Message from the Chair, Spring 2015
by Carl Arnold
It’s with great pleasure that I slip into the role of Chapter chair for this year. There are several avenues that Vice Chair Erin Riddle and I are pursuing, such as increasing membership, increasing staff, and increasing fundraising to pay for these and ongoing legal actions, such as Ravenswood and Painted Post, as well as anticipated legal actions and other important activities the Chapter has been engaged in.
Along with increasing membership is the need for this Chapter to pay more attention to encouraging members to take positions of responsibility. Those with history and experience have a responsibility to pass on their knowledge and expertise to others so the Club can ensure its vitality and be increasingly effective.
We begin this year with several significant victories.
- Governor Cuomo prohibited high-volume hydraulic fracturing. This is huge. It sets both a precedent and a standard for future energy policy in our state, region and country. New York thus joins France, Bulgaria, one Swiss canton, Scotland and Wales. All have moratoriums or bans on fracking. Pennsylvania recently prohibited drilling on public lands.
- In his recent budget, the governor allotted $20 million for green jobs in the Southern Tier, $30 million to preserve farmland in the Southern Tier and $20 million to preserve farmland in the Hudson Valley — another important precedent and standard.
- The attempt by multinational Suez to build a Rockland County desalination plant was rejected by the NYS Public Service Commission after strong resistance by the Sierra Club and other groups.
While these wins are tremendously gratifying, there’s no room for complacency. The DEC finding on fracking will likely be out by the time of this printing. It will reveal just how stringent and binding the prohibition is.
It’s crucial to remember that the rest of fracking infrastructure is quite intact:
- Midwest frack sand comes into the Horseheads rail depot destined for Pa. frack fields;
- huge water withdrawals from NY (e.g., Painted Post) go to Pa. frack fields;
- frack waste from Pa. is dumped in NY landfills and wastewater treatment plants not equipped to handle it;
- “bomb trains” transport oil from Bakken frack fields across NY despite several massive explosions and fires in the past few months;
- a fracked gas storage project in Seneca Lake salt caverns (see page 3) threatens tourism, the wine industry and the health and safety of the region; and
- an enormous regional pipeline buildout is underway, extending global reliance on exported fracked gas.
A theme I believe is essential to emphasize: we all need to have a sense of urgency—not panic, but urgency—in the face of the increasingly dire state of the planet. The UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists are appointed by their governments, resulting in studies that, while frightening, are understated by the standards of other scientific efforts.
Conservative outfits, such as the World Bank (“Turn Down the Heat”) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (“Too Late for Two Degrees?”) have come out with reports that detail the extremity the world faces.
Even the global gold standard for international energy corporations, the International Energy Agency (IEA), issued a report in November, 2011, warning that if the world doesn’t do something drastic and immediate about greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), we’re looking at irreversible, catastrophic climate chaos by 2017. The headline in “The Guardian” (UK): “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns.”
The Arctic Methane Emergency Group studies only the Arctic Ocean. It first discovered plumes of methane rising from ocean-floor methane hydrates that are melting due to the warming ocean. This methane—up to 105 times more effective than CO2 as a GHG—is flowing up through the ocean directly into the atmosphere.
This is in addition to the methane emitted by melting permafrost going directly into the atmosphere. This is in addition to the methane leaking from gas pipelines or purposely vented from condensate tanks and liquid natural gas (LNG) port facilities directly into the atmosphere. The Sierra Club has several lawsuits against the permitting of proposed LNG ports. There are applications for almost 20 at this point, and opposition to them has been mounting on both coasts.
A two-degree centigrade rise in global warming, widely assumed to be an acceptable upper limit, is actually absurdly high according to many scientists. Meanwhile, freak weather events rise in frequency and intensity—they’re becoming more normal than freak. We most likely don’t have until 2050 or even 2030 to make enormous changes to keep carbon in the ground. Highly technical solutions so far offered, such as geo-engineering or carbon sequestration, are prohibitively expensive, quite probably unworkable at the scale and in the timeframe necessary—and in any case are unproven.
If we can make the transition from industrial agriculture back to organic agriculture (how the human race got to the 20th century), by absorbing carbon into plants and soil through biochar and other forms of natural carbon sequestration, we may yet preserve a livable planet—if the transition is scaled appropriately. But that will obviously be a gargantuan educational project. What’s encouraging is the growing number of young people committed to farming, usually organic, often based on permaculture and biodynamics.
The Sierra Club mantra is conservation, efficiency and renewables. This phrase leads to two immediate necessities: (1) resist any further development of fossil or nuclear fuels, and strive to eliminate them as soon as possible; (2) society must learn to make do with less and still live comfortably, which is described very ably in Ozzie Zehner’s “Green Illusions,” a must-read as far as I’m concerned.
Because of the fracking movement and the incredible success of the Beyond Coal Campaign—now joined by Beyond Gas, Beyond Oil and Beyond Nuclear—and because of the recent decisions from Albany, the Atlantic Chapter is uniquely positioned to make even greater strides toward human survival and sanity.
It will, of course, be tough and require continual vigilance and action. In turn, this requires us to maintain a calm sense of urgency.
There’s so much to do.