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B4. Radical Ecology
Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta
This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
On July 30, images streamed across TVs, social media feeds and newspapers of thousands of people approaching a fence along the beach, in boats and by foot. Migrants, including children and families, were attempting to cross into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave bordered by Morocco. Facing violent border guards and the threat of drowning, over 70,000 people made it to Ceuta, with hopes of eventually reaching the Spanish mainland. Officials in Ceuta said that 100 people died in the crossing — either by drowning or being crushed — and sources on the ground believe the number was higher.
“I lost my phone, my money, my ID card, everything I had,” one Moroccan teenager recalled. “At one point I got pulled to the bottom, so far down that my feet touched the sand. When I looked around me, I saw women and babies who had drowned.”
“There was no proper humanitarian response from the local authorities — whether it is basic hygiene, food or shelter,” said Ric Fernández, coordinator and spokesperson for humanitarian and migrant advocacy group No Name Kitchen, or NNK, about the first days after the mass crossing. “Instead, there was an institutional response of pressuring people to ‘voluntarily’ return to Morocco. … There was repression, violence against people on the move in every form — legal, administrative and physical, and the forced expulsion of people.”
Facing intense pressure and violence from both the Spanish police and military, within 96 hours most people returned to Morocco. Estimates about how many migrants remain are in flux, but the Spanish government said in late September that up to 10,000 people are still in Ceuta.
While the global mainstream media quickly moved on from this story, the situation in Ceuta has remained tense over the last three months, with increased violent harassment by the police, evictions and collective expulsions. In recent weeks, “voluntary returns” and evictions from makeshift camps on the beach have ramped up.
Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'d_JZCDM4Q5ZBUslnKH4l0Q',sig:'D865mB1H6f680CvXaneq8PnsrTSRxAOhEky-2uFJX_Q=',w:'594px',h:'399px',items:'2299035070',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});Irene Estébanez Gutiérrez, a family and community doctor in Madrid, spent two weeks in Ceuta as a volunteer. “An information campaign has been waged that portrays people on the move as invaders, violent and dangerous,” she said. The media coverage, she believes, has failed to adequately address “the resulting humanitarian crisis, the systematic violation of rights, the lack of protection for minors, and the systematic violence and discrimination to which people are being subjected to, particularly by the military.”
Those who remain include Moroccan men and women, alongside Sudanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Malians and Nigerians. According to NNK, a significant number are minors. They are still stranded; the majority of them have slept in the street or in makeshift tents since they crossed into Ceuta over two months ago.
Kora, who uses a pseudonym as an activist to protect her identity, arrived in Ceuta to volunteer in early August and found the violence and the lack of access to basic necessities particularly angering. The authorities were “not letting them access the supermarkets to get food or water,” she said. “They turned off the publicly and freely accessible water [to shower or drink] on the beaches and beat them or scare them in the middle of the night … to purposefully making their lives more miserable.”
Organizing solidarity, facing criminalizationThis violence, however, did not prevent activists and migrants from developing forms of organizing and resistance. Hundreds of migrants staged a protest on a popular beach in Ceuta in August to demand asylum. On Sept. 21, Migreurop, a Euro-African network of organizations, activists and researchers that monitors European migration policies, noted in a joint statement with over 100 organizations: “We have witnessed forms of resistance in everyday survival practices.” They mentioned the sharing of information, food and medicine, as well as safety and protection practices.
#newsletter-block_1b590d37a6301dd66e1fa8b563f08f3f { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_1b590d37a6301dd66e1fa8b563f08f3f #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterBesides migrants’ self-led efforts, civil society has stepped up to help, with the Spanish Red Cross distributing food at Trampolín Beach, the site of one makeshift camp. Other local charities like Luna Blanca, have been providing between 2,700 and 3,500 meals a day in five locations with initial funding from the Spanish government. NNK, a group started by Serbian activists in 2017 that supports migrants along the Balkan and Mediterranean routes to the EU, has been working in Ceuta since 2021. It has grown from a fixed team of four to more than 21 volunteers, after a call for help in early August through social media and Signal groups with other grassroots organizations providing aid to migrants in EU borders. Operations have shifted in the three months since the migrants arrived, and NNK is now cooking and serving over 1,200 meals a day in a new industrial-size kitchen.
Fernández shared how the group has adapted its work on the ground to keep up with a crisis situation. “For more than a month [after July 30], we were not able to do proper legal accompaniment, because the system was broken and we were just trying to register people,” he said. “We tried to divide our work into four different teams: legal, health, cooking, awareness.” To keep things coordinated, aid groups in Ceuta hold a weekly meeting to share information and needs. The most pressing needs are for immediate humanitarian assistance, including clothes distribution, housing for vulnerable groups and phone charging.
