Dryden Safe Energy Coalition

As part of DSEC's educational mission to present facts, we give you this..."I’ll Take Natural Gas Facts Over Hearsay Any Day."
 

Have you ever noticed when someone outside travels to Dimock, Pennsylvania, searching for truth, all he/she ever reports is hearsay? Take Carol Schoonmaker’s recent guest essay published on MPNNow.com titled Learn the Lessons of one Small Pennsylvania Town, which details her decision to separate fact from fiction. There’s just one problem with Carol’s heart felt trip, where are her facts? Below is my follow up essay submitted to the same paper: Learn the lessons from a little unbiased research — A Pennsylvania resident responds. In it, I clarify and correct some of Carol’s claims with first hand knowledge of the area and industry...

Read the rest. 
 

First, some history...Mr. Armendariz at EPA ultimately resigned over his "crucifixion" remarks but he'll be back, somewhere—they always are. The back story is linked at One of Nine.

And we should be afraid, very afraid, of EPA.  At EID:
 

Recent revelations regarding the deliberate attempts by a regional EPA administrator to “crucify” the oil and gas industry raise troubling questions about EPA political agendas in other regions.  One of these is New York Region 2 out of New York City, which commented on New York’s Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) with a long list of complaints seemingly designed to undermine the New York Department of Environmental Conservation.  Our Rockefeller-funded anti-natural gas friend Walter Hang notes “EPA Region 2 submitted nearly twice as many pages of critical comments regarding the Revised Draft SGEIS than the original 2009 draft SGEIS”... 

Oh there's a feature and not a bug.

Read the whole thing.
 

In USA Today:

From gas-mileage standards to tax breaks for windmills, public support for "green" energy measures to tackle global warming has dropped significantly in the past two years, particularly among Republicans, a new poll suggests.

Majorities still favor most such tax breaks or restrictions on industry, finds the Stanford University poll to be released today. It shows 65% support gas-mileage standards and 73% support tax breaks for wind and solar power. But just 43% support tax breaks for nuclear power, 26% support increasing gasoline taxes and 18% support hiking taxes on home electricity.
 

Overall, support for various steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions has dropped an average of 10 percentage points since 2010, from 72% to 62%, lead researcher Jon Krosnick says. "Most Americans (62%) still support industry taking steps aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions," Krosnick says, "but they hate the idea of consumer taxes to do it." His group's nationwide polls compared responses from 1,001 people in 2010 to 1,428 people this year....

An op-ed piece re: the Park Foundation that appeared recently in local newspapers—by Dan Fitzsimmons and Bob Williams of the Joint Landowners Coalition:

What has been missed in the debate about the Ithaca-based Park Foundation's advocacy against natural gas development is the object of their opposition. The true targets of the Park Foundation are the people in Marcellus Shale communities of upstate New York.

 

In March 2011, we met with Park Foundation leadership. We were on the hunt for foundations to support the important work of the Joint Landowners Coalition to identify best practices in natural gas development and arm landowners with the information they need to protect themselves and their land...

...Foundation officials explained that their wealthy patrons were reticent to allow their pristine land to be affected by drilling rigs. We replied by telling them we had thousands of farmers who shared the same affection for their land. We described how the farmers were at risk of losing it all to high taxes and costs hitting up against record low profits — and that these farmers wouldn't allow their farms to be developed unless drilling could be done safely. Noting that they understood the plight of farmers, they replied, "We are aware there will be collateral damage from stopping natural gas development."

Thousands of upstaters who toiled all of their lives, some handing down their large or small farms generation to generation, were viewed merely as "collateral damage"...

At CBS San Francisco:

MILPITAS (CBS 5) — Three months ago, CBS 5 caught Solyndra tossing millions of dollars worth of brand new glass tubes used to make solar panels. Now the bankrupt solar firm, once touted as a symbol of green technology, may be trying to abandon toxic waste.

 

It’s a tedious process. Slowly but surely, the shattered remains of brand new solar panel tubes head to a recycling plant in Hayward.

 

Meanwhile the next phase of the company’s liquidation is under way. It involves getting rid of all the heavy metals left inside the building that were used to make the panels...

 

...the disposal process is going smoothly in Fremont, but what about nearby Milpitas? Solyndra leased a building on California Circle for the final assembly of its solar panels. But the cleanup at the leased building in Milpitas is in limbo, because Solyndra doesn’t want to pay...

 

...“Essentially it looks like they left a pretty big mess behind,” San Jose State Assistant Professor Dustin Mulvaney told CBS 5. Mulvaney has written a white paper (.pdf) on solar industry waste for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition...
 

