Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 14, 2012.
Citizen-led Ballot Initiative To Ban Fracking in Michigan Begins.
CHARLEVOIX, MICH. – A citizen-led ballot initiative to amend the Michigan state constitution to ban horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, statewide began this week. The Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan, a ballot question committee, received approval of its petition from the Board of State Canvassers. The proposed amendment would also ban the storage of wastes from horizontal hydraulic fracturing, preventing Michigan from becoming a frack wasteland. Michigan has over 1,000 injection wells and over 12,000 conventional gas and oil wells that could be converted for that purpose. The campaign website is: http://letsbanfracking.org.Michigan is the only state in the nation where citizens are attempting to ban fracking by amendment to a state constitution. Vermont’s legislature passed a ban on fracking on May 4 and with the governor’s approval, became the first state to ban fracking.
The Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan is required to submit 322,609 valid signatures from Michigan voters by July 9 to the Bureau of Elections, in order to place the proposed amendment on the ballot in November.
“Michigan’s constitution invites citizens to amend it,” said Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan’s campaign director LuAnne Kozma, of Novi, and a co-founder of the non-profit public interest group Ban Michigan Fracking. “We chose to form a ballot question committee and amend the constitution because we cannot count on our current elected officials to do the right thing. Proposed ‘frack reform’ bills in Lansing are only attempts to regulate and tolerate fracking and put studies in the hands of State regulators. New legislation (HB 5565) introduced last week, touted as a disclosure of frack chemicals bill, contains language that forbids physicians treating frack victims from disclosing the chemicals, even to patients. We knew we had to act to stop the toxic invasion about to devastate our state. We will not recognize Michigan in a few years, if we do not ban fracking,” said Kozma.
The citizen effort has the support of Vermont legislators Tony Klein and Peter Peltz who sponsored the Vermont ban bill. “It was clear in Vermont the dangers of fracking to our natural resources. In Vermont our natural resources are our number one priority, so it was not a difficult thing to prohibit fracking forever. It passed overwhelmingly,” said Klein. “We encourage all states, when they have the chance to do so, to ban this dangerous technique.”
New York ban groups also praised the amendment to ban fracking in Michigan. Maura Stephens, a cofounder of the Coalition to Protect New York and other grassroots groups, has been working on fracking issues for five years and will soon publish a book on the subject. “Only massive public resistance to fracking will stop the horrific industrialization of our beautiful states,” Stephens said. “This truly is a matter of life and death for your way of life.”
Earlier this month, a Michigan House of Representatives Natural Gas Subcommittee report recommended that the State lease all of its mineral rights, asserting Michigan’s “natural gas renaissance is upon us.”
The State auctioned off mineral rights in 23 Michigan counties on May 8 in Lansing, including the rights under Yankee Springs State Recreation Area (a state park) in Barry County and highly populated areas in Oakland County. Residents attempting to save their communities attended the auction, registered as bidders and tried, but failed, to purchase the mineral rights to the areas around Yankee Springs. The entire Lower Peninsula now stands to be fracked. Devon Energy is looking at the A-1 carbonate layers in Gladwin County along with other areas in the middle of the state. Encana is drilling the Utica-Collingwood shale in state forests, with several operations in progress and more pending. Densely populated areas such as Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Jackson– communities historically not affected by oil/gas drilling within their borders–are now facing the threat.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, which issues frack permits and at the same time, depends on revenue from the production of gas and oil, continues to publicly confuse the facts, claiming that hydraulic fracturing has been done for over 60 years, while not always informing the public that horizontal hydraulic fracturing is a new, as of 2002, experimental process, often referred to as a marriage of technologies between hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.