Volunteers arrive from Spain and mostly other European countries, contributing what they can based on their experience. “I provided direct basic health care because of the barriers to accessing medical care and the huge health needs due to violence and living conditions,” said Irene, the doctor who volunteered with NNK. She said she assessed dozens of cases involving wounds or injuries resulting from assaults, mostly perpetrated by the Spanish military.
The hostility of authorities toward migrants has also extended to volunteers, who carry out their daily work under intense police monitoring. Police constantly ask for identification documents and conduct searches, including of food containers meant for distribution. Reprisals against volunteers and grassroots groups have taken multiple forms, from administrative fines to criminal charges of “trafficking.” A volunteer who had previously spent time in Ukraine and Syria reported that the seven-square mile enclave of Ceuta felt considerably more militarized than either of those countries.
Lessons learned and the way aheadSpain’s response to the people who crossed into Ceuta has been shocking to many observers, especially for a country that has been considered among the more progressive in the European Union on migration. This comes at a time when states are slowly beginning to implement the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, a new and comprehensive reform to migration management which includes a focus on external borders. Legal advocates argue that this pact, coupled with the use of emergency laws, could suspend migration and human rights law in the EU during mass border crossings like the one in Ceuta.
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DonateSolidarity groups have also come under attack and are looking for ways to move forward in this new atmosphere. Greece is among the first countries to implement the pact and one that has led the way in criminalizing humanitarian efforts to support migrants. This increasing criminalization is happening “through the misuse of the criminal justice system to target and persecute activists and people in solidarity for their work, as well as through administrative law, such as harsher requirements for the registration of civil society organizations,” said Eleni Sirri from the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a network of NGOs, associations and collectives that monitors human rights violations at and within European borders.
Anna Gruber is the advocacy manager from Collective Aid, an NGO working with migrants in the borderlands of Serbia, Bosnia and Greece. She shared how Collective Aid also had to reorganize and strategize about the way ahead, given the increase in crackdowns on humanitarian work, as well as the anticipated changes because of the EU pact. “We are now focusing more on capturing conditions in detention, [and] mapping deaths and disappearances on the borders,” she said. “While these are hard to trace, bringing all the scattered evidence we can find together helps showcase the EU’s focus on detention camps and the containment of migration that is at heart of the new pact.”
Like other groups navigating the criminalization of migration and anticipated changes under the new pact, NNK feels it is important for grassroots groups across the EU and beyond to come together around migrant rights. Fernández believes putting energy into growing networks and collectives of grassroots groups is the way forward. “The far-right in Europe and instrumentalization of migration will continue to grow,” he said. “We need to prepare for that and learn from each other to be stronger.”
Kirsten Dimovitz, the advocacy coordinator for the Border Violence Monitoring Network and a volunteer in Ceuta, contributed additional reporting to the story.
This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
PANEL: Rainforest Radicals and the History of Rainforest Action Network
Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy
This article Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
I recently showed up to a protest for the first time in months, looked around, and thought: “Who the hell are all these people?”
Friends I could once rely on running into at protests when I was younger were missing.
The fact that I hadn’t been to a protest in months was unusual. I’d had a hard season of exhaustion and cynicism, and I felt I was falling out of the loop. In the last few years, I turned 30 and moved back to my hometown, and the once-intense focus on social movements that I had in my 20s was now jostling for attention with work and family.
The absence of my comrades at that protest seemed to signal that others, too, had burned or faded out of organizing.
It’s a trend that Chris Dixon describes in his new book, which is about sticking around for the long haul in the fight for a better world: “In radical activist scenes especially,” he writes, “people tend to age out by their 30s, if not before.”
When the manuscript of Dixon’s book came my way, it spoke to my fear of burning or fading out of the movements that have given my life meaning and momentum. (I sit on the editorial collective of Between The Lines Books, and helped select the book for publication; it was released in September 2026.)
After a few recent boom-and-bust cycles of uprisings — 2020’s Black liberation uprising, the Palestine solidarity protests that kicked off in 2023 — it’s a timely and thoughtful book about building movements with care and commitment.
Dixon (who unfortunately shares a name with a far more famous American crypto bro) is an anti-authoritarian activist and a scholar of social movements. “For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World” is the latest effort in his lifelong project to understand how social movements are built and sustained.
Dixon grew up in Alaska, and the book opens by describing his decades-long friendship with Ruth Sheridan, an anarchist who was in her 70s when she first came to talk to his eighth grade labor history class. That early curiosity — about how left-wing social movements are built and sustained and the unsung activists who make it happen — showed up in his 2014 book “Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements,” in which he shared lessons from almost a decade spent interviewing organizers across the U.S. and Canada.
Now, Dixon has reached back into this same conversational archive to write “For the Long Haul.”
