toward
industry, while others say it is too weighted towards
environmentalists. We think we got it just right, and having
a diversity of perspectives will only strengthen the final
product."
But the federal advisory committee’s role, like its New York
State counterpart, is propagandistic and not representative.
The findings of both can be summed up by the August 10
letter (pdf) sent to the
Obama Administration by 28 preeminent scientists in which
they wrote that the Natural Gas Subcommittee of the
Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, "appears to be
performing advocacy-based science and seems to have already
concluded that hydraulic fracturing is safe."
To summarize: Cuomo’s panelists are, in fact, more closely
tied to the gas industry, and to each other, than one might
at first assume. The “environmentalists” on the panel
promote “safe” gas drilling, through regulation and
oversight, rather than preventing environmental destruction
in the first place by supporting a statewide ban on fracking.
Not a single member of the panel represents the majority of
the grassroots environmental movement calling for a ban on
fracking and a rapid transition to renewable energy and
conservation. The panel does not contain a single member
from the coalition of
more than 70 grassroots groups that have called for a ban.
It is easy to see from the makeup of the panel that the
agenda being considered is to what degree the environmental
destruction of New York State will be implemented and taxed,
and what revenue streams might be developed from the
expected damage. For Cuomo’s panel, the possibility that
drilling not be allowed at all is not under
consideration.
Furthermore, there is a clear contradiction in the New York
State Governor’s response to the risks of hydraulic
fracturing with his DEC effectively admitting that
horizontal hydrofracking in tight shale is inherently unsafe
no matter what safeguards the D.E.C. might propose. That’s
why the governor is saying, ‘Don’t allow it in the New York
City watershed or the Syracuse watershed or on State lands.’
Outside of these watersheds, the Governor is using the DEC
and the ‘advisory’ panel to create an entire group of
second-class citizens who will be exposed to this
practice if he gets his way. That shouldn’t be allowed.
There should be equal protection for all citizens.
People of New York deserve better than a sham panel whose
findings and recommendations are pre-determined: the
declaration that hydraulic fracturing can be safely
installed in New York. People across the state must stand
firm to insist they get what they want: a statewide ban.
Denouncing Cuomo’s panel now and any of its pre-ordained
findings and recommendations must be a high priority of any
environmental organization fighting fracking.
Activists seeking a statewide ban have their work cut out
for them because if they don't make it absolutely clear that
these groups not only don't speak for environmentalists but
also are facilitating "safe" fracking, our state will not be
able to overcome the public relations muscle and access to
power (e.g. membership on this panel and regular quotes by
pro-'safe' fracking writings of journalists like NYTimes'
Andrew Revkin or ProPublica's Abrahm Lustgarten) in opposing
fracking.
Write to Cuomo to disband the
panel
Most importantly, consider using
this information to further organize the resistance to
Albany’s shortsighted endorsement of fracking. Please
consider it as a discussion piece for enlarging your local
group. It is a part of unraveling how the voices of
individual citizens have been marginalized from the
decision-making process on this and so many other issues.
And if you want to see where your legislators really stand,
write them and insist they publicly oppose Governor
Cuomo’s Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory panel and its
inevitable pro-fracking findings.
back to
top
Download PDF
|
