Last year, Governor Rendell closed the budget loophole by selling off access to state forest lands to natural gas drillers. Since the 50s, any lease revenues went into Conservation. Governor Rendell's legacy will include this longstanding best-practice in forest stewardship.

Environmental champ and Delaware County legislator, Rep. Greg Vitali, has introduced HB 2235 to prevent the Governor from doing it again. He wrote about it in today's Inqy, on the same day as the Governor's Budget Address. Here's an excerpt:

Fracking a single well typically requires millions of gallons of water. Several acres of land must be cleared for the drilling pad. Access roads, a water sediment basin, and other infrastructure are installed, and a high volume of truck traffic is required to transport drilling equipment and water to and from the site. All this activity has an impact on the forest as well as on water quality.

Right now, there are only a handful of Marcellus wells producing gas on Pennsylvania forest land. About another hundred wells are planned or being drilled. Five to six thousand more will be drilled in the next 15 years, according to conservative estimates.

No one knows what the cumulative environmental impact of this drilling will be. We need to stop leasing state forest land for the purpose until we can better assess the consequences.

Natural Gas Drillers are willing to do whatever they can to dispose of wastewater without getting shut down. They would love to have a way to dump it into the Philadelphia water supply. It's just a matter of time, in fact, until they do. This industry has only begun.

Right now, natural gas drillers are drilling away all over the state, generating more water than they know what to do with (and they really don't know what to do with it), water that's full of benzene, radium, hydrochloric acid, antibiotics and lots and lots of salt. All of this stuff kills fish and it isn't great to drink, either.

DEP has proposed a set of regulations that would lay out guidelines for the salt at least. It's the main problem, anyway, so that's not a bad start. The environmental community supports their salt guidelines (total dissolved solids, in the lingo). We support these guidelines, we just think they also need to deal with the other pollutants and make sure that drillers are accounting for all the water they take out of our rivers. If they don't account for it, that means that it's probably getting dumped untreated somewhere.

The industry is saying that the regs are too harsh. Please. They are fine, but the industry sees opportunity in Pennsylvania. We have the biggest, richest gas field, a governor who's easily swayed by industry and a Senate that's... I don't even want to say. So they have groused about every proposed requirement, because every bit of accountability they prevent is a dollar saved and that's more profit for the industry. Damn the torpedoes.

You can weigh in on these regs now. You have until Feb 12th. Go here. Remember, much of the water that gets dumped will eventually make its way into our water supply.

Other Marcellus News:

I think everyone on here knows where my political sympathies lie, in general, right? So hopefully I'll be given the benefit of the doubt when I say the following: NARAL is a pack of hypocrites and, while CBS has a boardroom full of candyasses, I'm marginally more on the network's side in this whole Superbowl pro-life ad brouhaha than I am on the side of the nation's chief pro-choice lobby. Don't know what I'm talking about? No worries. I'm not going to be watching the Superbowl either, but here you go. And this, too.

Focus on the Family has raised the money to run a pro-life ad featuring some pigskin tossing mouthbreather during the Superbowl. My reaction: yawn. But I'm alone in this. The annual media fubar that is the NFL championship wouldn't be complete without some ad getting cut and much of the political community going wiggy about it. The difference this year seems to be that the economy is crap and most commercial outfits can't afford the pricetag of an ad in the biggest television event of the year, so CBS seems to have lowered its standards for controversy.

The network has accepted the pro-life ad. I say: GOOD. As far as I'm concerned, there should only be two standards that networks apply to selling their ads: 1) is there still a spot left and 2) do you have the money. I think it's fantastic that issue ads are going up. Maybe some thinking will get done. I doubt it, but maybe. It's less offensive than the usual fare, more on that in a paragraph, tho.

Now, CBS had to complicate the issue (and make themselves candyasses, in my estimation) this year by rejecting an ad offered by a new gay men's dating site called MANCRUNCH. That's messed up. They should have accepted the ad just as they accepted the pro-life ad. In the past, our team has had its ads rejected (like the awesome PETA ad from last year -- okay, maybe you don't think PETA is your team, but it's my team, so whatever). That always infuriated me. Wussy, wussy, wussy. I get so sick of the perpetual terror of "offending" anyone. Good heavens, people, quit bowdlerizing our whole freaking life. If we're going to stand for something then somebody is going to stand against us. That's the story of history. It's fine. It's a much better story, in fact, than any silly Superbowl has ever been. Let it go. Let it happen.

