GLOBAL FRACKDOWN STARTS: Majority of Canadians want fracking moratorium, says EKOS poll

Council of Canadians :: Media Release :: October 8, 2014

Today, the Council of Canadians released the results of an EKOS Research poll that found most people, regardless of political affiliation, support a fracking moratorium. Seventy percent support “a national moratorium on fracking until it is scientifically proven to be safe.”

“Regardless of age, region or education, people from coast to coast are calling for an end to fracking,” says Maude Barlow, National Chairperson for the Council of Canadians. “Communities understand very well the impacts that fracking has on water sources, climate and public health. With the moratoriums in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, it’s clearly the way communities want governments to go.”

Significantly, this support for a moratorium cuts across party lines: nearly half of Conservative voters support a moratorium. The highest support for a moratoria came from NDP voters: 87% of them support a national moratorium as do 78% of Liberal voters. Currently, the Green Party is the only party calling for a national moratorium.

“Based on these numbers, political parties may want to rethink their positions to put them in line with what the population wants. We’re urging NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau to support a moratorium as the Green Party has,” says Emma Lui, Water Campaigner for the Council of Canadians.

The results are being released leading up to the Global Frackdown on October 11. The Global Frackdown is an international day of action where hundreds of communities around the world call for a ban on fracking. Local Council of Canadians chapters are organizing events across the country on that day.

Fracking is a risky technique where sand, water and chemicals are injected into the ground to break apart rock formations to extract natural gas or oil. Communities have raised a number of concerns including excessive water use, water contamination, greenhouse gas emissions and health impacts of fracking chemicals.

While the provinces issue water and drilling permits, the federal government has a responsibility to regulate fisheries, environmental assessments, pollution prevention and oil and gas in First Nation reserves.

Other results:

• 67% of people are aware of fracking (25% are very aware; 42% are somewhat aware) 

• 70% of people support a moratorium on fracking, which is fairly consistent across age groups, regions, income groups and education 

• 78% of Liberal voters, 49% of Conservative voters and 87% of NDP voters support a moratorium 

• 53% of Liberal voters and 67% of NDP voters strongly support a moratorium

The margin of error for a sample of this size is +/- 3.1%, 19 times out of 20. Survey results are statistically reliable in all major regions of Canada.

Read the media backgrounder and see the poll data tables.

Court Rules That New York Towns Can Ban Fracking

EcoWatch | June 30, 2014 10:47 am 
       

In a precedent-setting case decided today by the New York Court of Appeals, local communities have triumphed over the fracking industry. The court ruled that the towns of Dryden and Middlefield can use local zoning laws to ban heavy industry, including oil and gas production within municipal borders. 

Helen Slottje and Deborah Goldberg stand on the steps of the Court of Appeals
 in Albany on June 3 shortly before oral arguments.
Photo credit: Earthjustice

“Today the Court stood with the people of Dryden and the people of New York to protect their right to self determination. It is clear that people, not corporations, have the right to decide how their community develops,” said Dryden Deputy Supervisor Jason Leifer. “This would not have been possible without the hard work of many of my friends and neighbors and our lawyers Deborah Goldberg of Earthjustice and Mahlon Perkins. Today’s ruling shows all of America that a committed group of citizens and public officials can stand together against fearful odds and successfully defend their homes, their way of life and the environment against those who would harm them all in the name of profit.”

Deborah Goldberg argues before the Court of Appeals on June 3. 

Photo credit: Earthjustice

“This decision by the Court of Appeals has settled the matter once and for all across New York State and has sent a firm message to the oil and gas industry,” said Earthjustice Managing Attorney Deborah Goldberg. “For too long the oil and gas industry has intimidated and abused people, expecting to get away with it. That behavior is finally coming back to haunt them, as communities across the country stand up and say ‘no more.’ Earthjustice is proud to have stood with, and fought on behalf of, one such community.” 

Many other cities and towns in New York have been waiting for today’s decision to establish bans or moratoriums of their own. The victory also gives legal authority to the more than 170 New York municipalities that have passed measures against fracking in their communities. Today’s decision will also serve as inspiration for a growing number of localities in Colorado, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and California that are hoping to stop the controversial drilling practice.

“Town by town, New Yorkers have taken a stand against fracking. Today’s victory confirms that each of these towns is on firm legal ground,” said Helen Slottje, an Ithaca-based attorney whose legal research inspired New York’s local fracking ban groundswell and who was honored with the 2014 Goldman Environmental Prize. “The oil and gas industry tried to take away a fundamental right that pre-dates even the Declaration of Independence: the right of municipalities to regulate local land use. But they failed. The anti-fracking measures passed by Dryden, Middlefield and dozens of other New York municipalities are fully enforceable.”

