Opinions
Lively blog by Karen Korell that included over 340 items and 119 items that mention the word "landowners". For example, Google this phrase to see an index of all articles on Splashdown! that mention the word landownders:
<landowners site:http://splashdownpa.blogspot.com/ >.
Pennsylvania based website includes videos and activist anti-facking links.
Splashdown's author, Karen Korell, died August 30, 2010.
Updated frequently. (I will miss you. Neil Zusman 2010-09-11.) Pennsylvania based website includes videos and activist anti-facking links. Updated frequently. Passionate, opinionated and truthful.
See Splashdown posting by Chris Hedges, "Clean Energy and Poisoned Water", May 25, 2009.
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. He is a columnist for Truthdig.
Sustainable Otsego is a loose, minimally structured network of local activists and supporters who seek to promote sustainable practices in the rural Leatherstocking region focused on Cooperstown and Otsego County, New York. Its' listserv provides a forum for the discussion of sustainability issues.
Includes links to expert opinions, products and chemicals fact sheets and current events.
Amy Mall. Switchboard. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
Articles tagged hydraulicfracturing posted by Amy Mall, Senior Policy Analyst, Boulder, Colorado in "Health and the Environment".
"NRDC’s Land Program is dedicated to protecting our nation’s wildest places and most valuable wildlife habitat from irresponsible industrial development."
See: "Today's reports of spills from natural gas operations", 3/18/2010.
See also: Mall, A., S. Buccino, and J. Nichols. “Drilling down: Protecting western communities from the health and environmental effects of oil and gas production.” National Resources Defense Council. (October 2007). (PDF 48 pages, 13.7 MB.)
Big Oil has some big plans to put America’s clean energy future in jeopardy by expanding the production of tar sands oil – one of the most destructive, dirty, and costly fuels in the world.
In 2008, 1,600 ducks drowned in toxic tailing ponds created to produce dirty tar sands oil.
In July, 2010, 1 million gallons of oil gushed into a Michigan river from a pipeline owned by a tar sands company.
And now, tar sands oil companies want to pump this dangerous and dirty fuel right through America's heartland, putting our public water supplies, crop lands, and wildlife habitats at risk of tar sands oil leaks.
To extract the tar sands, oil companies are digging up pristine forest in Alberta, Canada, which provides habitat for large populations of migratory birds, wolves, grizzly bears, lynx and moose.
Mining and extracting these tar sands destroys enormous swaths of important ecosystems, produces lake-sized reservoirs of toxic waste, releases toxic chemicals into our air when it is refined in the U.S., and emits significantly more global warming pollutants into the atmosphere than fuels made from conventional oil.
TckTckTck is an unprecedented global alliance, 
representing hundreds of millions of people from all walks of life, who are united by a desire to see a strong global deal on climate change. We are made up of leading environment, development, and faith-based NGO's, youth groups, trade unions and individuals, and we are calling for a fair, ambitious and binding climate change agreement.
Blog by Sue Smith-Heavenrich reporting from Owego, New York.
Sue Heavenrich.
I am a freelance journalist, writing about Marcellus gas issues, the environment and science. I live in upstate NY, surrounded by forest and fields. There is gas beneath my feet. member: Society of Environmental Journalists; Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators.
Lie to me.
I've heard everything from "my secret fracking fluid is safe", to "I need sweetheart regulation and tax deals for my Big Oil and Gas folks because we are still having trouble making ends meet in our family." Can you convince a room of kids that fracking is safe using cupcakes and icing? Encana can. How about having kids compare natural gas to farting in Spectra Energy's "Kids Say [the] Darndest Things About Natural Gas"?
And there really is a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FPCA) blog, but the Yes Men have us wondering about the truth in ways that make us smarter by asking us to verify the legitimacy of the messages we receive through the media. Their work makes urgent civil disobedience by activists such as Appalachia Rising and scientists like James Hansen look all the more vibrant.
Unlike Josh Fox and Michael Moore whose "in your face" documentaries rub the liars' nose in doodoo, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno serve up matter-of-fact impersonations that put their personalities in the back seat. Their tagline: "Sometimes it takes a lie to expose the truth."
Where is the truth about the Marcellus Shale gas play? It's here and out there, far flung from British Columbia, Wyoming, Colorado through Texas, Louisiana, Alabama to Pennsylvania, New York and on to Poland, Paris, Malaysia, China, India, and Nigeria; from corporate corruption to lax government oversight and environmental justice. It's hiding in the boardrooms waiting for the whistle blowers and insiders to say that we really needed those environmental impact statements to be honest after all, after there is not a drop of water left to drink. (Neil Zusman, Jan. 30, 2011.)