To volunteer to circulate or sign petitions, see: http://LetsBanFracking.org
The petition reads: A proposal to amend the Constitution by adding a new Section 28 to Article I to read as follows: “To insure the health, safety, and general welfare of the people, no person, corporation, or other entity shall use horizontal hydraulic fracturing in the State. “Horizontal hydraulic fracturing” is defined as the technique of expanding or creating rock fractures leading from directional wellbores, by injecting substances including but not limited to water, fluids, chemicals, and proppants, under pressure, into or under the rock, for purposes of exploration, drilling, completion, or production of oil or natural gas. No person, corporation, or other entity shall accept, dispose of, store, or process, anywhere in the State, any flowback, residual fluids, or drill cuttings used or produced in horizontal hydraulic fracturing.”.
Links:
Committee to Ban Fracking in Michiganhttp://LetsBanFracking.org
Ban Michigan Fracking
www.banmichiganfracking.org
Michigan House Bill 5565 (Physicians gag-order bill)http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(v5fzuf2quwfkkeb0ik05v145))/mileg.aspx?page=BillSta
tus&objectname=2012-HB-5565
Michigan Board of State Canvassers draft minutes to April 26, 2012 meetinghttp://www.mi.gov/documents/sos/4-26-12_DRAFT_Minutes_383873_7.pdf
Michigan House of Representatives Natural Gas Subcommittee Report, April 2012
http://gophouse.com/publications/80/NaturalGasReport.pdf
Holy Terror Farm is a paradise of sorts on the banks of Terror Creek in the Western Colorado Rockies. Bushels of fresh fruits and vegetables of every sort, species, and color sprout from this soil every season (yes, even winter!). And all the water that irrigates the orchard, garden, and pastures here is siphoned directly from the pristine flows of Terror Creek, a tributary of the Gunnison River.Sign greeting visitors to Holy Terror Farm
Since buying the farm in spring 2010, Alison and Jason have doubled the number of trees in the orchard and quadrupled the garden space. They feed the home first, and excess produce is sold online mostly, thru a farmers market called Local Farms First. But the “chemical free” orchards here would no longer be able to make that claim reliably if gas wells were erected on the banks of Terror Creek. Who would want to eat that food anymore?
Natural gas pipeline warning sign, Silt, CO
The farmers in this valley have a great thing going here! And Alison isn’t the only one threatened; the BLM leasing proposal for gas drilling includes parcels that border schools, parks, and orchards all over the valley. It can be taken as a given that these two industries cannot coexist side-by-side. So why is it permissible for one industry to come and kick another out that was here first? That permission is representative of the fact that our federal and state governments, under the direction of industry experts, have put energy production before food production.
Sunrise filming at a drill site as a new bore hole is started
There are two main reasons for this jacked up priority order, and the first is pretty simple: we have to move food, among other things, across the nation and overseas to the markets in which they’ll be sold. And movement of goods takes fuel. We’ve got an infrastructure that is far larger than is really sustainable and we don’t want to face that fact. The second reason is more important, and far more discouraging: energy sells for great prices overseas where nations don’t have the technology or reckless abandon necessary to cultivate their own fossil fuels. So how do we address these two issues?
The first we can make serious progress on immediately: grow a garden! By eating locally, working locally, and investing in a localized community this will start to change. The stronger our localities, the less they have to lean on the larger national and international frameworks for their needs. The second issue is tougher to solve, especially in a capitalist society. It’s hard to tell a gas company not to sell its natural gas to Chinese markets for $16 when the unit price domestically is closer to $2.25. There’s not much we can do to make this look like a good business decision. But lifting of the veil has begun; secrets about the failing financial model of shale gas are starting to be exposed to the public. Reserve estimates in the Marcellus and Barnett shale plays, once thought to be huge moneymakers, have been slashed by 80%! As we seek to expose the truth, our foot is in the door.
Cameraman Diego and Ham, Bacon, & Porkchop's closeup
Education is key here; we need to learn as a public what the problems and conflicts are in this industry so we start making better decisions on a legislative as well as a personal level. One thing I know for sure since starting this project is that the energy industry is a great liar. And since it fills the bank quite well, our political leaders stand idly by or believe the lies themselves. But this film is our little bit of education and we hope stories like it can help raise the knowledge base of the people. We’re learning so much about this conflict as we go along, and we want you to learn with us. Please help us get this film made!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/658194669/holy-terror-documentary-film
http://www.halffropro.com/directors-blog
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Every Drop Counts
How can I conserve water? My answer may surprise you.