Residents of Dryden smile, with Helen Slottje and Earthjustice’s Deborah
Goldberg and Kathleen Sutcliffe, after the high court argument in Albany.
Photo credit: Earthjustice

In response to the court’s 5-2 decision, John Armstrong of Frack Action and New Yorkers Against Fracking said, ”We applaud the court for once again affirming the right of New Yorkers to ban fracking and its toxic effects from their communities. As Chief Judge Lippman said, you don’t bulldoze over the voice of the people. But water and air contamination don’t stop at local boundaries, and Governor Cuomo must ban fracking statewide to protect our health and homes from the arrogant and inherently harmful fracking industry.”

The case in Dryden has attracted nation wide attention and taken on special significance. More than 20,000 people from across the country and globe sent messages to the town board, expressing support for the town through the course of its nearly three-year legal battle. An Earthjustice video depicting the town’s fight has garnered more than 80,000 views.

“We did it! This victory is for everyone who loves their town and will fight to the end to protect it,” said Dryden resident Deborah Cipolla-Dennis. “I’m proud of my town and I’m proud of the people in Fort Collins, CO; Denton, TX; Santa Cruz, CA; and all the others who are standing up to the oil and gas industry.” 

Watch the video "Dryden: The Small Town that Changed the Fracking Game" under INTERESTING VIDEOS in the sidebar of this blog.

This story can also be reached at http://ecowatch.com/2014/06/30/new-york-towns-ban-fracking/?utm_source=EcoWatch+List&utm_campaign=fd167ba96c-Top_News_6_28_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49c7d43dc9-fd167ba96c-85328537

"Slowly but surely, citizens are claiming their rights to safe and clean environments and communities.  If this can be done in New York, why not in New Brunswick?  Should not our NB towns and villages be able to say NO by means of zoning about how their communities are to be developed?  The citizens of Dryden were told they were wasting their time, but they won in the end.  Two lawsuits have now been filed by citizen groups in NB -  the "Science Suit" against the GNB, and the "Peoples Suit" against the GC, GNB and SWN. You can donate to the Science Suit by going to www.knowshalegasnb.ca or www.noshalegasnb.ca and be part of the change in New Brunswick."  

Richard Lachance, Kent South NO SHALE GAS Kent Sud

Anti-shale Gas Group Continues Fight with Industry
Cole Hobson  ::  Times & Transcript  ::  Environment  ::  June 24, 2014

Jim Emberger is a resident of Taymouth, north of Fredericton and has been a vocal spokesman for the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance. He also led the Voice of the People Tour earlier this year and is named as one of the plaintiffs in the recent court filing against the province of New Brunswick, seeking a shale gas moratorium.

Times & Transcript: So you came to rural New Brunswick to hopefully enjoy a quiet retirement, but it seems like it’s been anything but?

Jim Emberger: I think that’s a fair thing to say. I would certainly much rather be doing other things (than shale gas activism). I’m a musician, songwriter and I’d rather be spending time in my studio doing this and also working in my garden that we have here in New Brunswick.

I’m by no means a professional activist, but I have been involved in things that affect my life. I think anyone who is not involved in things that affect their life is missing something. It’s kind of like not living their lives, letting other people make decisions for them.

T&T:  You’ve at times been characterized as one of the main voices of substance in the shale gas debate – with not a lot of information flowing freely from those on the other, pro-side of the debate. Do you feel that’s accurate?

JE:  It certainly evolved I think to being that. I mean obviously there are other forces at play here that agree with our position who aren’t part of the Alliance. We certainly got our first information from the Conservation Council of New Brunswick and it’s been a staunch ally through all this. The Council of Canadians and most of the mainstream environmental groups have had a voice. For a while all those voices came together in what was once a larger but looser – I wouldn’t say alliance – coalition, of like-minded organizations a couple years back under the New Brunswick Environmental Network, which hosts different kinds of forums.

They had a shale gas forum, we all got together as very different organizations and then people went their own way. The core group of about 22 community organizations (that comprise NBASGA) were more centered on this single issue.

Obviously people like Conservation Council have many issues that they are dealing with, so I think we remained as maybe the major shale gas voice because it’s our only issue.

T&T: If you’ve been called the face of the anti-shale gas movement, who do you think is the face of the pro-shale gas movement in New Brunswick?

JE:  To this point as far as I can tell, the government. I would say (Energy and Mines Minister) Craig Leonard and then a few people in the business community who obviously have financial gain to be made from doing this.

That’s all that springs to mind. There are some small pro-shale gas groups out there, they have a Facebook site, but I’m really not well acquainted with anybody for any group that has come across a knowledgeable spokesman for their point of view. I think it’s mostly coming from government and industry.