We meet Bill Stivers, an elder communist Dixon befriended as a teen; Rachel Herzing, the co-founder of prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance; the political prisoner David Gilbert with whom he exchanged letters from jail, and many more.
These lifelong leftists share their observations about what leads to burnout, the many-headed monster that has long stalked social movements. During this time of totalizing neoliberalism and weakened movement infrastructure, it’s grown especially powerful. These movement veterans counsel us to be patient, open-minded and to “practice being nobody special.”
Dixon tells the story of Stivers who, at the age of 76, travelled from Anchorage, Alaska to the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico to attend the Zapatistas’ Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. It was just a couple years after the militant group’s armed uprising and a young Dixon, more swayed by a European left tradition at that time, looked on with skepticism. But Stivers ended up having the more clear-eyed assessment of this new approach to anti-capitalist struggle. Stivers had cultivated the long view, which helped him avoid cynicism and dogmatism, and encouraged him to keep learning and stay open to new developments.
#newsletter-block_da317ba7a61bd5a5b96073f9d6105bca { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_da317ba7a61bd5a5b96073f9d6105bca #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterWhat I found most helpful about the book was Dixon’s formulation of burnout: he sees it not just as a type of overwork or exhaustion, but as a feeling of defeat that becomes more common because of a lack of strategy. Dixon introduces this idea by sharing a conversation he had with Kim Marks, a direct-action environmentalist and Indigenous solidarity organizer in Oregon: “So much of burnout is about not being effective,” she said, “and so much ineffectiveness comes from not having a plan.”
Dixon traces the ways that people often burn out of activist groups back to this underlying lack of strategy. When a group promises sweeping change but never decides how to take the first step; when a group gets mired in discussions about internal structure or politics and stops taking outward action; when a few veteran members shoulder a huge amount of work while new ones struggle to find meaningful ways to pitch in; when a group is hastily cobbled together to address a crisis then falls apart just as quickly after an unsuccessful campaign — all of these are instances in which a lack of strategy leaves people feeling defeated, ineffective and worn-out.
A good plan can pull groups out of these exhausting spirals. This involves mapping the current political landscape, articulating our goals, making agreements about what to do and how to support each other in doing it, and then evaluating our success and learning from our mistakes.
Dixon writes about the importance of imbuing this strategy-setting with care and intentionality, to “help people to talk frankly about workload, make reasonable estimates of what they can do, and look out for one another’s well-being.”
Previous CoverageYou can find many of these same encouragements — for rest, care and intentionality — in the pages of any self-help book. But the goal of capitalist self-help literature is to create an individual who is independent, sane and productive enough to keep cranking the handle of profit-making machines.
Dixon’s help is different: it’s not for the individual, but for the collective. At the end of the day, “sustained involvement in movements is fundamentally a collective activity, not an individual one,” he writes. No amount of advice given to or followed by the individual can stop the pattern of burnout and disengagement that’s become endemic in leftist spaces.
As a result, Dixon focuses on collective care rather than self-care. This can look like preparing food for the picket line, planning for childcare and legal support at the direct action, or tending to hurt feelings after the meeting. He calls care work “a crucial — and too often overlooked — foundation for the long haul.”
For Dixon, care is not just a way to make organizing more pleasant for the people doing it, or a moral imperative if the left wants to keep claiming the high ground. Instead, he sees care as a strategic imperative. When we make our political commitments with care in mind, Dixon writes, it forces us to ask ourselves and each other if what we’re committing to is reasonable and tactical. And when it is, we become more likely to stick around for the long run, and also more likely to win.
Not one of Dixon’s ideas stands without a quote from an organizer, an example from a movement or a reference to a movement scholar’s work. One of the book’s main contributions is its vast bibliography — a full third of the pages are suggested reading and endnotes.
Dixon’s form of activist research is highly attentive to insights that are gleaned from a person’s own experiences. Like this observation by anti-authoritarian activist Helen Hudson, who draws on decades of organizing with prisoners to form her analysis of how the state uses prison to weaken movements: “Prison isolates the prisoners from support,” she told Dixon, “but also deprives younger generations of radicals from the experience of revolutionaries who have much to teach us.”
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DonateDixon encourages younger readers like me to find these people in our own lives — older activists like Stivers and Sheridan who show us that it is possible and lovely to live an ordinary life of unflagging commitment to the left.
This is not an organizing manual (though Dixon does recommend a few of those in his suggested readings). Instead, what he gives us is a deep study of left-wing dynamics and some broad strokes toward sustainability. The people likely to get the most from this book are those of us who have already gone through many cycles of boom-and-bust social movement activity, and who are looking for fuel that burns longer and cleaner.
