As absentee oil and gas companies register with the state of Illinois this month, downstate citizens groups are taking the lead among statewide environmental groups and laying out scientific and legal standards for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and Joint Committee on Administrative Rules to consider prior to drafting the controversial horizontal hydraulic fracking rules.
In a letter sent this week to the key legislative committee and state IDNR agency officials, the groups representing rural communities targeted for fracking operations cite “several new scientific studies and academic research papers that have become available, which should be evaluated and considered before proceeding with allowing permits for hydraulic fracturing in Illinois,” and conclude: “As legislators, the power to protect the citizens of Illinois rests with you. You have been armed with knowledge and research that would validate the need for an immediate halt to any drilling until the science was studied.”
Or, as IDNR Director Marc Miller‘s conservation hero Aldo Leopold once admonished in his “land ethics”: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Leopold’s own “Sand County” region of Wisconsin, in fact, has been so upturned by reckless frac sand strip-mining that nearby counties have recanted their fracking support and enacted moratoriums.
“We have reached out to the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules to alert them of the significance of the new research and science that has come forth since the regulations were signed into law and of catastrophes that laws have no control over, like the situation in Colorado, where horrific flooding in Weld county caused numerous oil spills,” said Tabitha Smith Tripp, with the Southern Illinoisans Against Fracturing our Environment (SAFE). “This law has no provisions oraishedes爱上海同城对对碰
setbacks with regard to flood plains and watersheds.”
Tripp also noted new scientific research released last month that indicated the mantle below the surface of the New Madrid and Wabash faults in southern Illinois is weaker than expected.
“Along with earlier research this summer directly linked fracking and injections wells to increased seismicity and earthquakes,” Tripp said. “It would seem prudent that the IDNR would ban any permits in areas that are prone to earthquakes based on the science we provided.”
At a recent meeting in Springfield between representatives of IDNR, Illinois People’s Action (IPA) and SAFE, the key citizens groups expressed their concerns with the state’s admittedly flawed legislation and the rule-making process.
“Upon inquires from IPA and SAFE, the IDNR representatives refused to acknowledge IDNR’s broad authority to deny a permit application,” said Vito Mastrangelo, an attorney and representative on SAFE’s legal affairs committee. “Section 1-53 of the new legislation includes this provision: “(a) The Department shall issue a high volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing permit, with any conditions the Department may find necessary, only if the record of decision demonstrates that *** (4) the proposed hydraulic fracturing operations will be conducted in a manner that will protect the public health and safety and prevent pollution or diminution of any water source[.]”
Mastrangelo added: “And I asked the IDNR representatives pointedly whether, if we were to convince IDNR staff that the HVHF process was not safe, they would relay their concerns to the legislators on the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules or to the legislature. They would not agree to do so.”
Signed by SAFE, IPA and a broad range of southern Illinois groups including the Regional Association of Concerned Environmentalists, Shawnee Vineyard Indian Settlement, and the Friends of Bell Smith Springs, the letter reminds JCAR legislators and IDNR officials that they will be held “responsible to protect the communities being put in harms way.” It concludes:
Our plea for public protection before corporate profit is based in science and research, past and current manifestations of cumulative health concerns and environmental issues such as earthquakes, flooding, or droughts that can not be predicted nor avoided once occurring. It would be prudent to consider all of the science before allowing such a questionable method of extraction be a legacy left behind during your term.
Please consider these standards and as they are pointing to insufficient regulatory framework that will fall short in the face of a disaster, as was the case in Colorado.