Because do you know what really, really galls me about this whole conversation? The implicit assumption that there's nothing offensive about crassly commercial ads. Those are okay. "Buy this iPod -- you can get it in blue now!" "Buy this perfume -- it's by Britney!" A bunch of worthless stuff that no one needs -- driving the kind of buy, buy, buy mentality that put our country in such a bind, that drives the awful boom & bust cycle that puts people on the streets and shatters family: THAT'S okay. We don't even talk about that.

Rep. Vitali put out this press release for a forum on natural gas drilling that he's hosting in nearby Media. I'm on the panel and so is Sharon Ward (who many of us know). Rep. Vitali is rightly trying to educate his constituents about what may well be the most serious environmental issue to hit our state since coal.

If any YPP'ers can join us, it would be great to see you there.

HARRISBURG, Dec. 30 - State Rep. Greg Vitali, D-Delaware, will host an informational meeting on Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 19 in the large auditorium at Delaware County Community
College, 901 S. Media Line Road, Media.

"The purpose of this meeting is to educate the public and policy makers about the environmental and fiscal issues surrounding Marcellus Shale gas extraction. This will be an issue of increasing importance in the upcoming decade," Vitali said.

While on the subject of unions, the Temple Nurses union has been in tense negotiations with the hospital for months. At issue, among other things, is a contract demand that the union shut up about the bosses at the hospital.

The workers say the gag order sucks. Good coverage about it at WHYY this morning.

I just want to point out the Hospital's spin: "we aren't saying individual workers can't speak up, it's just the Union we want to shut up." Memo to Temple (and everyone) -- it's the same thing. A union IS the workers' voice.

The Inquirer recently printed a cheerleadery puff-piece about Marcellus Shale development in Southwest and Northwest, Pennsylvania. Too bad they didn't combine the story with about how the drillers managed to weasel out of a severance tax (and the Governor's very unconvincing rhetoric about it).

Today, DEP admitted that it took them ten months to get Cabot, the drilling company that wrecked the water supply of Norma Fiorentino, to provide any water at all to locals whose water supply has been wrecked (that's what the linked press release means by "interim solution.")

Clearly, DEP isn't quite cutting it, which makes Secretary Hanger's objection that they are hiring up ring a little hollow. This is the same DEP that decided they'd trust any engineer willing to sign off and say that a drill site complied with environmental regs. So far, the Commonwealth is doing nothing in the face of the drilling onslaught but standing down.

Since it was a front page story, we had to criticize it. They didn't print my letter so I thought I'd throw it up here:

To the Editor-

Clean Water Action takes exception to the portrayal of Marcellus Shale development in Pennsylvania in your article "Pa. Tapped, Drillers Not." Your paper gave short shrift to the destrurctiveness of shale drilling, dismissing it out-of-hand with a quote from the CEO of a natural gas company. As someone who has made several visits to the heart of drilling country, visited rigs and talked at length with leasholders: it's not all smiles in Marcellus land. In many cases, the checks aren't that big and they don't do anything but shrink. Meanwhile, residents wonder if they'll still be able to stand living on their land once the drillers are done. It's only going to get worse Philadelphians have to start paying to clean frack water out of our drinking water because we haven't protected ourselves the way New York City has.

Click read more for the rest!

Right behind Norma Fiorentino's house, they have been drilling for natural gas. Some of the gas is coming from under Norma's property, so she gets a little money for it (not all that much so far, though). She also got a present on New Year's Day. Her water well exploded all over her yard. Now she can't drink the water from her tap anymore and she's worried that her kitchen might blow up.

Good times, right? And when the checks stop coming, the gas won't stop. It will still be there in the water table. Totally ruined. Won't that be great when she her or her heirs try to sell her land?

Clean Water Action is meeting with people and talking to them about their experience living nearby or around natural gas drilling rigs.

So what can you do? Watch this video, then I have two quick things for you after the jump.

