October 2023 Networker: Addressing the Polycrisis and Navigating a World in Turmoil

Editor’s Note

Much to our horror, a new war now adds more flames to our already-sizzling world. Alongside our shock and revulsion at the violence and destruction, here in the United States we’re witnessing new rounds of division within fragile alliances, campus tension over free speech issues, dueling street demonstrations. Even if we were to try to keep our focus solely on science, environment, and health, we know that war—this war, every war—profoundly impacts each of those. Writing together in the New York Times, Somini Sengupta and Jim Tankersley say, 

The next few weeks will be crucial. If the conflict spills across the Middle East, it would likely shatter hopes of mustering global agreement on anything else, including the shared crisis of climate….

The conflict has erupted at a time of many crises across a deeply divided world. It follows a global pandemic and comes amid a war in Ukraine that has pummeled economies, driven countries deeper into debt, raised food and fuel prices, and worsened hunger among some of the world’s poorest people.

Polycrisis. Entire seminars, articles, and workshops are devoted to the term. Our senior scientist Sandra Steingraber just returned from a gathering of Heinz Award recipients in Pittsburgh who met to discuss the systems thinking and collaborations required to engage with polycrises and the skills required to generate the kind of hope that is needed to sustain us along the way. As the historian often credited with defining the word, Adam Tooze says, 

A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality.

How to navigate such a situation? In a Fall 2023 letter that predates the immediate Middle East crisis, our colleague Michael Lerner of the Omega project at Commonweal, writes, 

Our work is both to confront the reality of the darkness we have entered and to support the light of hope that we will find our way through these times to a better world. The struggle to realize that hope is as old as humanity. It has never ceased, and it never will.

The Omega initiative is serving as a “convergence hub” for experiments in polycrisis resilience. But importantly, Lerner also emphasizes that life goes on even in the face of interacting, multiplicative emergencies, and it remains the case that most environmental and social progress is made “sector by sector.” 

Our own core work at SEHN aligns with Lerner’s insight. While we’ll have much more to say on the polycrisis in the days ahead, we continue to focus on the fossil fuel crisis, which drives both the climate crisis and the toxic pollution crisis and creates the context for many other crises, including war, violence, water scarcity, hunger, and dislocation.  

SEHN director Carolyn Raffensperger was an early voice speaking out and building a coalition of grassroots groups, scientists, medical professionals, policymakers, and attorneys to oppose the massive carbon waste pipelines to be built by powerful corporations throughout the Upper Midwest and provide vetted science on the dangers of CO2 pipeline to communities on the frontlines. Fast forward: one of the big ones, the proposed Navigator carbon pipeline, was totally canceled last week and a second one, the Summit pipeline, has encountered significant permitting obstacles. The coalition will prosecute CO2 pipelines until these false climate solutions are out of business. We are currently gearing up to prevent their re-routing into national forests. Every pipeline thwarted is more hope generated. 

Sandra Steingraber and I, with Concerned Health Professionals of New York—and now with our SEHN colleague Ted Schettler—have been steadfastly working to ensure the scientific data and the medical voice are central to deliberations about fracking. Our just-released ninth edition of the fracking science Compendium includes many updates on the risks and harms of liquefied natural gas (LNG)—the exportable form of fracked gas that profoundly shapes geostrategic policies of nation states around the world and represents a toxic threat to the environmental justice communities in the U.S. Gulf coast where a rapid build-out of LNG terminals is underway.  We are heartened by the enthusiastic response of frontline communities who have awaited this new edition and let us know how this compilation of science helps them continue and sharpen the struggle against the oil and gas industry’s disregard for public health and climate. And there also lies hope.

Present day U.S. gas infrastructure has origins in decisions made during a very different wartime, seventy years ago. But rather than learning as we went along, we now confront (and try to prevent) horror stories linked to the current hundreds of thousands of miles of gas pipelines crisscrossing the country. Sandra tells this story in this month’s rePercussion Section.

On the topic of war, or any other aspect of the polycrisis, don't forget that, along with any other actions you may choose, you can write your senators… even daily, as I have done these past weeks. 

With shared sorrow for the vast loss of life, and hopes for a more peaceful future.

Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN

From the ninth edition fracking science Compendium Summary of Findings:

[T]he vast body of scientific studies now published on hydraulic fracturing in the peer-reviewed scientific literature confirms that the public health and climate risks from fracking are real and the range of environmental harms wide. Our examination uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends. 