T&T:  Is it fair to label you as totally anti-development?

JE:  I’m all for the development of solar, wind, tidal energy, clean energy economies. I’m totally for the development of an industry here in New Brunswick that would start doing the retrofitting of homes and businesses and infrastructure to fight climate change.

We are going to have to use less fossil fuel energy whether we have climate change or not ... I’m only anti things that basically cause more harm than good ... I’m in favour of the development in New Brunswick of a local agriculture economy which is something we could also do in a heartbeat with some direction from the government to do the right kind of incentives. I’m in favour of a development of a sensible forest industry and not just cutting down all our trees to pulp them and send them off somewhere else.

There are all kinds of opportunities in New Brunswick if everybody could just get out of the mindset of 200 years of resource extraction.

T&T:  Put more aptly, is it fair to label you as totally anti-development of shale gas, no matter what safeties or measures are in place?

JE:  I have no problem saying that I’m totally opposed to that ... Like many people I have had an interest in energy issues for a long time, as I once worked in the energy industry. From my point of view and that of many people who are environmentally concerned, one of the things we said back in 2000 or thereabouts when (shale gas) first came on to the news that there was this new way to get natural gas, we thought, well that’s a great thing because that means we can close down the coal-fired power plants that are really awful polluters and get natural gas, which burns clean.

It’s only when we started finding out later how the process works to get this stuff out of the ground and how much environmental destruction it causes on its own, plus the fact they lose so much of the produced methane to the atmosphere – in terms of global warming it makes it worse than coal.

Then when you start adding that in, it became, let’s slow down, maybe this isn’t such a good idea. We started doing our research and the more we know about it, the less we like it. It wasn’t an idea of ‘it’s a new energy source, we hate it.’ Just the opposite, this has been an evolution of learning from the science.

T&T:  So do you feel there is absolutely no safe way to safely extract shale gas? Or do you more take issue with the methods used by the industry?

JE:  The way they do it now is pretty much the only way it can be done, that’s the reason why we’ve never mined shale gas until the last 10 years, because it’s extremely difficult to get out, it’s trapped in rock, there was no good way to do it. The current way is a good way to do it technically, they can get the gas out, but ... all the things you know that are bad about the industry are also the only ways you can do it.

If they could come up with some new way to get shale gas out of the ground safely without polluting the environment or making people sick and if that gas was then used to replace coal burning power plants and nothing else, then I’d say it may be good. But in the long term, we shouldn’t be producing any new fossil fuels, whether clean-burning or not, because as the scientists say, we need to leave 75, 80 per cent of all the fossil fuels we know exist in the ground, because every bit more of carbon dioxide or methane we add to the atmosphere pushes it further down the road to climate change. It’s already irreversible.

It’s the old metaphor of the big ship moving at sea, even if you put on the brakes, it goes on for a long time before it stops. What (climate change) we have now is based on the stuff we put in the atmosphere 40 years ago, we can’t just say we’re going to slow down a little bit, we need to slow down significantly and find other ways to power our civilization.

T&T:  Is your background in the oil and gas industry (as a regulatory officer for the Federal Energy Administration, a government organization created to address the 1973 oil crisis) what spurred you on to go forward with this lawsuit?

JE:  My experience was back in the 1970s during the oil crisis when there was the oil embargo and the wars in the Middle East ... That gave me a familiarity with the oil industry and how it works in general and what its bottom line is ... and also how regulations of any kind are rarely effective. Let’s just say I have little faith in the regulatory process for any extraction industry anywhere in the world right now, because first-hand I could see how the money and power of these industries basically corrupted any regulatory agency that was set up to deal with them.

In that sense I guess you could say that led me to the idea we need to actually get to the courts, because there is this history of regulatory agencies not being able to have any meaningful regulatory control of the industry that they are designed to watch over.

T&T:  The anti-shale gas movement may have gotten a bad name this summer in Rexton with reports of illegal activity, arrests and violence that erupted. Your approach to this whole thing has been different, as you’ve focused more on trying to pass on information through the Voice of the People tour and researching scientific studies, as opposed to standing on the side of a highway with a sign, blocking trucks and other such activities. Do you feel this is a more intelligent and focused way to approach things?

JE:  We’d like to believe that people of reason can examine the evidence and come to the right conclusion and that’s where we have been from the beginning as an organization. But when we say peaceful, we consider protesting and carrying signs and waving signs as peaceful. People who are willing to partake in civil disobedience also follow a long-held historical method of peaceful resistance and so we weren’t out there endorsing that as an organization, but we have no problem with that. It’s an individual decision.

