By now, no one should believe the Sierra Club —or its allied partners — on the subject of fracking.

Several days ago national Sierra Club’s executive director Michael Brune finally revealed in Time magazine that the organization — one of the biggest and most well known “environmental” groups —  took $26 million from gas company Chesapeake Energy’s Aubrey McClendon. The windfall was to be used for Sierra Club’s anti-coal campaign — which includes heavy promotion of the gas industry. [PDF: Exclusive-how SC took money]

Without any shame, nor a mention of this heinous transgression to its members, the Sierra Club Michigan chapter over the weekend sent out an e-mail alert. In it the group aggressively pushes a package of Michigan legislation that it helped write, called the frack “reform” bills. A study of fracking that’s proposed in one of the bills, would be funded by the gas industry.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Sierra Club has not reformed.

Ban Michigan Fracking formed in 2011 in direct response to a co-opting of the ban movement by Sierra Club, Clean Water Action and others who are pushing to make fracking “safe.” Anybody who has studied fracking over the last couple years knows that it cannot be done safely. The only way to protect Michigan water, air, land and people’s health is an all-out ban on fracking. We vehemently oppose the bills and Sierra Club’s continued “safe fracking” efforts and have an online petition to defeat them

. We are also working directly for a ban, learning from the successes in other communities and states.

Making a deal with the devil — framing fracking the gas industry way

While still on the gas industry dole, Sierra Club’s Brune, chairman (and former executive director) Carl Pope, and attorney David Bookbinder participated in the Critical Path Energy Summit, [or see PDF’s for Critical Path Energy Summit | Aspen Science Center and Critical Path nat gas summit bios] held in Aspen, Colorado on May 6-7, 2010, along with staff and leaders of Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund. But that wasn’t just a meeting of the “Big Greens” — Chesapeake’s Aubrey McClendon and many others in the gas industry were in attendance, too.

These strange bedfellows “recognized that there is tremendous value in working together to fast track increased demand for natural gas in the power and transportation sectors.” They further agreed that “the current social discord in the shale gas fields needs a new approach to change the frame. Even with significant expenditures for advertising and public relations, the industry has not been successful in changing public opinion.”

Maybe that’s because people are starting to see beyond the propaganda about gas as a “clean, green, domestic bridge fuel to a sustainable energy future” and recognize that they themselves are being offered up as sacrificial lambs so that industry and a few top investors can get even richer.

Nauseatingly, the collaborators gushed further: “The assembled NGO, government and Industry leaders agreed that the only way to unleash the economic, social and environmental benefits of natural gas was to work much more closely together.”

The “current frame” they said, was that gas is a secretive industry, has enormous environmental impacts, puts poisons/chemicals in the ground and water, and “uses up all the water in the world.” The “new frame,” they explained, would turn the old frame “on its head” and establish a new level of trust through words and deed with “NGOs and industry standing shoulder-to-shoulder” and that “earning community trust HAS TO BE LED BY THE NGOs!” [emphasis theirs].

And what is the “new frame?” For one thing, the Critical Path Energy Summit partners had to “proactively develop Best Management Practices” working with regulators to develop optimal regulations, and move toward transparency, for example “revealing the composition of frack water, incident reports, etc.” One way they would do this is to “hire a trusted local interlocutor.” Revealing the composition of frack fluid would be “a HUGE PR victory,” they emphasized.

The con is still on

Sierra Club’s Michael Brune tries to greenwash the organization’s current position as though the corporately-compromised nonprofit has actually reformed since refusing $30 million more dollars from McClendon in 2011. [PDF: Coming Clean – The Blog of Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune Blog – Sierra Club]

However, national Sierra Club is still promoting the bottom-line goal of the Critical Path Energy Summit: Get the public to accept a type of “safe” or “green” fracking that is just regulated by “best management practices.”

Throughout 2011 and to the present, the Sierra Club in Michigan, together with Clean Water Action, continues to push for “safe fracking,” “best management practices” and gas industry-funded study of fracking.