From Clean Water Action

As if I wasn't already excited enough about this Friday's 13th Annual Clean Water Action Party on Boathouse Row, we have something new on offer this year. Environmentally inspired artwork. I have to confess, I'm blown away by what's been offered.

I met Dave Holley at InLiquid's Art for the Cash Poor this summer and started talking to him about the work of Clean Water. He got really excited, so when I told him that I was looking to spotlight an artist's work as it relates to water, he said he was in.

I had no idea what impressive work I was in for.

Dave got to work and became inspired by Hiroshige's famous "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa." Using a method that very much squares with the type of issues Clean Water espouses, he found a used sail to work on and began applying recycled magazine and other images to it, using the colors in what he found and painting over the top. Creating this amazing painting/sculpture that will debut this Friday at the Annual Auction. So you should come. You should see the whole piece. The image above is just a detail. You know you want to see it all at once. So RSVP now.

More details about the event in the jump!

On Wednesday, a Halliburton subcontractor hired by Cabot Oil & Gas spilled over 8000 gallons of an as yet undisclosed substance (known only as a "drilling gel") into a wetland and a creek in Dimock, Pennsylvania. Efforts by environmentalists to figure out just what's been dropped in the backyards of Pennsylvanians have turned out no real answers.

I woke up Monday morning to hear on WHYY that Governor Rendell had abandoned the idea of imposing a tax on the extraction of natural gas from our state's massive but deeply buried reserves of natural gas. If he'd given a better explanation for his decision, I might be able to keep quiet about it, but the reason he said we shouldn't do it because it would kill a fledgling industry. Hogwash. Everywhere else the industry operates has a severance tax already and we've got more gas here than all of them combined (well, okay, we have the most, hands down -- no one knows exactly).

Besides, it's not a new industry at all. It's the same rigs, same teams, same operations already operating in Texas and Wyoming and Colorado. Moving to a new state doesn't make it a new industry. In fact, moving those rigs around to tap new gas plays is just how the business works. They already know how to do it. That's the essence of what they do.

So, the Inquirer did an editorial today spelling this out with numbers. Why, they ask, should we believe that a modest tax would quash this operation when the revenue forecast of the main players are so rosy? It seems like there is plenty of money there.

Some context the Inquirer didn't mention. Did you know that we don't tax the extraction of any natural resource from our state? Not coal. Not gas. Not wood. Not freaking gravel. Why? Because the coal industry is so powerful here that they have time to argue about any severance tax because they believe that as soon as one resource gets taxed that would take us that much closer to taxing coal. And they don't want that to be taxed ever. So they fight them all.

Awesome.

But we had a Governor who had said he would back taxing gas and Democrats who said they would, too. We had that, but now we don't anymore. It's too bad. Fortunately, the House Dems seem to be standing pat on Severance Tax, and that's the right call. Rep. George told PA Environmental Digest that he's standing firm on the Severance Tax and that Speaker McCall is with him.
Clean Water Action Pennsylvania

believes that the severance tax is so important that we canvassed part of McCall's district on it recently and delivered a stack of letters to him from locals who agreed: tax the shale and make it pay for environmental protection.

In fact, we specifically argue that a piece of the tax should be used for hiring and training enough DEP inspectors that one can be on site for each well bore at the stage of siting, drilling, cementing, stimulating and the closing of waste pits.

Currently, Pennsylvania makes electricity suppliers buy some of their power from renewable sources. The amount is very small, but we have a chance to increase it. Wouldn't it be nice to diversify our supply of electricity a little before rate caps come off in Philadelphia?

Right now, House Bill 80 is a bill that would commit our state to providing almost a fifth of its power from truly renewable sources by 2024 as well as more than double our commitment to solar power in the same time frame. [Current sponsors from around here: VITALI, HARPER, FREEMAN, M. O'BRIEN, MANDERINO, LENTZ, ADOLPH, MYERS, JOSEPHS, LENTZ, PETRI, GINGRICH, CURRY, MICOZZIE, GERBER, SABATINA and JOHNSON.]

This would be a very exciting development, one that closely mirrors the progress envisioned in Federal Climate Legislation, except one problem: the current draft of the legislation could wipe out all that progress by giving the coal industry a good reason to build a brand new coal power plant.