And it’s by paying attention to Dixon’s rigorous practices of listening and sharing that readers will get the most out of this book — leaving not just with a handful of advice, but with an initiation into a practice.
This article Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
How Vermont shut down ICE
This article How Vermont shut down ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
After Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration moved to rein in the Bovino-style spectacle with its made-for-TV arrests. In an attempt to avoid another public outcry, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly settled into a new rhythm.
Arrests have still increased month after month, reaching a record high of roughly 51,000 people taken into ICE custody in August. This is part of a new surge — carried out in hospitals, courthouses and airports — with an intent to stay off the nightly news. As The New York Times reported, this phase is “captured mostly by grainy security camera footage, through cracked blinds and from behind closed doors.”
This phase is also backed by a dragnet of data. At airports, ICE has been running name matches with TSA to detain people at check-in counters and gates. It has found a backdoor into the country’s license-plate cameras: Records show local and state police ran more than 4,000 immigration-related searches on Flock’s camera network in a single year. (Yet another reason Flock cameras should not exist.)
Perhaps surprisingly, much of the tech infrastructure driving ICE’s new surge is headquartered in … Vermont. The town of Williston, outside Burlington, is home to both ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center, which houses the agency’s national tip line, and ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, or NCATC, its social-media surveillance hub.
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Vermont resistanceResistance started with the fight over flights. Early in Trump’s second term, activists documented ICE moving detainees onto commercial flights out of Burlington’s airport — more than 450 people as of mid-July 2025, by their count. They showed up in airports as witnesses and disruptors, sometimes aided by empowered flight attendants. They forced an ICE retreat: organizers say ICE hasn’t moved detainees through the airport in more than a year.
More recently they’ve gone after the hard infrastructure. Sit-ins at the White Cap Business Park in Williston, where the NCATC facility is located, have led to arrests for allegedly blocking the entrance to the ICE offices, including 11 people in February and 13 in July.
After those arrests came some unusual twists, which speak volumes about the courage it takes to refuse unjust orders and to continue protesting in the face of repression.
Complicity and noncooperationResponses to authoritarianism are as old as a time — many of the same dynamics from Vermont show up in the ancient story of Pharaoh and Moses.
Undeniably the most powerful person in his land, Pharaoh was the ultimate authoritarian. His big trick was taking beautiful work and turning it evil. Take the work of midwives, whose job is to usher life into the world — he turned that work into ugliness by ordering the Hebrew midwives to kill every newborn boy.
But we all have a choice. And famously, several of the midwives refused. Their act of noncooperation with an unjust order is the reason Moses lived.
We are living through a moment when institution after institution is being turned toward evil. Some, like the Department of Justice, were already a mixed bag. But now it is being turned against the very logic of due process it claims to serve, as we’ve seen recently with the criminal indictment of whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson. Other institutions, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are being perverted, with great resistance from insiders who cling to the key values that these agencies were founded on.
Previous CoverageIn Vermont, the local prosecutor, Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, faced her own choice. When asked to bring charges against the protesters who held the sit-ins, she repeatedly declined, citing limited resources. That makes sense: No one was harmed, and the protesters have a strong necessity defense — the argument that they were preventing an even greater harm. Every minute that ICE isn’t taking part in abducting people is good for the country.
Then came a bizarre turn of events. The state’s public safety commissioner directed state police to send the cases to Vermont’s Attorney General Charity Clark, bypassing normal procedure and upending the traditional role of the attorney general. Clark, a Democrat, decided to charge the protesters with trespassing.
In an op-ed, she said her hands were tied: “Justice must be blind or our system will fail.” Back to Pharaoh: This is a bit like a midwife in the next town over raising her hand to say, “I’d like to kill Moses, because that’s what the law dictates.”
Protesters recently unearthed relevant Vermont history — a model of state-level noncooperation. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which ordered cooperation with slave catchers, Vermont passed a state statute known as the Habeas Corpus Law. It effectively nullified the federal law, and went so far as to require state attorneys to defend anyone accused of being a slave, with full representation before a judge and a jury. The entire practice of nullification was deemed highly escalatory — so much so the federal government threatened military invasion — but due to the state’s resistance, throughout Vermont there was effectively no participation in the Fugitive Slave Act.
As in that case, the pressure from the federal government has continued. One week before a planned week of direct action, the federal government suddenly charged five people from the earlier protests with obstructing access to a federal facility (punishable by up to 30 days in prison or a $5,000 fine), likely hoping to deter further escalation.
We all have a choice: complicity with Pharoah or noncooperation. Despite the threats and new legal challenges, the protesters in Vermont chose the riskier, more liberatory path.