The rapidly expanding body of evidence compiled here is massive, troubling, and cries out for decisive action. Across a wide range of parameters, the data continue to reveal a plethora of recurring problems that cannot be sufficiently averted through regulatory frameworks. The risks and harms of fracking are inherent in its operation. The only method of mitigating its grave threats to public health and the climate is a complete and comprehensive ban on fracking.Indeed, a fracking phase-out is a requirement of any meaningful plan to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Released on October 19, 2023, the ninth edition of the fracking science Compendium provides the data and the evidence policy makers and frontline communities need to help facilitate that urgent phase-out. Concerned Health Professionals of New York (CHPNY) a program of SEHN, compiles, writes, and publishes this vast report with Physicians for Social Responsibility. We have once again updated and expanded this compilation to include even more tentacles of the harmful energy system that the fracking boom of the recent decade and a half has enabled. 

From policymakers to climate organizers, from elected officials to physicians, and from labor leaders to environmental justice activists, many of our readers urgently need organized, searchable, and up-to-the minute evidence on the risks and harms of fracking and all its accompanying infrastructure, including pipelines, gas-fired power plants, compressor stations, liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, and flare stacks. We provide that.

And now for the first time, the Compendium also includes a compilation of studies on the indoor air quality and health impacts of gas appliances. We hope this new topic area will assist those who are working to facilitate the transition to all-electric buildings. Having this data in hand helps us all speak truth to power, especially as we attempt to work with governments (local, state, and national) that generally preclude in their policymaking—with significant exceptions—the Precautionary Principle.

The online document is yours to browse, study, excerpt, share, quote, and print (apologies for that expense, at 637 pages), heave into your bag and possibly drop onto your representative’s desk. Please use the contents of the fracking science Compendium to write editorials to your local newspaper, for Facebook posts, TikTok scripts, and letters to your elected officials. Let it inform your testimony at public hearings and your remarks during public comments sessions. Incorporate it into your curricula. Share it with your faith community. 

Continue Reading

Carrying pressurized methane and stretching for hundreds—or even thousands—of miles, natural gas pipelines are, by far, the biggest components of fracking infrastructure. They are also exceedingly prone to corrosion, ruptures, leaks, and explosions. 

Because they pose additional health and safety threats that are specific to the communities and ecosystems they traverse, the Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating the Risks and Harms of Fracking, 9th edition, is full of pipelines. They have individual names, back stories, horror stories, permitting decisions, accident reports, citizen opposition campaigns, and lawsuits. We attempt to follow them all. 

There’s the proposed Atlantic Coast pipeline, which looked to be financially unfeasible—until its debt was guaranteed by Dominion and Duke Energy. 

And there’s the Albany Loop pipeline, which would have conveyed fracked gas across the Hudson River—until public opposition, on climate grounds, forced its owner to abandon plans for it.

There’s the Spectra Energy pipeline, which, in 2016, exploded, destroyed a house, injured the homeowner, and damaged several other homes in Salem Township, Pennsylvania. The cause of that accident: corrosion. 

There’s the Revolution pipeline, which, in 2018, exploded and destroyed a house in Beaver County, Pennsylvania after going into service just a few days earlier. The cause of that accident: heavy rains and landslides.

There’s the Enbridge pipeline, which exploded in Lincoln County, Kentucky in 2019, killing one, injuring six, and forcing 75 people from their homes. According the final accident report, the cause of that blast was a combination of “a manufacturing defect, degraded coating, and ineffective cathodic protection applied following a 2014 gas flow reversal project, which resulted in hydrogen-induced cracking at the outer surface.”  

There’s the Constitution pipeline which was to bring fracked gas from northeast Pennsylvania to New York State. That pipeline received federal approval and all the necessary permits from the state of Pennsylvania, but New York refused to issue permits. Nevertheless, in preparation for construction, the company seized land by eminent domain along the Pennsylvania side of the planned route and, with the assistance of armed federal marshals, destroyed a family’s sugar maple grove. Canceled in 2020, the Constitution pipeline was never built. The century-old maple trees remain as stumps.

There’s the PennEast pipeline, which would have transported fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New Jersey. It was blocked after New Jersey denied key water permits. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the pipeline company. But, in 2021, after massive public opposition, PennEast was canceled anyway.  

And then there’s the $6.2 billion Mountain Valley pipeline, which also lost key water permits in 2021, and, because of violations for erosion and sedimentation control, had to pay over a half a million dollars in fines by consent order of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Mountain Valley was given new momentum in 2023 when the debt ceiling deal between Congress and the White House removed many of these legal obstacles and required its approval. Its construction is now underway—even as an ongoing civil disobedience campaign is slowing that work down.

Continue Reading