Along with the letter, citizen groups included a list of demands drafted by the IPA on Disclosure and Transparency, Regulations, and Inspection and Enforcement. Notably in the current process of drafting administrative rules by the IDNR, the list includes:
Disclosure and Transparency
1. With regard to disclosures about the rule-making process, the Illinois Department of Natural爱上海419
Resources (IDNR) shall: (Creed #1, 3, 6)
a. Publish the names of those who drafted the rules governing hydraulic fracturing in the State of Illinois in a state newspaper and on the IDNR website, including the drafters’ qualifications or backgrounds pertaining to their work on the hydraulic fracturing bill, within thirty (30) days of their appointment to the hydraulic fracturing committee.
b. Publish in a state newspaper and on the IDNR website a list of the names of those public health and environmental scientists involved in rule-making process with a description of their qualifications or backgrounds pertaining to the hydraulic fracturing bill within thirty (30) days of their appointment to the hydraulic fracturing committee.
c. Name scientists and/or direct action leaders on the [hydraulic fracturing committee] submitted by Illinois People’s Action and/or other Illinois social, political or environmental groups who share the opinions of those Illinois citizens working to oppose hydraulic fracturing.
2. With regard to personnel responsible for approving or rejecting hydraulic fracturing permits, the IDNR will:
a. Disclose the qualifications of personnel responsible for issuing hydraulic fracturing permits and provide a list of the permits issued by said personnel.
b. Identify the qualifications of personnel responsible for inspecting, approving, or rejecting hydraulic fracturing and their capacity to verify information provided by the applicant.
c. Identify the capacity of personnel responsible for approving or rejecting hydraulic fracturing to access the necessary resources to conduct thorough background checks on the operators requesting permits including, but not limited to, current and past violations.
d. Increase public transparency regarding the hydraulic fracturing regulation process, disclose the number of inspectors hired as well as the nature and duration of the training they have or will have undergone before they undertake this assignment, and/or any qualifications said inspectors brought to the position before being hired by IDNR.
3. Require all hydraulic permit applications to publicly disclose the depth, direction(s) and length(s) of any and all drilling done in relation to a single well head, and make this information available on the IDNR website.
4. Public Disclosure: Real time reporting and transparency: IDNR shall not issue a permit until the following public information and emergency notification systems are in place: (Creed #2, 3, 4, 5,
6)
a. A list of all chemicals to be used in the well, or in the vicinity of the well, potential adverse effects of those chemicals and treatment recommended if exposed to them.
b. A Public Information guide developed in consultation with Public health officials, seismologists, and emergency medical and rescue workers and published on the IDNR site and distributed in booklet form to residents within 1 mile of any part of a fracking operation (including any part of an underground horizontal leg).
c. The company Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for each chemical or product used in the well or its vicinity during any stage or for any action related to the hydraulic fracturing process.
i. The MSDS must also be distributed to local fire departments, and local and state emergency planning officials under Section 311 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. This distribution must happen at least thirty (30) days prior to use of the product on the hydraulic fracturing site.
ii. With regard to chemicals used, the MSDS shall list all chemicals to be used in the well or in its vicinity, potential adverse effects of those chemicals, and recommended treatment if exposed.
d. Creation of an Operator’s Violations page on the website that is easy to locate and navigate. Violations and/or accidents are to be posted within 48 hours of an event, with easy-to-comprehend descriptions of:
i. what caused the event;
ii. what were the damages to property, life, environment, public health;
iii. closure of operation (even if temporary);
iv. license suspensions and/or license revocations.
v. the dollar amount of fine.
Items to be reported include but are not limited to: traffic accidents, well-casing failures, spills, dumping of produced water, frack pad fires, overflow of open pit storage, intentional or accidental venting of methane, increased levels of methane and/or other chemicals in surrounding groundwater, soil or air, explosions, radiation leaks/exposure, transportation spillage, and aquatic and wildlife kills.
5. If a hydraulic fracturing company contests a penalty, or negotiates with the State of Illinois or a private citizen to settle a dispute out of court, all such settlements and/or lawsuit decisions must be described on the IDNR web site. If a hydraulic fracturing company requires that a settlement or details of a court decision be kept confidential in order for settlement to be reached, the IDNR will refuse to grant any future drilling permits to said company until the settlement details or court case details are publicly disclosed as required by the IDNR.