In a Power Point presentation dated January 2011, the club states its goals are to make Michigan “require public disclosure of chemicals,” “require companies to use BEST MANAGEMENT PRACTICES,” [emphasis is Sierra Club’s] increase performance bonds, (another Critical Path talking point), and “reassess rules and regulations after EPA releases results of the study due out in 2012.”

By May 2011, Michigan Sierra Club and Clean Water Action teamed up to issue a press release that declared “Michigan Should Delay Before Drilling: Make Natural Gas Fracking Safe for Michigan’s Waters.” They reiterated key talking points from their industry collaboration at Critical Path, such as requiring public disclosure of chemicals, participation in the permitting process, putting into place “proper safeguards,” “proper water quality management practices onsite,” “best possible storm water control measures,” and “all solid waste from drilling . . . properly disposed of in appropriate regulated waste disposal facilities.”

Also in spring 2011, the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action and West Michigan Environmental Action Council hosted showings of the film Gasland at which they reassured audiences that Michigan will be different and avoid the horrors that fracking has wrought in other states, while calling for slightly better regulations. The three-person panels included Clean Water Action’s regulations attorney, Susan Harley, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s supervisor of wells, Hal Fitch, and a university geologist. (Recall the Critical Path’s call to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and use trusted local interlocutors.)

By November 2011, Michigan Sierra Club and Clean Water Action had helped write and introduce “frack reform” bills — one for a moratorium tied to another bill detailing a frack study to be funded by the gas industry, and a frack panel that would have a similar mandate as New York Governor Cuomo’s frack panel:  to come up with regulations and “conditions on permits.”  At a press conference for the bills at a frack well site in Antrim County, someone holding a sign for a ban on fracking was told by a Clean Water Action staffer to take it down to not muddle the message.

The Sierra Club’s newsletter for fall 2011 tries to mobilize members to do something about the “dangerous practice of fracking” by telling lawmakers that “you’re concerned about these problems with current laws and regulations” and then reiterates the key points of no public participation, disclosing chemicals, and using too much water. In December 2011, Michigan Sierra Club staffer Mike Berkowitz was quoted in a news article about the bills: “Right now, we believe the research points toward that it can be done safely, it just needs to be heavily regulated.”

With Sierra Club’s revelation about their blood-money from McClendon, it is reasonable to speculate that the same temptations would have faced the others, including Clean Water Action, Natural Resources Defense Council, Michigan League of Conservation Voters, Michigan Environmental Council, and West Michigan Environmental Action Council, all of whom defend fracking “if it is well regulated.”

If you care about this issue, it should be clear by now that the leaders in the movement to ban fracking are the grassroots groups that have been thwarted, undermined and undercut by pro-“safe fracking” Big Greens.

Ban Michigan Fracking takes no corporate donations. We have no lobbyists in Lansing. We have no ties with the gas industry nor with the Critical Path participants or their allies, interlocutors, or the DEQ. We stand to gain nothing by telling truth and calling it as we see it. We stand to lose everything should fracking go forward. We the grassroots must stand together to fight the industry and those in bed with it — whether they’re crooked politicians or crooked NGOs.

The New York Times reports on the strength of the ever-growing grassroots citizens movement to ban fracking in New York state while “name brand” groups like Sierra Club and others are — surprisingly to many — pro-gas and/or pro-regulation. This is a great article about how the pro-ban anti-fracking movement is making much more sense to people than the professional green groups’ acceptance of compromise and their pro-gas stance. Ban Michigan Fracking faces the same obstacles here in Michigan. 

Join with us to register your community organization to call for a ban on fracking in Michigan by contacting us Drilling Critics Face a Divide Over the Goal of Their Fight, 1/10/12

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: January 9, 2012

 

With a deadline looming this week for the public to weigh in on gas drilling in New York State, the antifracking movement itself has become divided over what its goal should be: securing the nation’s toughest regulations, or winning an outright ban?

Kate Sinding says the Natural Resources Defense Council’s position on hydrofracking had evolved.

The question is pitting brand-name organizations like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Nature Conservancy, which are working nationwide for stringent rules, against an ever-growing universe of grass-roots groups demanding a prohibition on the kind of intensive shale gas drilling being proposed in the state. And it is reflecting the tightrope being walked by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo between an economically potent industry and many landowners eager for drilling on one side, and on the other a movement that has become one of the most powerful environmental and citizens campaigns in state history.

