The DeSmog Blog has a longstanding record of speaking out

From the Letter of Brendan DeMelle, Executive Director, DeSmog Blog, May 8, 2021

More than 40 cities have enacted bans on new gas infrastructure, but in the Pacific Northwest one company is trying a new tactic to head off climate policy. In recent months, Oregon utility Northwest Natural has been promoting its use of “renewable natural gas” — methane captured from places like landfills and repurposed into energy for homes. Its push to promote its green image comes on the heels of a contentious effort by officials to require carbon emissions reductions from the company. Read Nick Cunningham’s story.

Meanwhile, a new government report highlights federal failures to oversee offshore drilling. The report found that 97 percent of the time, existing regulations on environmental protection and cleanup are not enforced. More proposed rules to fix the broken regulatory system, however, are a distraction from the real issue of the government failing to hold the oil industry accountable, argues Justin Mikulka.

Finally, this week five environmental groups filed a lawsuit in a Montana federal court alleging that the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issues permits for oil and gas pipelines nationwide violates some of the country’s cornerstone environmental laws. The lawsuit is the most recent round in a nearly decade-long battle, sparked under the Obama administration, over how regulators approach the environmental impacts from oil and gas pipelines and the extent to which the public gets a say in the permitting process. Sharon Kelly reports.

Have a story tip or feedback? Get in touch: editor@desmogblog.com.

Thanks, Brendan DeMelle, Executive Director, DeSmog Blog

P.S. Readers like you make it possible for DeSmog to hold accountable powerful people in industry and government. Even a $10 or $20 donation helps support DeSmog’s investigative journalism.

Black drill cuttings at the drill pad in Penna.

From an Article by Peter Mantius, The Water Front Online, August 5, 2020

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill August 3rd that makes New York the first state in the nation to apply hazardous waste laws to potentially toxic oil and gas byproducts.

The action, coming just months after the state codified into law its 2014 policy ban on fracking for shale, solidifies the governor’s legacy of applying public health standards to a powerful and often weakly regulated industry.

The bill’s legislative sponsors and leading environmental groups praised the governor for closing a “dangerous loophole” in the way oil and gas wastes are regulated.

However, throughout Cuomo’s near-decade in office, oil and gas drilling wastes from hundreds of fracked Pennsylvania wells have been dumped in upstate New York landfills and spread on the state’s roadways.

Cuomo’s Department of Environmental Conservation supervised the flood of waste imports with apparent deference to the industry and its backers, downplaying the health risks and even denying outright the existence of the problem.

“No fracking waste is being dumped in New York,” DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos told a legislative hearing on Sept. 7, 2016. That prompted the Poynter Institute’s Politifact to rate the statement “False” on its “Truth-O-Meter.”

That wasn’t an uncharacteristic stray statement. Asked late last month to comment on the hazardous waste bill, a DEC spokesperson provided an agency response that said, in part: “To be clear, there is no loophole for fracking waste.”

Fracking fluids, the July 28 DEC statement to WaterFront continued, are prohibited in New York landfills, while solid wastes imports that are permitted are carefully screened to “protect public health and the environment.”

Dr. David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University of Albany, said in an affidavit: “The net effect of New York accepting drill cuttings and de-watered mud from Pennsylvania fracking sites will be that New Yorkers will have an increased risk of cancer, especially lung and gastrointestinal cancers, and increase of birth defects coming from DNA damage and an increased risk of shortened life span.”

Anthony Ingraffea, a retired professor of rock mechanics at Cornell University, said in a recent interview: “Perhaps we’ll never know what the environmental and health impacts of all that (fracking waste) currently in New York will be. They’ve made our bed, and now we have to lie in it.”

Since January 2011, New York landfills have imported more than 638 thousand tons of waste from Marcellus shale gas wells in Pennsylvania, according to records that state maintains. (New York doesn’t maintain its own statistics).