A funeral, a guerrilla garden and a sit-inThe week of direct action went on as planned, beginning with a funeral. On Oct. 5, more than 30 clergy led a procession of a hundred or so mourners who walked behind a hearse to the White Cap Business Park, singing “Amazing Grace.” They carried 95 paver stones, each representing a life taken by ICE — directly or from complications while detained — and placed them one by one in a handmade coffin of Vermont pine. The action echoed the Stolen Neighbors Quilt created in Minnesota, which remembers people who were deported. Here, names of those killed by ICE were read out. Then, in front of the doors of the spy center, the coffin was nailed shut.
A crowd gathers in Williston, Vermont on Oct. 5, behind a coffin filled with paver stones representing lives lost to ICE. (Shut Down ICE VT)Rev. Marybeth Redmond said at the vigil, “I have walked alongside Vermonters struggling to survive, and I have never seen our immigrant neighbors so hunted, so afraid and so alone.”
In the end, it was a symbolic act. Security scattered the stones, and the property manager and others were seen taking crowbars to the coffin. But it was only the beginning of the week.
The next action was a garden. Because what would you expect from Vermont? Rather than using just their bodies to get in the way, about 40 protesters arrived at sunrise with pots, planters and bags of soil.
They affixed the boxes to the pavement with construction adhesive, painted and chalked them with flowers, insects and slogans, flew a rainbow kite, and by mid-morning, had gotten a full dance party going. The action blocked the road to 188 Harvest Lane, which houses ICE’s national tip line.
They were also highlighting the environmental violence of ICE’s data intensive operation. Gardener Isaac Petersen said, “ICE’s surveillance technology is extremely energy-intensive, much of it powered by AI and data centers. It harms our communities directly by targeting our neighbors.”
State and local police moved some barriers, but largely left the garden alone, which blocked the road for most of the day. ICE’s parking lots were nearly empty all day, and the rumor was that ICE was told to avoid coming into the office.
Protestors hang handwritten “tips” outside the ICE office housing the agency’s national tip line. (Shut Down ICE VT)Each day escalated from the day before. By Thursday, protesters went right up to the front entrance of the Harvest Lane facility. Dozens had arrived before 8 a.m. to deliver handwritten note cards with “tips” encouraging ICE employees to find other jobs. The protesters started by taping those messages to the windows and doors. Then they hauled out a rug, a couch, a coffee table and a fold-up mattress — a makeshift living room — and sat down, singing and playing music, effectively shutting the place down.
Much of this has been intergenerational. Vermont protesters have ranged from people in their early 20s to an 83-year-old from Bethel and 85-year-old from Sharon.
Some of those sitting at the entrance this week had taken part in earlier acts of civil disobedience, and several now face charges brought by Clark.
Organizers say the ICE facility was effectively shut for much of that week, its parking lots empty. Police interference was minimal: At one point, officers came over only to remove the items protesters had used to block a surveillance camera, then returned to their cars. As the organizers said in their press release, “ICE employees went home rather than face Vermont’s week of bold, decisive action.”
What you can doThe week of action was only one moment, and organizers hope others will organize their own — aimed at different pieces of ICE infrastructure. There are other flash points around the country this month, too, in Austin, Minneapolis and Arizona.
As for Shut Down ICE VT, the group behind the week of action, they plan to keep going. One simple way to support them: Call the tip line that ICE runs out of Williston to encourage neighbors to turn each other in. To disrupt its activity, the group is encouraging people to call 866-347-2423 and tell whoever picks up all the different ways ICE could be making a better world. According to organizers, this tactic has been so successful the lines are clogged — one person was on hold for 2 hours and 18 minutes until her phone died. (This tactic was used in the early DOGE days.) Instead of doing Pharaoh’s bidding: What are the beautiful things you could be doing with your life? It can be a bit of a daily ritual.
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DonateBecause here, in the end, is Pharaoh’s trick: He changed the meaning of what was legal. He didn’t simply say, “You must obey me.” He said that if you refused, you were the one breaking the law.
But we should remember whose side the law has so often taken. The law stood against enslaved people seeking freedom. It stood against women having control of their own bodies. It stood against trans people claiming full autonomy. The law, by itself, is no defense against injustice — and must not be turned into an instrument of oppression.
Sarah George declined to prosecute protesters for a reason. By stepping in to take up the case, Charity Clark has signaled a willingness to participate in the repression. The people shutting down ICE in Vermont are on the right side of history. Let’s find ways to join them.
This article How Vermont shut down ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
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Why we need to think outside the box this election
This article Why we need to think outside the box this election was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
This election is not like any other. You’ve heard that before, and so have I. But after decades of “this presidential election is the most important election in your lifetime,” I have finally conceded that this midterm election may be the most important election in my lifetime — because it will be the ultimate test of whether Trump and MAGA have succeeded in their authoritarian consolidation of power.