You grab 100 people from the street and it’s just human nature you are going to get a few of them who are hot heads and who aren’t happy, especially angry young men with a lot of testosterone going who have legitimate grievances. We have to remember that for four years this has been going on peacefully.

But when large scale industrial activity is taking place, the people who were opposed to it felt like they weren’t getting heard, and when people get pushed, they push back. I’m not defending any type of violence. You can’t characterize a movement that way, but every movement has those characteristics in it. I don’t care whether it’s anti-war protest or the protest against the G7 or civil rights protests, there are always some people who will be violent ... Yet virtually every news story whether it’s the paper, the TV, the radio, you name it, at the end of the page there’s always a reference to Oct. 17, things at Rexton.

We’re talking about peacefully going to court, doing scientific things and (the media) keeps bringing up the fact that there were violent demonstrations, even though we had nothing to do with the violence. There is a characteristic too of it not being one big unified thing in position, that is people oppose it for different reasons that overlap and they also have different stakes in the matter ... It’s way too nuanced, I think, to talk about ‘well, these people are good protesters, and these people are bad protesters.’

T&T:  I notice the NBASGA lawyer, Larry Kowalchuk, is from Saskatchewan. How did he get involved in this case?

JE:  There are not a lot of lawyers in New Brunswick with a lot of environmental background, there hasn’t been a lot of environmental law done in New Brunswick and this was actually going beyond that. The way we’re approaching this is beyond a simple, ‘they are breaking this environmental law.’

The entire context of our suit has to do with our rights as citizens to have a say in things that will be detrimental to our lives.

So we heard of Mr. Kowalchuk and we checked him out through both public and private sources and found out that he was of like mind on the issues, he wasn’t just there as a hired gun lawyer and he has had success in arguing similar kinds of constitutional cases and at Appeals Court and Supreme Court level. We spoke to him and he was interested in taking up this cause, so it was just like a good fit ... We were mostly looking for someone who had the track record and who also had similar outlook on the world as we do.

T&T:  It seems it’s pretty easy for those who support the industry to ignore a protester with a sign on the highway, but it’s not so easy to ignore a court action, is that why this avenue was taken?

JE:  Exactly. Two things, the main thing, as you say, it can’t be ignored. There’s going to have to be a judgement, a ruling, and they’re going to have to be aware of all the evidence, so at least it’s out there. If we hear all the evidence and the people hear it during the court case and they still believe it’s safe, then at least they have heard all the evidence.

But the second thing is, I think right now it’s also important that this be done in the relatively neutral realm of the judicial system where hopefully there will be a minimal opportunity to spin the message and the information, and it takes it out of the hands of politicians.

We would love to have a political party get elected this September, which on their own says ‘we are going to put a moratorium in place.’ Actions on a moratorium don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We’re happy with that happening, but at the same time we don’t want it to be a case of, well, the next administration that comes in suddenly has a change of heart because there’s some money being thrown around, they say maybe we lift that moratorium.

We want it to come from a source, and have an action taken, that actually can be long-term and do what it’s supposed to do, which is to allow all the research to be done before making decisions.

Why communities across Canada are calling for a freeze on fracking

January 31, 2014 - 10:30am

Written by Emma Lui for the Public Sector Digest, January 15, 2014

“Fracking releases large amounts of natural gas, which consists of both CO2 and methane, directly into the atmosphere. Methane, in particular, is a very powerful greenhouse gas because it can trap 20 to 25 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.”

Atlantic Canada has become a hotbed of opposition to fracking. Elsipogtog protests in New Brunswick have captured national attention, Newfoundland and Labrador recently declared a temporary ban, Nova Scotia has committed to ban the import of fracking wastewater on top of its moratorium, and Prince Edward Island’s Standing Committee on Agriculture, Environment, Energy and Forestry has recommended a moratorium on high volume hydraulic fracturing. This recent wave of opposition has put a brighter spotlight on the impacts fracking has on public health, water, and climate change in communities across the country.

I. What is fracking?

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as ‘fracking’, is a process used to extract natural gas or oil from shale rock, coal seams, and other sources. Fracking uses millions of litres of water, thousands of litres of unknown chemicals, and thousands of kilograms of sand to blast apart rock formations in order to capture natural gas or oil trapped in shale formations or coal seams.

Communities everywhere are raising concerns about fracking and the potential for water contamination, increases in greenhouse gases, the lack of disclosure of fracking chemicals, and how moving forward on fracking will hinder Canada’s ability to fulfill its obligation to protect the human right to water and sanitation.

II. A threat to water sources

Fracking uses unsustainable amounts of water. A fracking project requires anywhere from 10 million to 200 million litres of water, along with a toxic chemical cocktail. There are no known safe methods to dispose of fracking wastewater and the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission has linked earthquakes with the injection of wastewater underground.