Whatever the result, the split among the industry critics reflects how the opposition has exponentially hardened since fracking emerged as a statewide issue in 2008.

“When we started out, what we wanted was more information on what this means for New York,” said Wes Gillingham, program director for Catskill Mountainkeeper, one of the first groups to focus on the issue. “No one had any thought about calling for a ban. But the more you find out about gas drilling and how it’s been practiced by the industry today, the more you realize it can’t be done safely. It would just be a disaster for New York State.”

Mr. Gillingham said he had worked closely and effectively with national groups. Still, he said: “For the average person on the ground over the Marcellus Shale who is living with this issue, the fact that the national groups are not saying, ‘Not here, no way,’ is shocking to them.”

Wednesday is the deadline for comments about the state’s proposed drilling regulations and environmental impact statement to guide gas development in New York. So far, the State Department of Environmental Conservation has received 20,800 comments, far more than any other issue in its history. Officials say they do not know of any other issue that received 1,000 comments.

Drilling could start up after the state adopts new regulations, perhaps this spring. After previously indicating his agency expected drilling to resume at some point this year, Joseph Martens, commissioner of the conservation department, said in October that it was not clear whether any drilling would proceed this year.

Representatives of national groups, like Kate Sinding of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Roger Downs of the Sierra Club, are widely regarded as key players who asked the right questions and provided the technical expertise that helped produce what has, in effect, been an almost four-year moratorium on new gas drilling in New York State. At issue is a process called high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which involves injecting millions of gallons of chemically treated water underground to break up shale formations and release natural gas.

Questions about the safety of the process have helped move some environmentalists from an enthusiastic embrace of gas to a much more measured one that still sees it as an essential part of the available energy mix.

“I guess I would say that, in fairness, the N.R.D.C.’s position has evolved — in New York and more broadly as well,” Ms. Sinding said. “So we’re very concerned not only with having the best regulations in place, but with the extent to which drilling is going to be allowed to happen at all in the state.

“But we haven’t called for a ban because we continue to believe that, in all likelihood, some amount of drilling is going to happen, and it’s important to be present at the table so we have regulations that ensure that whatever is done will be done as safely as possible.”

Many of those involved said it was unlikely that Governor Cuomo would turn his back on the gas industry and ban drilling in the rich Marcellus and Utica shale deposits covering much of the economically depressed southern and western reaches of the state. But a push for local and statewide bans has become an increasing focus of the opposition.

Drilling critics have far outnumbered supporters during the public comment period, but the conservation department has also heard from the gas industry and landowners who hoped to lease their property for drilling. Many of them say New York has already delayed for too long, and is paying a price.

“I think the governor’s office recognizes that this has gotten much beyond the science and has become an emotional issue or a cause célèbre for certain elements,” said Dennis Holbrook, executive vice president of Norse Energy in Buffalo, who has been active in the industry in the state for 35 years. “It’s time to move the process forward.”

National environmental groups have a complicated history with natural gas. Several, particularly the Sierra Club, have seen it as a bridge fuel toward renewable sources that was cleaner than coal and oil, and a preferred alternative to common mining practices. The relationship between the gas industry and some environmentalists has frayed as the potential impacts of gas drilling, particularly the effects on drinking water supplies, have become apparent in the Western States and in Pennsylvania. Now some former advocates of gas see it not just as an alternative to oil and coal, but also as something crowding out renewable resources like wind and solar power.

But many fracking critics still see the old ties at work.

Claire Sandberg was one of the two founders of Frack Action, which started up in 2010 largely because some antifracking activists worried that established environmentalists seemed resigned to living with gas drilling.

“I think the national groups got themselves in a real bind,” she said. “They entered into a marriage of convenience with natural gas because it was too daunting to try to take on coal and gas at the same time. Now they find themselves with a mutiny on their hands.”

“It’s time for the environmental movement to grow a spine,” she added

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Many close to the process say that the fight will become far more complicated than simply deciding whether to ban or to regulate. Options in between could include a ban until further studies are done; rules so tough they amount to a de facto prohibition; bans in parts of the state, like those close to water supplies; regulations that would keep out all but the most responsible companies; and allowing drilling to resume with a pilot program in an area with a history of drilling.