This legislation was crafted by the Rendell Administration, so it will take voters to convince house members that they need to amend HB 80 so that it builds Pennsylvania's expertise in new, cleaner technologies rather than the dirty, failing approaches of the past.

Good amendments have been proposed that would make the bill one environmentalists can support. The Rendell crew has okay'ed the amendments, too, so we don't have to worry about the hammer coming down on them from Ed. Please let your Representatives know that they need to pass these amendments and then pass the bill.

As far as I can tell, the state Department of Environmental Protection isn't doing anything to protect the public from the misdeeds of the natural gas industry. In this stunning video, watch three families stories in Wyoming following the destruction of their property's water supply by drillers. At about 6 minutes, you can see water turn into plastic. It's amazing.

WYOMING! from JOSHFOX on Vimeo.

This isn't the kind of thing we have to look forward to in in Pennsylvania: it's happening. It's well, well underway, but right now we only have a DEP without a will to reign in the industry. If the State Budget goes as planned, it won't have a way, either.

Despite our frustrations with DEP, it's still the closest thing to protection we have and, of course, with political pressure, it can be forced to start watching. If there's no one there, it can't be forced to do anything. That's why Clean Water Action issued the following statement on the budget today:

Dear Members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly,

On behalf of Clean Water Action’s over 150,000 members across the state, I am writing concerning the current PA budget crisis which you are working on. Clean Water Action is greatly concerned that proposed cuts in environmental spending will cause great damage to both our Commonwealth’s natural resources and our residents’ health.

Environmental advocates, like myself, are giving public thank yous for area U.S. Congressional Representatives who went out of their way to stand up for the environment and for all of us by voting the first bill to do something about Global Warming out of the House of Representatives.

Congressional action on climate change is long overdue. Sure, there are people out there who still have their doubts about climate change. Those people are known as "crazies."

Can I get an amen?

The reps I know of around here who voted for the new climate change legislation were Allyson Schwarz, Patrick Murphy, Joe Sestak, Chaka Fattah, John Murtha and Bob Brady all made the right vote.

For some of them, it was a no-brainer, but it's important to remember that people like Schwarz, Murphy and Sestak live in much more politically mixed districts, places where people listen to a lot more Rush Limbaugh than anyone in Philadelphia does. It took some bravery for these reps to make that vote as it will lead to real shifts in the way America operates, and they are going to have constituents that aren't too sure that they want that kind of change.

We could go further in the Senate, tho. Hit "read more."

This issue takes me back to my old days with the Raise the Minimum Wage Coalition. I still keep an eye on labor issues and I've always been a big fan of the immigrant population in this country. That's why I'm so disturbed by the jingoistic movements happening around government databases designed more to fire first and check the facts later than to verify that people are legal to work in U.S.

Rep. Galloway is is moving two bills to advance the e-verify system here in Pennsylvania, HB 1502 and HB 1503, both of which pertain to construction companies. If you aren't familiar with e-verify, it's a federally run system that supposedly checks workers legal status by running the social security numbers they gave through a database.

Below is a press release from my organization today on the passage of the Clean Water Restoration Act through committee. We've been working on this legislation for 7 years and it's exciting to see it finally move, if only through one committee. The best part is that Sen. Specter voted for it. We put in a lot of work to convince him to, and he did. Notably, Sen. Casey has been silent on the bill. We hope this convinces him to come out in favor of it, as thousands of voters have already personally asked him to.

Clean Water Action Applauds Senate Move to Protect America’s Waters

Clean Water Restoration Act is key to safeguarding water resources for millions of Americans

Today, Clean Water Action applauds passage of the Clean Water Restoration Act in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee by a vote of 12 – 7.

“This vote is a strong rejection of the Bush Administration’s “No Protection Policy” that threatened the drinking water sources for at least 110 million people,” said Clean Water Action President John DeCock.”

Beginning in early 2003, special interests pressured the Bush Administration to put policies in place that confused and delayed permits under the Clean Water Act and limited enforcement of the Act’s programs. These policies, coupled with misinterpretations of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, brought enforcement of the Clean Water Act to a virtual halt and left America’s water supplies and public health safeguards at risk.

Click "Read more" for more on this issue!