For Immediate Release
July 28, 2015
Contact:
Kelly Trout, Chesapeake Climate Action Network – (240) 396-2022, kelly@chesapeakeclimate.org
Contact:
Kelly Trout, Chesapeake Climate Action Network – (240) 396-2022, kelly@chesapeakeclimate.org
Ryanne Waters, Food &
Water Watch – (818) 371-0912, rwaters@fwwatch.org
Baltimore
City Council Moves to Endorse Statewide Fracking Ban
Committee
advances resolution urging permanent ban on dangerous drilling; full Council
hearing scheduled for August 17
Statement
of ‘Don’t Frack Maryland’ Coalition Members Mitch Jones, Shilpa Joshi and Andy
Galli
Baltimore, Md. – On Tuesday, the Baltimore City Council took its
first step toward urging a statewide ban on the dangerous practice of fracking
in Maryland. After hearing public testimony, the Council’s Judiciary Committee
voted 3-0 to advance a resolution calling
on the state to place an outright ban on fracking due to its harmful
health, environmental and economic impacts. The resolution currently has
13 co-sponsors and is scheduled for a vote by the full Council on August 17.
Earlier this year, the Maryland General Assembly passed a bill that prohibits the state from issuing fracking permits through October 2017. The bill became law this May. The resolution, introduced by Councilmember James Kraft last week, calls on the state to enact permanent protections for Maryland communities, noting, “There is no scientific research supporting claims that [fracking] can be carried out in a way that reduces health and environmental risks to an acceptable level.”
Earlier this year, the Maryland General Assembly passed a bill that prohibits the state from issuing fracking permits through October 2017. The bill became law this May. The resolution, introduced by Councilmember James Kraft last week, calls on the state to enact permanent protections for Maryland communities, noting, “There is no scientific research supporting claims that [fracking] can be carried out in a way that reduces health and environmental risks to an acceptable level.”
In response, representatives of the “Don’t Frack Maryland” coalition issued
the following statements:
“Just since the General Assembly approved a two-year moratorium important new public health studies have confirmed the risks fracking poses to our state,” said Mitch Jones, Senior Policy Advocate at Food & Water Watch. “Studies showing increased hospitalizations in heavily fracked areas, correlations between lowered birth weights for newborns and proximity to fracked wells, and the distance that air pollution from fracking can travel are just the latest in the mountain of research that shows fracking is dangerous to our health. Fracking’s impacts are widespread and don’t just affect people living next to fracked wells – which is what Baltimore realizes.”
"The Baltimore City Council is taking the right step for both communities and our climate," said Shilpa Joshi, Maryland Campaign Coordinator at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. "Studies show that fracked gas could be worse for the climate than coal because the fracking process leaks methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. With so much of Maryland's economic activity at risk due to rising sea levels and growing flooding, we can't afford to take steps backward toward another dirty fossil fuel."
“Just as the City Council lead in 2013 with legislation to ban the treatment of fracking wastewater, they are leading again with a resolution to ask for a statewide fracking ban. Council members certainly understand the best way to protect Baltimore’s water and the public’s health from fracking is not to frack at all. We applaud their decision,” said Andy Galli of Clean Water Action.
“Just since the General Assembly approved a two-year moratorium important new public health studies have confirmed the risks fracking poses to our state,” said Mitch Jones, Senior Policy Advocate at Food & Water Watch. “Studies showing increased hospitalizations in heavily fracked areas, correlations between lowered birth weights for newborns and proximity to fracked wells, and the distance that air pollution from fracking can travel are just the latest in the mountain of research that shows fracking is dangerous to our health. Fracking’s impacts are widespread and don’t just affect people living next to fracked wells – which is what Baltimore realizes.”
"The Baltimore City Council is taking the right step for both communities and our climate," said Shilpa Joshi, Maryland Campaign Coordinator at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. "Studies show that fracked gas could be worse for the climate than coal because the fracking process leaks methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. With so much of Maryland's economic activity at risk due to rising sea levels and growing flooding, we can't afford to take steps backward toward another dirty fossil fuel."
“Just as the City Council lead in 2013 with legislation to ban the treatment of fracking wastewater, they are leading again with a resolution to ask for a statewide fracking ban. Council members certainly understand the best way to protect Baltimore’s water and the public’s health from fracking is not to frack at all. We applaud their decision,” said Andy Galli of Clean Water Action.
###
Background: More
than 100 groups came together and worked tirelessly to empower Marylanders to
form the Don’t Frack Maryland Campaign and fight for a long-term moratorium on
fracking. During the 2015 General Assembly, more than 100 Western Maryland
business owners joined this call, and Marylanders sent over 25,000 messages to
legislators supporting a moratorium. Letters signed by more than 100 health
professionals, and more than 50 restaurant owners, chefs, winemakers and
farmers from across the state were also delivered to the legislature. Even
actor and Maryland native Edward Norton helped the effort, providing a radio ad
appealing to the Governor to sign the bill. Two commissioners of the “Marcellus
Shale Safe Drilling Initiative,” released a letter in January outlining the
commission’s study did not incorporate a great deal of the recently-released
studies exploring the health effects of fracking.
Nasser writes: "More than 100 children, parents
and community organizers in fluorescent yellowish-green shirts and orange shoe
covers marched through a South Los Angeles neighborhood earlier this week
chanting, 'Hey, hey, ho, ho, this drilling site has got to go!'"