Some involved with the issue say that despite differences, diverse fracking opponents have found ways to work together, and that they will almost certainly need the technical knowledge and the procedural savvy of longtime environmentalists, as well as the passion of the grass-roots groups.

“You have a lot of bricks being thrown at the national organizations, but I don’t really think there’s as much difference as some people want to see,” said Bruce Ferguson, a founding member of Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, which supports a ban. “No one wants to see fracking go forward under the current regime or the way it’s being done in Pennsylvania. Everyone agrees on that.”

Fracking for shale gas in Michigan may intensify. Devon Energy, an energy company out of Oklahoma, obtained $2.2 billion from China this week for its fracking operations in the U.S., particularly in Michigan. Devon owns 300,000 acres in Michigan. Devon also constructs and operates pipelines, storage and treating facilities and natural gas processing plants. This stunning development helps unmask a common industry-perpetuated myth that shale gas drilling in the U.S

. is designed to make us “energy independent.”

We need a ban more than ever. Please join us by signing our online petition against the frack reform bills that will have the gas industry itself pay for a frack study…. We already know fracking is not worth the costs to our health and environment.

Here are some of the news reports about the Sinopec/Devon deal:

• Wall Street Journal: Sinopec Enters U.S. Shale January 4, 2012
• Forbes: China Set To Frack America In Shale Deal With Devon    January 4, 2012
• Reuters: Sinopec, Total pour $4.5 billion into U.S. shale January 3, 2012
• Business Week: Devon sells stake in shale ventures to Sinopec  January 3, 2012
• The Wall Street Journal’s Deal Blog: The French and Chinese Are Digging in Your Yard for Natural Gas January 3, 2012

Dr. Sandra Steingraber, ecologist, cancer survivor and acclaimed author, speaking around the country on cancer and its environmental risks, made this statement at a symposium in September opposing fracking in the Finger Lakes region of New York

.

It will be our mantra for 2012.

Listen to Steingraber’s magnificent, inspiring talk about fracking and its known damages to our health and environment:

Update: Headline in the Petoskey News-Review 1/6/12– Christmas Eve gas leak identified as toxic hydrogen sulfide

On Christmas eve day, 2011, a rotten-egg odor could be smelled across northern Michigan, according to news reports. Hydrogen Sulfide gas (H2S) was detected from a gas release near Grayling and in towns far north of that, as far as the Mackinac Bridge.  A failed valve at a well owned by BreitBurn Energy in Beaver Creek Township, Crawford County, was cited as the cause of the leak. BrietBurn spokesman and executive vice president Greg Brown stated to the Gaylord Herald Times: “We apologize if anybody was alarmed. We don’t believe there is any danger. (It was) just a bad smell.” But in 1997, amid other H2S releases and consequent harms to people in Manistee and Mason Counties, Dr. Kaye Kilburn, Professor of Medicine at the University of Southern California, told the Muskegon Chronicle: “Hydrogen sulfide poisons the brain and the damage is irreversible….H2S is dangerous any time you can smell it.” (Alexander, Jeff, “Gas exploration may affect health,” The Sunday Muskegon Chronicle, 12/7/97)

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• Grayling gas leak smelled 80 miles away, Gaylord Herald Times, December 27, 2011
• Grayling gas leak smelled 80 miles away, Petoskey News-Review, December 27, 2011.
• Failed valve responsible for natural gas leak, Chicago Tribune, December 24, 2011
• Failed valve responsible for natural gas leak, Lansing State Journal, December 24, 2011

Some sources on H2S releases in Michigan:

• Michigan Land Use Institute’s coverage of the H2S releases in the 1990s in Manistee and Mason Counties.
• Schindler, Dana, “Survey of Accidental and Intentional Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) Releases Causing Evacuations and/or Injury in Manistee and Mason Counties [Michigan] from 1980 to 2002. 
• Hydrogen Sulfide Panel Meeting Summary, State of Michigan’s Michigan Environmental Science Board, July 9, 1998.
• Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Hydrogen Sulfide Q & A page

See also this 2006 study by a University of California at Berkeley researcher: Hydrogen Sulfide, Oil and Gas, and People’s Health 

Several of the permits and pending applications for horizontal frack wells state that drilling is likely to yield H2S gas. See the Permits section for details.