Those landfills and unrelated transfer stations have imported more than four thousand barrels of liquid shale drilling wastes. (A graphic in the original article by Melissa Troutman of Earthworks uses Pennsylvania data to show NY imports of Pennsylvania’s shale waste from 2011 to 2019.)

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NOTE: This excellent article is quite long and detailed. It should be read in its entirety. The author, Peter Mantius is the creator and editor of The Water Front Online, the region’s only news organization dedicated to environmental issues in the Finger Lakes and Upstate New York.

Some 21 children and young adults are plaintiffs in this case!

From an Article by Julia Conley, Common Dreams, October 16, 2018

Twenty-one children and young adults were looking forward on Tuesday to bringing their climate lawsuit against the federal government to trial in the coming weeks, following a U.S. District Court ruling arguing that the plaintiffs have made a convincing case that the Trump and Obama administrations have failed to curb carbon emissions even as they knew of the pollution’s myriad harmful effects.

Judge Ann Aiken handed down the ruling late Monday in a court in Eugene, Oregon, affirming that the plaintiffs can credibly claim that their due process rights have been violated by the government and fossil fuel companies—an argument the young people are more than ready to make in court starting October 29, when the case is set to go to trial.

Following the decision, 21-year-old Tia Hatton said in a statement, “My fellow plaintiffs and I have our eyes set on one thing: our trial date…We—my lawyers, our experts, and my co-plaintiffs and I—are ready to make our case against the U.S. federal government and their deliberate energy policy that cause catastrophic climate change.”

“My fellow plaintiffs and I have our eyes set on one thing: our trial date…We are ready to make our case against the U.S. federal government and their deliberate energy policy that cause catastrophic climate change.” —Tia Hatton, plaintiff

The lawsuit, Juliana vs. The United States, was first filed in 2015 under the Obama administration, with the 21 plaintiffs, then ranging in age from eight to 19, arguing with the help of Our Children’s Trust that the government’s actions that have worsened carbon emissions have “violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources.”

The children pointed to increasingly frequent and destructive extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and droughts in their hometowns across the U.S. as evidence of their claim, and since then have called expert witnesses including climate scientist James Hansen and economist Joseph Stiglitz to bolster their case.

The young people “proffered uncontradicted evidence showing that the government has historically known about the dangers of greenhouse gases but has continued to take steps promoting a fossil fuel based energy system, thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Aiken in her ruling.

Aiken dismissed President Donald Trump as a defendant in the lawsuit, but she did so “without prejudice”—meaning the youths can bring a case against him later on. Other Trump administration officials who head government agencies can still be named in the current case.

“The District Court continues to provide well-reasoned decisions that narrow and appropriately frame the heart of this case for trial,” said Julia Olson, executive director of Our Children’s Trust. “We are ready to bring all of the facts forward and prove these youths’ case once and for all.”

The federal government has for three years attempted to have the case dismissed by arguing that extreme weather events and pollution levels happen around the world, not only in the U.S., and that, as one Justice Department lawyer put it in 2016, “There simply is no constitutional right to a pollution-free environment.” Aiken vehemently rejected the argument:

Where a complaint alleges knowing governmental action is affirmatively and substantially damaging the climate system in a way that will cause human deaths, shorten human lifespans, result in widespread damage to property, threaten human food sources, and dramatically alter the planet’s ecosystem, it states a claim for a due process violation. To hold otherwise would be to say that the Constitution affords no protection against a government’s knowing decision to poison the air its citizens breathe or the water its citizens drink.

“Judge Aiken’s blockbuster decision lays out in extremely precise detail the factual and legal issues in our case which remain to be resolved at trial,” Alex Loznak, a 21-year-old plaintiff, said. “Having contributed extensive personal testimony and research to help develop our case’s factual record over the past several years, I am confident that our arguments on the remaining disputed issues will ultimately prevail in court. We still need a full and fair trial to prove our case. October 29, here we come!”