January 2024 Networker: Not On Our Watch |
| Volume 29 (1), January 2024 |
Executive Director’s Note |
| I woke up this morning with a fierce refrain of these words, “Not On My Watch.” I startled myself! What was my watch? Who was I shielding? What danger was I watching for? The first known use of the words “not on my watch” was in 1911. The chief detective of San Francisco’s police was on the night shift when he heard that a man was about to commit suicide. He refused to let that man die while he was on duty. The prompt for my fierceness this morning was knowledge of a family in trouble in my town: they were out of food and their car was going to be repossessed. I consider the most dangerous people to be parents who can’t feed their children. A mom or dad will do anything to care for a child. Of course, the daily watch I am assigned is environmental: care for the Earth, communities, and future generations. I carry out this sacred responsibility through my work with the Science and Environmental Health Network, side by side with the other SEHN staff members and colleagues in many other organizations. The scientists on our staff are skilled sentinels and can accurately assess looming and emergent threats to climate, water, and public health, given our history with fracking, pipelines, and toxic chemicals. In this issue of The Networker, you will read the reports of some of those watches. We are sounding the warnings on fracking 2.0 and its relationship to the latest ploy of the fossil fuel industry, carbon capture and storage. Guardians and sentinels are most effective as part of a team. We need others to take their turns on watch. We need the tools to do our work. I hope you can see where this is leading—a thank you to you for supporting SEHN. We need the money to support the sentinels and many of you, our readers and colleagues, gave generously in response to our end-of-year request. We are all so grateful. This is what we offer in return for your participation in this work—whether it is a financial gift to SEHN or being a guardian in other fields—we will be faithful to our assignment and to the best of our ability, we will prevent the preventable suffering caused by environmental destruction. Carolyn Raffensperger
Executive Director, SEHN |
Not A Southern Tier Solution |
| By Carmi Orenstein, Editor, the Networker, and Program Director, Concerned Health Professionals of New York
And Sandra Steingraber, Senior Scientist |
| Here at SEHN, we often feel that we are going to battle with zombies. Or, more specifically, with the endless machinations of the fossil fuel industry to keep their zombie industry alive and deeply entrenched within our economy. Fifteen years ago, when it seemed that peak oil and gas might finally be at hand, the industry bet big on fracking. This extraction technique uses high-pressure streams of water, chemicals, and sand to blow up layers of shale and extract the tiny bubbles of gas or oil trapped inside—as opposed to simply sucking up the pools of oil or gas trapped between the rock layers, which is what old-school drilling had gone after. At the time, fracking was marketed as a climate change solution—a bridge to a renewable energy future—but we now understand that it merely extended the lifespan of oil and gas extraction and set in motion a disastrous rise in methane emissions. More recently, the oil and gas industry got behind carbon capture and storage (CCS), which uses taxpayer dollars to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from smokestacks of various kinds, liquefy it, and pump it through special pipelines for burial. Most often, that burial ground is a depleted oil well, in which case the captured CO2 injected into it serves the purpose of pushing more oil out of it. The name of this zombie is enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Like fracking, it is also marketed—with a lot of handwaving—as a solution to the climate crisis. As we have demonstrated, it’s not. Now, in New York State, the two zombies have teamed up to form a new monster: fracking with captured CO2. Currently in the proposal stage, CO2 fracking claims it can save the climate by using captured CO2 instead of water to force methane out of the shale for burning in gas-fired power plants. This plan represents a brazen attempt to do two things at once: make an end-run around New York’s statewide fracking ban, which prohibits high-volume hydraulic fracturing, AND collect public funds for burying CO2 in places where no evidence guarantees it will stay put. Southern Tier CO2 to Clean Energy Solutions, LLC (Southern Tier Solutions, or STS) is the Texas-based company making this proposal. In its promotional materials, STS boasts that New York State is merely the pilot project for a much bigger roll-out. “Together, we shall develop and deliver the blueprint to this nation and the free world.” In other words, the stakes are high, the issue is more than local, and this same flimflammer may well show up soon in your own community. Let’s take a deeper look at this plan. Continue Reading |
RePercussion Section: Banning Fracking in New York…All Over Again |