And so it’s appropriate that many groups are trying new things ahead of this election — because the old playbook alone won’t get us there.
No Kings. On Oct. 17, No Kings is going to try something it hasn’t tried before. Instead of another mass march, the coalition is holding No Kings: Vote Early, a nonpartisan day of action in which communities will host block parties, BBQs and local protests to make a voting plan together and vote early where local rules allow. Organizers say it’s “not purely a protest,” but rather a nonpartisan action to encourage voter participation. The idea is to treat voting not as something we do alone, but as something we do together. I’m not old enough to remember it, but people used to go to the polls with their neighbors and make an event of it. This is bringing back that collective spirit.
(It’s easy to host. Go here for all the info you need by Thursday Oct. 15.)
Election Holiday. Another experiment is popping up for the Nov. 3 election — Election Day: Our Civic Holiday. This group (which I’m a part of) rests on a simple idea: treating Election Day as a day for showing love for democracy by doing our civic duty. Vote, help someone else vote, become a poll worker or observer, or find another way to participate in civic life. The idea is to translate that into a cultural vibe, like Valentine’s Day, but for a different form of love — love for democracy and our neighbors.
#newsletter-block_a40caf0c6e0e2d6538990fc5b579df62 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_a40caf0c6e0e2d6538990fc5b579df62 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterThese are two experiments among many in how we protect elections in new ways under new circumstances. (I’ll be writing more about possible post-election actions later.) Neither solves the problem on its own, but both actions build on the understanding that stealing an election gets much harder when there’s a large blowout. Hungary is the reminder. As I wrote in April, Orbán’s defeat was so decisive that he conceded before all the votes were counted, with turnout near 80 percent, the highest since their transition to democracy. As Micah Sifry put it, it was “too big to rig.”
New tactics aren’t easy — and it’s worth reminding ourselves of that.
The trap of the winning tacticUntil now, No Kings has been known for one thing: enormous marches, each bigger than the last. Organizers put the first at five million, the second at seven million, and the third, in March, at more than eight million. When a tactic works like that, the pressure to keep repeating it is immense.
I’ve seen this up close. After Greta Thunberg began her Friday walkouts, Fridays for Future grew and grew. I was working with 350.org — a global environmental organization — at the time and we provided a lot of the backend technical support to help it grow. That growth created tremendous pressure and helped drive movement at the United Nations and in many countries. (You can certainly argue it contributed to the Inflation Reduction Act, which — despite significant cuts — has some parts that are still very active.)
But every tactic eventually peaks. As Saul Alinsky put it, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Suddenly an organization named for leaving school on Fridays needs to improvise — and that’s hard.
Student protesters asked me to write the Climate Resistance Handbook to try to assist Fridays for Future (and others) to break out of their tactical doldrums.
Occupy Wall Street hit the same wall. In Philadelphia, where we had an encampment outside of City Hall, my ears still ring with painful, shouted debates over whether we could do anything other than occupy. The argument largely won out that occupying is the thing that held us together — and like most occupations around the country (but not all!), we never tactically transitioned.
That’s the pull: The familiar tactic feels like the glue. The drive to stay the course is strong. And it takes a strong decision-making process to break out.
Many of us know this tactical challenge: endless weekly vigils and letter-writing with no changes. Worried about this dynamic in my anti-casino organizing group, I once made us promise we would only use the same tactic once — resulting in new tactics like citizen’s search warrants, Philly’s Ballot Box or the public filibuster.
So No Kings deserves congratulations for breaking the mold. Yes, many would love to see something more escalated that increases the level of risk-taking — but it’s worth just underlining how difficult it is to change course at all. So greeting this pivot with encouragement makes all pivots more possible.
The strategic logicWhy put so much energy into the election?
I’ve regularly argued there is so much more than elections. And Trump’s attempt at consolidation is happening in places where elections alone won’t save us. Take the military, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to purge 20 percent of the military’s top leaders. He’s already blocked and purged many women and Black leaders. Many view his attempts as a long-term purge to keep control of the military. (The military is hardly defensive and has its own ways of pushing back — including the extensive leaking about the eight sailors in the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group who attempted suicide.)
But the elections remain critical both as a narrative (exposing Trump’s unpopularity!) and also because Congress (for all its faults) remains a key pillar in allowing the theft of congressional money, putting in radical judges, co-signing his corruption and so much more.
Previous CoverageTrump knows this, which is why it is such important contested territory for him. In September, Trump led the crowd at the Republican National Convention in a pledge to “cheat like hell” (Newsweek claimed he was joking — but I’d say the intent is hard to dismiss). The Callais decision echoes widely as the single largest loss of Black political power in recent memory.