6. Corporate Liability: (Creed #2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
Recognizing that many of hydraulic fracturing’s effects on public health have yet to be determined, and further recognizing that only the open sharing of health data will allow such detrimental health effects to be discerned, the IDNR hereby calls for a completely transparent approach to all health records likely to be related to hydraulic fracturing. In the event that IDNR learns through its inspectors or citizen reports of a public health occurrence or occurrences reasonably believed to be connected with a hydraulic fracturing site, IDNR will publish the details of such events, though not the names of the affected individuals unless permission is secured from citizens affected negatively by exposure to the hydraulic fracturing process. The IDNR further requires that any non-disclosure agreements as related to disputes, settlements or court cases between physicians and industry or patients and industry are forbidden.
WASHINGTON — The Arctic coastal plain of northeastern Alaska serves as a summer safe haven for the porcupine caribou herd. It is here that cows come to give birth, and it is where the herd forages and escapes predators.
For thousands of years, the Gwich’in people, an indigenous tribe of northern Alaska and Canada, have relied on the caribou as a primary food source. But even when Gwich’in were facing starvation, they kept out of the herd’s calving grounds, tribal member Bernadette Demientieff told HuffPost at a rally Wednesday outside the U.S. Capitol.
The Gwich’in call the coastal plain — part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — “Iizhik Gwats’an Gwnadaii Goodlit,” or “the sacred place where life begins.” And today they are fighting — once again — to keep oil and gas development out of this fragile landscape.
“Our voices need to be heard,” Demientieff told HuffPost, adding that the Gwich’in people think they’ve been ignored by Alaska’s all-Republican congressional delegation.
Chris D’Angelo/HuffPost
Members of the Gwich’in Nation and Inupiaq tribe rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest the GOP-led effort to open Alaska’s fragile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development.
Last week, the Senate passed a wildly unpopular tax overhaul bill that includes a provision pushed by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that would require Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to approve at least two lease sales for drilling — each consisting of no fewer than 400,000 acres — in the refuge’s 1.5 million-acre coastal plain. The issue of drilling in this part of refuge, also known as the 1002 Area, has been the subject of a decades-long battle between energy producers and conservationists.
On Wednesday — the 57th anniversary of the executive order establishing the refuge — members of the Gwich’in Nation, Alaska’s Inupiaq tribe and other indigenous groups gathered on the National Mall outside the U.S. Capitol to demand that Congress remove Murkowski’s provision from the tax bill and abandon opening the coastal plain to fossil fuel development. Allowing drilling, they stressed, could forever destroy Alaska natives’ subsistence lifestyle.
“We just want to continue to live our way of life,” Demientieff, the executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, told the crowd of about 100 people. “We’re not asking for anything. We just want to continue to have our food security, to have healthy land, to have healthy animals to hunt.”
Jeffrey Peter, a member of a Canadian band of Gwich’in, said his people have evolved alongside and “share the fate of the caribou.”
“I’m not a politician. I’m not a public speaker,” he said. “I’m just an individual who cares about this very deeply. This means everything to me. And it means everything to my people.”
Peter said he “deserves the right to pass on this knowledge and these traditions that have been carried through generations,” adding that his first child is expected in a few months
Jeffrey Peter, a Vuntut Gwich’in from Canada’s Yukon Territory, talks about the importance of protecting the refuge and the porcupine caribou herd pic.twitter.com/bGx3jDrNqu
Those speaking at the rally included Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Tom Udall of New Mexico. Each said they would do what that can to support the Alaska natives’ in their fight to protect the lands they consider sacred.
“This is part of a big battle for our Mother Earth, for our beautiful blue-green planet,” Merkley said. “But let’s make sure we win this particular piece of this battle.”
After decades of unsuccessful attempts to open up the coastal plain to energy development, Republicans appear on the brink of victory. All that stands in the way of the tax bill becoming law is for the Senate and House to hash out a compromise version. The House passed its own tax bill last month.
Murkowski’s legislation would allow for 2,000 acres of th爱上海同城对对碰shlf
e refuge’s 1.5 million-acre coastal plain to be developed with wells and support facilities, and is expected to bring in an estimated $1.1 billion in federal revenues by 2027.
The senator has called it “a tremendous opportunity” for Alaska and the country, and said she’s “confident” drilling would not come at the expense of the environment.