Earlier this fall, the Independent Coalition of Citizens Against Fracking (in New York state) released a damning report about the advisory panel on fracking appointed by NY governor Andrew Cuomo

. The report exposes the bias of the governor’s fracking advisory panel. The proposed fracking advisory committee for Michigan (in House Bill 5151) has the same essential mandate, which is why we are opposed to it.

Below is the group’s press release.

Report available at GasMain.org
Download PDF of full report

New report: Cuomo’s Fracking Advisory Panel Fatally Biased

Independent Coalition of Citizens Against Fracking
For Immediate Release
September 20, 2011

Grassroots Groups Expose Bias of Cuomo’s Fracking Advisory Panel in Report Released Today

Contact: gasmain.org(@)gmail.com

Report available at GasMain.org
Download PDF of full report

New York State’s recently named Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel is stacked with appointees who have already made clear they’re on the side of the gas industry’s plan to industrialize the state, say grassroots organizations from around New York. The panel was established by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s DEC commissioner Joe Martens in early July – just a week after the governor ended the de facto statewide moratorium on hydraulic fracking.

In a report released today, the grassroots groups show that the panel is dominated not only by industry representatives and industry-paid academics, but also by representatives of national groups that claim to be working to protect the environment but actually are on record as being promoters of so-called “natural” gas.

“The large national organizations’ coziness with polluting industries, Albany and Washington explains their repeated betrayal of grassroots efforts to protect communities and the environment,” said Robert Jereski of New York Climate Action Group, a grassroots environmental organization focused on climate change and ending industrial logging of old growth forests. “These national groups were chosen by Cuomo because he knew he could count on them to support the false notion of ‘safe’ fracking.”

Members of grassroots environmental, civic and community organizations from across the state, who have been educating themselves and others about fracking for several years, are sure the Advisory Panel’s forthcoming report will contain no surprises.

Finger Lakes-based Lisa Wright, a longtime activist on shale issues, pointed out, “New Yorkers and most people throughout the world who have looked closely at unconventional gas development know that fracking for gas is seriously problematic. Organizations that call themselves ‘environmental’ need to stand up for our communities and act like forward-thinking stewards of the earth, not shale-gas salesmen.”

Cecile Lawrence of Tioga Peace and Justice, Green Party NYS 2010 candidate for U.S. Senate and 2011 candidate for Tioga County Legislature commented “From the moment he began his campaign for Governor of NYS, Andrew Cuomo insisted on being vague regarding his stance on the fracking of the state. Through the makeup of this panel of fracking advisors he has shown that he clearly has allied himself with fossil fuel based monied interests. The lack of presence of anyone from a true grassroots organization grounded in the people of the state whose lives and livelihoods are at stake shows that Cuomo needs an education as to whom he was elected to represent.”

Carl Arnold of Chenango, Delaware, Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group (CDOG) also sees pro-“safe” drilling agendas driving some of the larger, supposedly green groups represented on the panel. “Some groups surely know that drilling can never be safe, yet are fudging on a ban,” he said. “This contradiction is made clear when one examines the connections between multinational polluters, large financial and law firms, the oil and gas boys and some well-known NGOs that claim to be protectors of the environment. Those connections raise the obvious questions: What do they receive from the deep pockets of the oil and gas industry? How can they work with those folks?”

The focus of many allied upstate and downstate activists is Part 2 of a just-released report (available at gasmain.org) on the Cuomo advisory panel members who were purportedly appointed to represent the environmental movement.
Coalition to Protect New York is a collective of organizations around the Finger Lakes, central, western, and Southern Tiers regions. “We’ve learned from painful observation and experience,” said one of the coalition’s cofounders, Jack Ossont of Yates County, “that there is no way to ‘regulate safely’ this destructive industrial process. That’s why informed New Yorkers as well as people across the country are demanding that it be banned.”