Fake Newspaper/Database, real website as reported by YesMen, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno.
See: Video - The Yes Men Fix the World. (2009). Full 1:35 video from YouTube below.
See: Yes Men Claim Leonore Annenberg Prize For Art Award
June 18, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
TOP HEADLINE: WORLD LEADERS SIGN PACT TO AVERT CLIMATE DISASTER
Newspaper Ignites Hope, Announces "Civil Disobedience Database"
In a front-page ad in today's International Herald Tribune, the leaders of the European Union thank the European public for having engaged in months of civil disobedience leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference that will be held this December. "It was only thanks to your massive pressure over the past six months that we could so dramatically shift our climate-change policies.... To those who were arrested, we thank you."
There was only one catch: the paper was fake.
Looking exactly like the real thing, but dated December 19th, 2009, a million copies of the fake paper were distributed worldwide by thousands of volunteers in order to show what could be achieved at the Copenhagen climate conference that is scheduled for Dec. 7-18, 2009. (At the moment, the conference is aiming for much more modest cuts, dismissed by leading climate scientists as too little, too late to stave off runaway processes that will lead to millions or even billions of casualties.)
The paper describes in detail a powerful (and entirely possible) new treaty to bring carbon levels down below 350 parts per million - the level climate scientists say we need to achieve to avoid climate catastrophe. One article describes how a website, http://BeyondTalk.net, mobilized thousands of people to put their bodies on the line to confront climate change policies - ever since way back in June, 2009.
Although the newspaper is a fake (its production and launch were coordinated by Greenpeace), the website is real. Beyondtalk.net is part of a growing network of websites calling for direct action on climate change, building on statements made in recent months by noted political figures. (For example, in September Nobel laureate Al Gore asserted that "we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants.")
See: Stephen Holden. "All Suited Up for Mischief, to Rumple Stuffed Shirts." NYT. Oct. 7, 2009.
See: The Yes Men. "Chevron - We Agree."
See: Chevron Human Energy Stories | Addressing Climate Change.
See: Anne C. Mulkern. "U.S. Chamber Sues Activists Over Climate Stunt." NYT. Oct. 27, 2009.
A television commercial about global warming from Environmental Defense and the Ad Council.
The Gates of Hell
This pit of fire that has been burning for 40 years looks more like something out or Mordor than Turkmenistan. But the burning crater of natural gas began shortly after a Russian drilling rig collapsed into the Underworld and no one knew what to do.
Having opened this huge poisonous gas cavern up, the atmosphere and the nearby residents in the village of Derweze decided the next logical move would be to set this huge crater on fire, and it has been burning ever since.
Here’s video of some tourists enjoying the incredible, football-field-wide hole to hell (not literally).
The Centralia Underground Coal Fire
Our former publisher and Pennsylvanian Bill Coffin used to talk about this one all the time, so I have been familiar with its existence for some time. Nevertheless, it’s completely nuts. Like the Gates of Hell, it has been burning for decades — since 1962 in fact. But unlike the Turkmenistan fire, its genesis is not so clear.
It is suspected to be a blunder by the local fire department in 1962 which had been tasked with cleaning up the local landfill, which itself sat on top of an abandoned strip mine. To accomplish this, they set the landfill on fire, apparently not an unheard of method at the time. However, the theory goes that the fire was not put out properly, and heated up veins of coal underneath the landfill, which began to smolder over time.
Eventually the reaction lit an underground fire which continued to burn, which caused little concern from local authorities until almost two decades later when in 1981, a 12-year-old boy fell into a 150-foot sinkhole which suddenly opened up in the backyard underneath his feet.
An actual sign in Centralia, PA.
...the sometimes loosely governed rush to liberate this fuel from rock deposits through hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has helped invigorate opponents of drilling. I agree with Christopher Helman over at Forbes, who wrote a couple of days ago that low gas prices mean there’s little to lose by holding up drilling in highly contested areas (the Marcellus Shale here in New York being the prime battle zone) while an Environmental Protection Agency scientific review is completed.
I was at the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday and officials there made a convincing case that the hydraulic fracturing study, due out in 2012, will clarify where real risks lie.
But campaigners who fight natural gas altogether, like anyone else immersed in the struggle over an energy policy that works for the long haul, had better come up with a real-world game plan for fostering human progress while limiting environmental risks.
Otherwise, they’ve moved from the Nimby camp to the world of the Banana (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything).
See: Climate Co-benefits and Child Mortality Wedges
About Dot Earth
In Dot Earth, which recently moved from the news side of The Times to the Opinion section, Andrew C. Revkin examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits.