Demonstrators marched through a South Los Angeles neighborhood this week to protest fracking, which disproportionately impacts communities of color. (photo: Haya El Nasser)
California Communities Mount Protests Against Fracking
By
Haya El Nasser, Al Jazeera America
24 July 15
Kern County family sues California
governor, charging fracking regulations discriminate against Latinos
More than 100 children, parents and community
organizers in fluorescent yellowish-green shirts and orange shoe covers marched
through a South Los Angeles neighborhood earlier this week chanting, “Hey, hey,
ho, ho, this drilling site has got to go!”
The canaries-in-a-coal-mine color-scheme of the protesters
was intentional. There was even a giant cage in front of an oil drilling site
on West Jefferson Boulevard that neighborhood children, most of them African
American or Latino, crammed into, holding up signs asking to “Set these
canaries free.”
Protests over conventional oil drilling and hydraulic
fracturing – known as fracking – near schools and homes in poor minority
neighborhoods are now reaching new heights across California as more studies
show that drilling for oil
disproportionately takes place in poor communities of color.
Last week, a Kern County family filed suit against California Gov.
Jerry Brown and state regulators charging that the state’s new fracking regulations do not protect the
health of Latino students in public schools because they still permit wells
nearby.
Fracking is a type of well stimulation that injects
chemical-laced water into the ground to extract oil or gas. The regulations
will increase monitoring and reporting but will not stop fracking.
A report by the California Council on Science and Technology
released earlier this month basically found that there is not enough
information about chemicals used in fracking and their potential danger to
health and the environment. For example, no agencies are monitoring whether the
wastewater from fracking operations is treated before it seeps into the
groundwater from unlined dump pits or is used to irrigate crops.
The lawsuit, filed by the Center
on Race, Poverty & The Environment, argues that fracking
regulations that went into effect July 1 unintentionally violate the state’s
anti-discrimination laws by not banning fracking in close proximity to schools.
“California guarantees all children the right to an
education but also equal education,” said Madeline Stano, staff attorney with
the center that filed the lawsuit. “We are the first case that we’re aware of
that’s really linking oil and gas activity and civil rights issues under
existing civil rights laws.”
The state prohibits intentional or unintentional
discrimination on the basis of race.
Don Drysdale, with the California Department of
Conservation, responded in an e-mail: “Neither the Department nor the
Governor’s Office have comment on this pending litigation.”
More than 60 percent of the 61,612 children who attend
California schools within one mile of a stimulated well are Latino, according
to the center. Statewide, Latino students are more than 18 percent more likely
to attend a school within a mile and a half of a fracking operation than
non-Latino students.
“Governor Brown and our state regulatory agencies have
failed to protect public school students and our state as a whole by adopting
regulations that do not address the existing racially disparate impact of well
stimulations on Latino students,” Stano said.
The plaintiff in this case is Rodrigo
Romo, who claims that his two daughters were exposed to dangerous
levels of toxic pollution and psychological stress from fracking operations
near public schools they attended in Shafter and Wasco, California.
Both have asthma and the youngest has experienced epileptic
seizures, conditions that led her to stop playing soccer.
One of the fracking wells is less than 1,200 feet from
a school.
“Three wells you can see from their playground,” Stano
said. “You can feel the vibration. You can smell the chemicals.”
Conditions are so bad, she said, that students often
have to move indoors for recess.
Here in South Los Angeles, an area that’s 60 percent
Hispanic and 30 percent black, the issue is not fracking but conventional oil
drilling, which also involves the use of chemicals.
“It’s the same issue as fracking,” said Kevin Blue,
senior pastor of Church of the Redeemer, one of two blacks churches that helped
organize the protest at two neighborhood drilling sites. “They’re putting
poison in the ground. We’d love it if they shut it down.”
Single-family homes abut the drilling sites.
“They’re three feet from people’s homes,” said Aimee
Dewing, one of the organizers with Stand Together Against Neighborhood Drilling
(S.T.A.N.D. L.A.). “Acids roll down the street. On one side, you see workers in
hazmat suits and on the other side, people are in their yard grilling.”
There has never been an environmental impact report
done on either of the two sites, the main demand of residents who also oppose
the proposed addition of a gas burner at a nearby drilling operation on West
Adams Boulevard.
“It really is an environmental justice issue,” Blue
said.
“Most of our congregation live within a square mile,”
said the father of three, who lives half a mile west of the oil drilling site.
Drilling has been taking place in this neighborhood
right next to homes since the 1960s.
“A lot the adults decided to accept it,” Blue said,
which is why neighborhood activists are now training children in the art of
protests, using the same strategies utilized in the civil rights movement more
than half a century ago.
The elementary- and middle-school students are
attending the Adventures Ahead summer program run by Blue’s church and Holman
United Methodist Church. They have spent the summer learning about social
movements and the role children can play in advancing social justice and
educating the community.
Timeka Drew, the mother of two boys attending the
program, marched alongside the children.
Even though she has lived in the neighborhood six
years, “I had no idea so many drilling sites were so close by.”
People of color experience 70 percent more particulate
matter emissions because they live within two and a half miles of major gas
emitters, said Strela Cervas, co-director of the California Environmental Justice
Alliance, which represents more than 20,000 people in communities
across the state.
“The communities that are hit first and worst by
climate change and fracking are communities of color and, disproportionately,
low-income communities of color,” she said. “The communities we work with live
and breathe the realities and that hasn’t been reflected in state policies.”
Kelvin Sauls, senior pastor at the Holman Methodist
church, said this week’s protests are not just about race.
“There’s racism plus classism going on,” he said.
“Discrimination and exploitation is not just a race thing.”
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
Th