Adds a fellow CPNY cofounder, Kate Bartholomew of Schuyler County, “Even with our huge and growing movement, the governor’s panel hasn’t got a single member representing our position. To use taxpayer money — our money — to establish this panel and to promote fracking using these discredited ‘environmental’ organizations and industry insiders is not only the opposite of good representative government; it’s downright deceitful.”

In the report released today by the grassroots alliance, familiar groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Sierra Club, Riverkeeper and many others, including New York State level groups, are examined. Their collusion, as well as the incestuous connections between the industry, Governor Cuomo’s advisers, and vendors hired by his administration and his regulatory body, are a major threat to representational government in our state. In July the Albany Project reported that a vendor paid by DEC to conduct an “independent” economic study of proposed fracking has no expertise in such analysis. The firm is also a paid consultant for big oil and gas clients.

“That’s antidemocratic and unethical,” said Dave Walczak of Bath-based Citizens for Healthy Communities. “Besides, if the governor and Department of Environmental Conservation needed a study on community impacts, to save taxpayers the costs of this so-called ‘independent study,’ all they had to do was drive across the Pennsylvania line below Elmira. What you see there is not what we want in any part of New York.”

A similar federal-level advisory panel examining fracking came under fire recently when 28 top scientists challenged President Obama. His panel, they charged, “appears to be performing advocacy-based science” because its chairman profits from fossil fuel exploitation. Gas industry representatives and academics who are publicly avowed fracking advocates figured prominently on the federal panel.

Clare Donohue of Sane Energy Project expressed the question being asked by thousands of New Yorkers: “Governor Cuomo, we demand an explanation of why you have given the people on the ground, in thousands of communities where fracking is proposed—we whose lives would be forever altered—no seats on your advisory panel?”

#   #   #

Michigan is rooting for New York state… and we hope others, including Michigan, will be close behind! This is what Adelaide Park Gomer, who received the Advocacy Award from Common Cause on November 30, 2011, for her tireless work in fighting fracking in New York State, said, as posted in AlterNet:

New York Should Become First State to Ban Fracking

December 6, 2011 | AlterNet
We believe that the pillars of the 21st century are clean water and air, alternative energy, and economic justice,” Gomer said upon receiving the Advocacy Award from Common Cause.

Adelaide Park Gomer, president of the Park Foundation based in Ithaca, New York, received the Advocacy Award from Common Cause for her work fighting fracking. Gomer is as a knowledgeable and passionate defender of independent media, environmental sustainability, and higher education, as well as of democratic and transparent governance.

She and the Park Foundation have been among the staunchest supporters of the antifracking movement in New York, as the gas industry is poised to begin this dangerous, dirty, and destructive practice throughout much of the state, should Governor Andrew Cuomo give it the green light-which could happen very soon despite the overwhelming evidence that fracking poisons air, water, soil and food supply, endangers public health, and shows no long-term economic benefit.

The award was given at a banquet held in New York City on November 29, 2011. Among the guests were many grassroots activists, NGO staff members, and and independent journalists whose antifracking, pro-environmental, or reporting work has been supported by Gomer’s and the Park Foundation’s philanthropy. During her speech, Gomer was interrupted by applause numerous times and received two standing ovations.

Read the speech she delivered in accepting the award

. http://www.alternet.org/story/153336/new_york_should_become_the_first_state_to_ban_fracking/

Pavillion, Wyoming and Michigan have something in common–frack wells drilled by Encana. Pavillon’s drinking water is contaminated by fracking says EPA yesterday in the New York Times:

E.P.A. Links Tainted Water in Wyoming to Hydraulic Fracturing for Natural Gas New York Times, December 8, 2011

The frack wells in Michigan by Encana are in Kalkaska and Cheboygan Counties

. See the Permits menu to view the permits granted to this company by Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality.

Ban Michigan Fracking launches an online petition today to notify state legislators to ban fracking and specifically to OPPOSE a package of bills introduced in November 2011

. The bills would impose a similar set of frack-study, frack advisory panel and moratorium as we now see in New York state.

Sign the PETITION and help spread the word.

Read more about the bills in the Press Release and Oppose the Fracking “Reform” Bills Menus, above.