Trump hopes terror can keep us from voting. In March he signed an executive order restricting mail-in voting, and while courts have kept the restrictions from taking effect this year, the fear it stoked is already having an impact. Trump is adding more fuel by making up stories of noncitizen voting. Why? So he can actually steal the election. I lay out 18 ways the regime might take our votes away in this scenario guide.
If nothing else, remember that a 2028 election becomes far easier to steal with a willing Congress. You don’t need a strong imagination to picture a Trump-led Jan. 6 insurrection under current Republican leadership ending in a fully effective coup backed by Congress and the Supreme Court. That becomes much harder with a hostile Congress.
All of this brings us back to why the midterms matter and the context of why collectively voting early and supporting each other on Election Day matters.
Why turnout is protectionMass participation can overwhelm a system and make the likely accomplices of would-be election thieves less willing to go along. Trump can try to control the narrative, but the mechanics of theft require a chain of accomplices: election deniers in the certification process, state actors, and behind them businesses and supporters who quietly approve. That’s why folks at May Day Strong launched the Business for Democracy Pledge. By signing on, businesses commit to oppose obstacles to voting and, if results aren’t honored, to close ranks in defense of the election. It pulls potential accomplices back before they cross the line.
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DonateThen there are the efforts to recruit more voters, like the Oct. 17 Vote Early Day coming up soon — a chance to mix large-scale decentralized actions for an electoral good. Or the Election Day: Our Civic Holiday effort where we’re not asking for a federal policy change. We’re asking people to treat the day differently. Vote if you haven’t. Help someone else vote. Make it visible.
We’re trying to feed into the energy by reminding everyone to stay active on Election Day, Nov. 3, by:
- making sure you’ve voted, and that the people around you have too
- becoming a poll worker or nonpartisan observer
- joining Singing Resistance, Souls to the Polls, or Joy to the Polls, and meeting any interference with positivity
- connecting with rapid-deployment teams or people already at polling sites, not to confront ICE, but to redirect and escort voters so everyone eligible gets to vote.
You can share the word at election.holiday. Businesses can support the campaign by pledging to give their employees time off to do their civic duty through Time to Vote, the coalition founded by Patagonia. And if you’re still looking for roles to support the election, find them at We are Ground Control.
All of this is part of the pre-election plan: Get large numbers of people voting against an awful regime. There’s an abundant range of opportunities to help protect our election. I hope you find your role.
This article Why we need to think outside the box this election was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Feds Deny Ballistics Expert Access to Prairieland Defendant Who Got a 100 Years w/ Adam Federman
Counterpunch: Trump’s USDA Gambles America’s Forests on a Defective GMO Chestnut Tree
Inside the successful campaign against illegal Chinese mining in Africa
This article Inside the successful campaign against illegal Chinese mining in Africa was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
When the shrill of heavy earthmoving machinery crept towards Elias Mlambo’s riverside banana plantations in February, the sudden brownish color of the river alarmed him.
The water was laced with used machinery oil, disfiguring the once crystal-clear, wild water of the Haroni River. The river not only sustains the Ndau tribal people of the Chimanimani district in southeast Zimbabwe but also acts as Zimbabwe’s eastern border with Mozambique. By December of last year, excavators operated by a Chinese mining syndicate were at work along a stretch of the riverbeds — tearing up centuries of riparian ecology in a hunt for alluvial gold deposits.
“They appeared without notice, without our permission, claiming to have a government license to dig for gold on our land, but never showing the actual permit,” said Mlambo, a banana farmer and local tribal elder in Rusitu, one of the largest villages in the district.
He said he confronted a man who claimed to be the manager of the Chinese miners — but the man gave his name only as “Xai Samson” and flatly refused to give out the company’s name. He acted as though he did not understand English — a deliberate tactic some dubious Chinese mining syndicates adopt in Zimbabwe when confronted by aggrieved locals, Mlambo said.
“He just waffled a few sentences in Chinese — gestured to the excavators and piles of fresh soil,” he explained. “We figured out that our river, fruit plantations and ancestral graves were collateral to the invaders.”
Ignored at firstFor the next three months, Mlambo made complaints to the Chimanimani municipal authorities, a lawmaker and Zimbabwe’s mines ministry — and was ignored. Just one ministry bureaucrat responded to Mlambo and other tribal elders by telephone, only to say that his hands were tied, citing how high-level state partnerships and national economic priorities trump tribal land rights. It’s a familiar cold response from Zimbabwe’s government that human rights leaders say has given dozens of Chinese prospectors carte blanche to excavate hills and river streams, and encroach onto tribal farming and grazing lands in pursuit of precious metals like platinum, lithium or gold.