| By Sandra Steingraber, PhD, SEHN Senior Scientist |
| In the pages of The Networker, we often point to the December 2014 New York State fracking ban. We do so with pride because the rationale for the ban echoed the messaging and data of our own health professional-led campaign that documented the many pathways by which fracking imperils human health. The science we compiled helped our governor make the right decision. Five years later, in the face of Trump-era environmental rollbacks, the New York State legislature further strengthened our state’s ban on high-volume hydraulic fracturing by codifying Governor Cuomo’s executive action into permanent law, making it impervious to any attempts by future governors to toss it out. That law also squashed a cynical attempt to circumvent the fracking ban when Tioga Energy Partners, LLC tried to advance a proposal to extract natural gas by using propane gel instead of water as the agent of fracking. The 2021 law places an explicit moratorium—although not an outright ban—on propane fracking. Phew. With this, we all breathed a sigh of relief—with one environmental organization going so far as to claim that “now that the ban is codified, we can rest assured that this ban will last for generations to come.” Except… see our lead story in this edition. Enter Southern Tier Solutions, a Texas-based company with a New York-sounding name that hopes to evade our fracking ban by using liquefied CO2 instead of water to force molecules of methane out of the shale. Strictly speaking, liquid CO2 skips around the word hydraulic in our prohibition on high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which is water-based. Hence, on January 11, 2024 anti-fracking activists from around the state, organized by Food and Water Watch, assembled outside of Governor Kathy Hochul’s Manhattan offices for a rally.. We came to protest this misbegotten plan to drill thousands of wells and burn the methane fracked out of them in a dozen or more gas-fired power plants from which CO2 will be captured, liquefied, and used to frack more methane of out the wells—in a kind of gas-extracting, perpetual motion machine. If CO2 fracking sounds like a fanciful, highly speculative idea, it is. Continue Reading |
“Everything that’s wrong with fracking—earthquake risks, radioactive releases, air pollution, threats to groundwater and public health—doesn’t go away when CO2 is swapped for water. As health professionals, we are well aware that liquefied CO2 is corrosive, accident prone, and behaves as a terrible asphyxiant that can acidify lung tissue on contact.” Senior scientist Sandra Steingraber represents Concerned Health Professionals of New York on the occasion of a 90-organization sign-on letter outlining the threats posed by a pending proposal in the state. “Steingraber said research by Concerned Health Professionals of New York indicates potential problems caused by using CO2 could be even worse than with water-based fracking and not enough research has been done to determine the level of emissions that would result from Southern Tier Solutions' proposed method.” Senior scientist Sandra Steingraber’s remarks at a press conference addressing the CO2 fracking proposal are quoted by pressconnects.com, of Greater Binghamton and the Southern Tier of New York. “We document the toxic pollution that accompanies shale gas drilling in dozens and dozens of studies… These findings still apply, whether the agent of fracking is water, liquefied CO2 or Kool-Aid.” WXXI, an NPR-affiliate for Rochester, New York and the Finger Lakes Region, quotes Dr. Steingraber. “It’s hard to say how close is too close, said Ted Schettler, science director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, an environmental and public health advocacy group. Schettler, who holds a medical degree and is very familiarized with carbon dioxide safety issues, said answering that question requires complex computer modeling that takes into account the weather, topography and other factors like how much CO2 was released.” Inside Climate News covers the extreme challenges CO2 pipelines pose for community planning and emergency response. Inside Climate News conducted an interview with senior scientist Sandra Steingraber during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest gathering of earth and space scientists, on scientists’ moral obligation to speak out. Dr. Ted Schettler was quoted in an Environmental Health News piece on his work using the “Tanimoto Score,” a system to determine chemical likenesses, to “develop a hazard screen listing more than 40 bisphenols that industry should avoid.” “As soon as the drill hits the shell, methane will start flowing out of the hole, and along with it benzene and formaldehyde, which can cause cancer, and other radioactive particles.” New York’s City Limits quotes Dr. Steingraber in its coverage of a January 18, 2024 rally to address the risks posed by the proposal to frack with CO2 and employ other dangerous carbon capture and storage activities. |
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