Last week , a City of Longmont water board member commented that he has a fiduciary responsibility to sell Longmont’s ‘surplus water’. Currently, Longmont leases out 600 acre feet of water per year to big oil for fracking and drilling.
Oil fracking and drilling within our community will swell to consume thousands of acre feet of clear water per year.
Simultaneously, Longmont is encouraging its citizens to reduce their use of treated water by 3500 acre feet per year.
So, if I have a leaky faucet I have two choices:
1. I can repair the faucet to reduce my consumption. This will increase Longmont’s ‘surplus water’. The ‘surplus water’ from my leak will be sold for fracking. The water will be mixed with toxic chemicals to produce fracking fluid. The fracking fluid will be injected miles under the ground into the Niobrara tight sand formations. Toxic water spurts back from the well, and needs to be quarantined. It is trucked hundreds of miles to disposal sites to be forced into two mile deep isolation wells. The mountain stream water that Longmont sold to the drilling company is irrevocably removed from the hydrological system (assuming that everything goes well). It will never again runoff the surface. It will never again soak down or
evaporate up into the water cycle.
2. I can let the faucet continue to drip. In this case my leaked water will soak down into the soil or evaporate into the atmosphere or drain to the treatment system. It is conserved within our natural environment.So, what is the best way for me to conserve the water that is leaking out of my faucet?
Maybe I should just let it drip. Every drop counts.
Joseph Bassman
Longmont, CO
Tags: conservation, consumption
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Tags: gas drilling, hydraulic fracturing, Marcellus, natural gas, unconventional play
To anyone who knows a little of the history and nature of the oil & gas industry, it will come as no particular surprise that a couple of gas industry executives, at a 10/31 – 11/01 conference in Houston, recommended the use of military psy ops techniques and former military psy ops operatives to infiltrate and influence communities in an campaign to “overcome public concern over hydraulic fracturing.”
Over and over, on every scale, from its dealings with everyone from homeowners to local government to state government, the industry has demonstrated a gross sense of entitlement. “What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine.” (Links later. ) But perhaps nothing exemplifies this so simply and directly as the statement of Matt Carmichael, Anadarko representative, (see photo above) who recommended his fellow industry executives, “Download the U.S. Army-slash-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, because we are dealing with an insurgency. There’s a lot of good lessons in there and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable.”
His fellow executive, Matt Pitzarella, also pictured above, of Range Resources, seconded Carmichael’s advice: “One employee who works with municipal governments in Pennsylvania has a background in psychological operations in the Army. Since the majority of his work is spent in local hearings and developing local regulations for drilling, we’ve found that his service in the Middle East is a real asset.” (Story with audio clips here)
Of course, these statements reveal much that warrants commentary, but somewhere near the top is what Carmichael’s phrase, “We are dealing with an insurgency,” demonstrates about the gas industry’s self-perception.
Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of an insurgency: “An armed rebellion against a constituted authority (for example, an authority recognized as such by the United Nations).”
So if in the gas industry’s thinking, community resistance to the many hazards of gas extraction constitutes an insurgency, or illegitimate armed rebellion, then the gas industry considers itself a “constituted authority.”
Citizens everywhere have news for you, boys: yes, the very special treatment you’ve been getting for the last 100 years has made you a very spoiled, very large, and indeed very dangerous child. But you are not a “constituted authority” despite your wet dreams. And we are not a rebellion.
You are the outlaws. We are the citizens with whom the constituted authority ultimately rests.
One thing you got right: we are armed, with a weapon that history suggests you have little use for – the truth.
Tags: Anadarko, Carmichael, Pitzarella, Range Resources
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