“For many of us, we believe that this area — this very productive area — is actually one of the best places that we can go for responsible development, and that we should have done it some time ago,” she said at a recent hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Described by some as “America’s Serengeti,” the refuge covers more than 19 million acres in northeastern Alaska and is home to polar be爱上海同城论坛手机版
On its website, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service writes that despite the many hardships the porcupine caribou herd faces, it stages “a magnificent wildlife spectacle on the Arctic coastal plain” each summer.
“The caribou are a vital part of the natural system that operates there,” the website reads. “Unalterably linked to the area, the herd both depends on and enhances the dynamic wilderness that is the Arctic Refuge.”
In 2015, FWS recommended that the coastal plain be designated as wilderness, a move that would have permanently protected the area from commercial development. With President Donald Trump in office, however, FWS has reversed course, voicing support for oil and gas extraction in this remote ecosystem.
“We support responsible development, in whatever form or fashion that best occurs in,” Greg Sheehan, principal deputy director of FWS, said at a November congressional hearing. He added that if Congress passed legislation, the agency would “use the best science, the best technologies and other strategies” to ensure activities have the “least amount of impact on the native wildlife species.”
But Demientieff said her people aren’t going to back down ― and she remains confident they will prevail. “They are not getting into the refuge,” she said.
Teddy Roosevelt, in a frequently cited address, once noted that, “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.”
On September 24, we will celebrate both National Public Lands and National Hunting and Fishing Day. This occasion provides an excellent opportunity for Americans to get outdoors and give something back by becoming active in local projects to protect our nation’s natural splendor. It’s also a crucial chance for people across the country to tell leaders in Congress that the allure of short-term economic gain is no reason to strip protections from tens of millions of acres of still pristine areas. Unfortunately, a pending congressional proposal could undermine decades of progress in preserving this wondrous heritage.
Likewise, National Hunting and Fishing Day honors the conservation leadership that hunters and anglers historically have provided in restoring wildlife populations to previous abundance and protecting the habitat on which many species – from birds to bears – depend. Established by President Richard Nixon in 1972, the day also serves as an opportunity for parents to introduce the wonders of nature to their youngsters and teach our children about just how fragile these special places can be.
We are losing open spaces at an astonishing rate – more than 3 million acres a year, or nearly 8,000 acres a day. You see this loss in meadows converted to malls, forests cleared for subdivisions and wild places being opened to new oil and gas drilling, coal extraction and hardrock mining. These activities can be an important source of jobs, but we need to strike a balance between development and protection because America’s wild lands are a finite resource.
We must bequeath to our heirs some semblance of the diminishing natural world. And fortunately, that’s been happening over the last half century. Since the enactment of the Wilderness Act – a legal tool that allows Americans to safeguard some of our public lands in perpetuity – we have had the foresight to conserve more than 100 million acres.
Saving places as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System keeps pristine areas in an untrammeled state and free for us to enjoy. Moreover, because of citizens’ calls for action, more designations are under consideration.
Some in Congress, however, are currently pushing legislation that would open more than 60 million acres – an area the size of Wyoming – of now-protected areas to extractive industries. Known as the Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act of 2011, this bill would strip current safeguards for irreplaceable old-growth forests, sinuous canyons and sagebrush plains before they can be properly assessed or otherwise conserved.
If industrial development and off-road vehicle use are allowed, these places will become permanently ineligible for南京夜生活
wilderness consideration. Moreover, the release bill would abandon the balanced, bipartisan approach utilized by our nation’s leaders over the past several decades to ensure that America’s last undeveloped lands are protected for generations to come. Indeed, President Ronald Reagan signed more wilderness bills into law than any other president in U.S. history, working with a Democratic Congress to enact 21 proposals in 1984 alone.
As both National Public Lands and National Hunting and Fishing Day remind us, we are fortunate to have unspoiled places we all can enjoy. And as President Roosevelt so wisely warned over a century ago, if Americans are to continue to enjoy this nation’s rich “natural heritage” we must actively protect it.
This Sept. 24, millions of Americans will do their part. Congress should follow suit by rejecting this misguided wilderness release proposal.
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