Fracking

New Law Shields People from Arrest for Protesting Project By Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund Grant Township, Indiana County, PA: Grant Township Supervisors passed a first-in-the-nation law that legalizes direct action to stop frack wastewater injection wells within the Township. Pennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE) has sued the Township to overturn a local democratically-enacted law that prohibits injection wells. If a court does not uphold the people’s right to stop corporate activities threatening the well-being of the community, the ordinance codifies that, “any natural person may then enforce the rights and prohibitions of the charter through direct action.” Further, the ordinance states that any nonviolent direct action to enforce their Charter is protected, “prohibit[ing] any private or public actor from bringing criminal charges or filing any civil or other criminal action against those participating in nonviolent direct action.” ...

By Tara Prema / Gender Is War Recently we asked, “ What the hell does gender have to do with fracking?” We weren’t being flippant – it’s a question that plagues many of us. The question came up because some leftists are blacklisting and threatening eco-feminists over gender identity politics. The question is whether women can define themselves as a class that is distinct from men, or whether “women” must be redefined to include people born male who identify as female, or anyone born male and still living as a man who is “genderfluid” enough to sometimes feel like a woman and demand to be allowed into women’s spaces, even if they have a history of assaulting women and girls. ...

By Luutkudziiwus / Intercontinental Cry VANCOUVER - Luutkudziiwus, a Gitxsan Nation House Group, will file a legal challenge in regard to the BC regulatory permits awarded to the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline that would supply gas to the Petronas LNG plant on Lelu Island which threatens to decimate Skeena River wild salmon. Luutkudziiwus Hereditary Chiefs travelled down to Vancouver to make the announcement today, while government and industry are gathered at the 2015 LNG Conference in BC. ...

By Natalie Bochenski / Sydney Morning Herald An anti-fracking activist group will “poison” a major work at the Gallery of Modern Art to protest its sponsorship by Santos. Generation Alpha said Heritage, which features 99 animals gathered around a blue water pond, showed exactly the kind of environment that the natural resources company would ruin. Spokesman Ben Pennings said it was “beyond ironic” that Santos would sponsor the Falling Back to Earth exhibit. ...

By Rising Tide Chicago To the cheers and applause of the dozens of supporters below, anti-fracking activists unfurled a two-story banner with “Don’t Frack Illinois,” from the balcony of the state capitol rotunda. During impassioned testimony from activists with the Illinois Coalition for a Moratorium on Fracking (ICMF), the brightly colored banner gave visual support to the voices gathered from throughout the state who came together in Springfield for this the second lobbying and day of action called for by the coalition. “We won’t allow water, air, and living communities to be traded for short-term jobs,” If the industry pursues fracking in Illinois, we will hold these corporations and the policymakers who support them accountable." said a member of Deep Green Resistance. ...

By Joe Romm / Think Progress Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have reconfirmed earlier findings of high rates of methane leakage from natural gas fields. If these findings are replicated elsewhere, they would utterly vitiate the climate benefit of natural gas, even when used to switch off coal. Indeed, if the previous findings — of 4% methane leakage over a Colorado gas field — were a bombshell, then the new measurements reported by the journal Nature are thermonuclear: ...

By Mike Ludwig / TruthOut For residents in Assumption Parish, the boiling, gas-belching bayou, with its expanding toxic sinkhole and quaking earth is no longer a mystery; but there is little comfort in knowing the source of the little-known event that has forced them out of their homes. Located about 45 miles south of Baton Rouge, Assumption Parish carries all the charms and curses of southern Louisiana. Networks of bayous, dotted with trees heavy with Spanish moss, connect with the Mississippi River as it slowly ambles toward the Gulf of Mexico. Fishermen and farmers make their homes there, and so does the oil and gas industry, which has woven its own network of wells, pipelines and processing facilities across the lowland landscape. ...

By Peter Rugh / Waging Nonviolence The war came home this weekend, as thousands of people whose land has been under siege by the U.S. government and corporate interests gathered in Washington, D.C. No, they weren’t victims of drone attacks or 10-plus years of fighting in Afghanistan. They were ordinary Americans, whose neighborhoods, townships and states have been struggling to put an end to fracking, a destructive form of natural gas drilling. ...

By Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublica New research has concluded that salty, mineral-rich fluids deep beneath Pennsylvania’s natural gas fields are likely seeping upward thousands of feet into drinking water supplies. Though the fluids were natural and not the byproduct of drilling or hydraulic fracturing, the finding further stokes the red-hot controversy over fracking in the Marcellus Shale, suggesting that drilling waste and chemicals could migrate in ways previously thought to be impossible. ...

By Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublica Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation’s geology as an invisible dumping ground. No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia. ...