This is almost funny:
 

Great news for NIMBY activists that want public policy to follow the anthropogenic global-warming agenda but don’t want their vistas cluttered.  The wind farms that they support everywhere else but nearby themselves may be part of the problem...

...Wind power is already one of the worst options in the renewables market.  Wind is unreliable, and the unreliability of energy production causes numerous problems for distribution.  The manufacture and maintenance of the windmills requires a lot of energy, costs a lot of money, and creates a lot of waste, although perhaps not as much as Solyndra left behind.  The blades kill hundreds of thousands of birds a year already, and any expansion will make that destruction much worse.

Of course, the rise in temperature might be beneficial.  No one has shown that even if a warming period occurs naturally or artificially that the overall impact will be relentlessly negative...

At EID:

Typically, environmentalists have conservationist views – in general, they advocate for the preservation, restoration, or enhancement of the natural environment.  I view myself and many of the landowners I know as the true activist environmentalists and hard core conservationists...

...Why is it fine for wind and solar to kill protected animals? It’s not fine, as any true environmental conservationist would admit. And, that’s why natural gas is the energy I support. It creates more power per acre, while having less impact to the environment. It’s really a no brainer if your an environmentalist...

Read the whole thing.

At MDN:
 

At the first ever Natural Gas Career and Education Expo held at Broome Community College in Binghamton, NY on April 11th...Upon arriving, there was a line of 50 or more people waiting to get in to a packed exhibition area with more than 40 vendors, most of whom were looking for people to fill open positions. Exhibitors ranged from large oil and gas companies like Williams, Cabot Oil & Gas and Chesapeake Energy, to environmental consulting firms, equipment dealers and educational programs. Much of the time between 3 and 7 pm the exhibit area was packed, elbow to elbow, with job seekers ...more than 2,300 people attended the four hour event.

And at the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin:

BINGHAMTON -- Larry Peloso Jr. hasn't been able to find work since he graduated from SUNY-Delhi last year with an associate's degree in carpentry and building trades.

 

"I couldn't find any jobs ... because of the housing industry," said the 22-year old Otsego County resident. "So I was trying to get a job with the gas companies."

 

Hundreds of job seekers had the same idea Wednesday when an estimated 2,300 people milled the floor of Broome Community College's Ice Center at the inaugural New York Natural Gas Career & Education Expo...
 

At the NYT:

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Of all the types of energy embraced by the green community, “combined heat and power” probably has the clunkiest name. But proponents hope that C.H.P. systems, which can be installed in homes, will one day compete with better-known technologies like solar panels.

 

The idea is to capture two forms of energy at once, namely heat and electrical power (which is why the technology is sometimes called cogeneration). Large systems exist on college campuses like the University of Warwick in England and also at hospitals, chemical factories and even airports. These systems use the heat left over from generating electricity to produce either hot water, which circulates through pipes to nearby buildings to provide heat, or steam, which can be used for industrial purposes...

 

...Small systems are gaining traction in Japan after the nuclear disaster last year, which led officials to order that nearly all of the country’s reactors be taken offline...

 

...Elsewhere in the world, the picture is mixed. In the United States, a basic obstacle is lack of knowledge, said Daniel Bullock, director of the Gulf Coast Clean Energy Application Center, a U.S. Department of Energy group based in a Houston suburb that promotes C.H.P. and related sources of energy.

 

“Most people don’t even know about C.H.P.,” Mr. Bullock said. As a result, he added, “People are willing to pay a lot more money for solar panels than what a C.H.P. system would cost.”

 

The low price of natural gas in the United States — a result of the plentiful supplies created by the hydraulic fracturing boom — may make the systems more appealing, Mr. Bullock said, though homeowners, lacking the negotiating power of large industrial users, may not reap the full benefit of the lower gas prices...

The West Firm announced today [3-30-12] that it has filed the necessary papers to take an appeal from the Dryden decision, which upheld the Town of Dryden’s ban on natural gas drilling. At the same time, the Firm announced that it has made a motion in the Middlefield case to renew consideration of the decision rendered by Judge Cerio, which reached a similar conclusion.  In the Middlefield case, Judge Cerio noted the absence of any clear indication in the legislative history to the 1981 amendments to the Environmental Conservation Law to support a finding of broad preemption. Subsequent to receipt of his decision, The West Firm combed the state archives based upon the tip from a retired DEC employee, which indicated that there may be archived documents shedding light on the legislative history of the supersedure provision...

Read the rest. You can also click on the "Energy Development Law" tab in the menu above to access the relevant documents.