#newsletter-block_15274f02932a8a8e4b772696b6cbbfaa { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_15274f02932a8a8e4b772696b6cbbfaa #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter“There’s a cozy, transactional relationship between state decision-makers and Chinese minerals prospectors,” said Nsama Musonda, the executive director of Care for Nature Zambia, a regional ecology monitoring nonprofit. “This gifts Chinese businesspeople a carefree right to dig for precious minerals — without consent — on tribal people’s lands in Zimbabwe and nearby countries like Zambia.”
Knowing the script that has played out elsewhere across Zimbabwe, Mlambo and fellow villagers refused to retreat. Instead, they looked across the international boundary to Mozambique — a stone’s throw across the Haroni River. On the other side, in Mozambique’s Sussundenga district, villager Manuel Pinto was watching his community’s primary fish stocks float belly-up to the surface.
Fish in the community ponds that line the Mozambique side of the Haroni riverbed were suffocating from the sludge coming from the spoiled headwaters on the Zimbabwe side, he said. But Pinto feared something worse: Mozambique’s community health nurses warned that children could develop chemical rashes if they encountered contaminated waters.
“The river doesn’t need a passport to flow and nourish both countries, Zimbabwe and Mozambique,” he said, speaking the same Ndau vernacular language that hundreds of thousands of tribal people on the Zimbabwe side of the river border speak, too. “We realized that if authorities in Zimbabwe would not enforce environmental law, the Ndau people on both sides of the border would act to protect their right to safe livelihoods.”
The border alliancePinto says he knew routine complaints would be easily ignored by state decision-makers. So Mlambo and Pinto conjured up a community alliance rooted in their shared Ndau lineage. Tribal identity, older than colonial state borders, drove their determination to defend their environment against the encroachment of heavily polluting Chinese miners.
In daylight, the Ndau communities on the Zimbabwe side confronted the Chinese miners: spraying graffiti on the worksite and the machinery, and singing, chanting and banging pots, drowning them in noise. Since the area is remote geographically, located far from city markets, they also successfully convinced local food shops to refuse to sell soap, beverages, bread, meat, tea, essential groceries and cellphone top-up cards to the Chinese miners and their local mining employers. Taxis and buses refused them service. These actions constantly reminded the miners and their workers that they were trespassing on tribal lands.
“We made life uncomfortable for them,” Mlambo said. “Their workers were often hungry because we instructed local shops not to sell food or beer to the invaders, which they liked a lot. They would drive 50 kilometers just to replenish the food pantry with essentials like salt and cigarettes. Their workers began to quarrel with their bosses.”
Locals also shared their displeasure to social media networks followed by thousands of Zimbabweans.
At the same time, the Ndau communities on the Mozambique side of the river filled out urgent cross-border environmental petitions with provincial authorities in Mozambique’s Manica province. They walked into the offices of the governor and lawmakers and demanded urgent meetings, asking them to directly press the Zimbabwean government to take action under specified timelines. If the decision-makers didn’t follow through, the Ndau activists threatened not to pay taxes because the sludge from Zimbabwe’s polluted river was beginning to spoil their corn and fruit farming plots.
A Chinese mining excavator digs a hillside for gold in Chimanimani district, Zimbabwe. (Centre for Natural Resource Governance)The Zimbabwe government is known for being “tone deaf” to citizens’ grassroots petitions against irregular mining, said Pedrito Martinho Campira, chief of the Sussunhega district. But he added that the deliberate aggressive petitioning of the regional government in Manica, which borders Chimanimani, has created a diplomatic headache for Zimbabwe’s stubborn authorities, whom locals suspect were shielding the Chinese syndicate.
“At night our people would cross the river, cover the Chinese mining site with paper petitions and spray graffiti, warning the Chinese miners that they are messing with the waters flowing into Mozambique,” Campira recalled of the intense cross-border pushback that overwhelmed the Chinese prospectors.
“Illegal riverbed mining is an affront to our two shared lands and cultures,” he said. “We are one Ndau people separated by a colonial fence; we have blood family ties across the river.”
Faced with nightly protests, daily confrontation with locals on the Zimbabwe side of operations, cross-border diplomatic pressure and vocal warnings from Mozambique border guards, who were dismayed by the contaminated water flowing from the Zimbabwe side, the unidentified Chinese miners finally retreated in June. They abandoned heavy machinery and fled the mining site — leaving locals to rehabilitate spoiled riverbeds, banana plantations and damaged forest cover.
“We won,” Mlambo said. The Chinese mining syndicates operating without consent across rural Zimbabwe are used to facing only local complaints and enjoying the shield of compromised government bureaucrats, he added. “This time they faced something unfamiliar — a cross-border, bi-national grassroots pushback, and they were clueless on how to respond.”
Xiao Samson, the manager of the Chinese syndicate that attempted to excavate for gold in Haroni River, refused to give a full interview. He only said in a short phone call, in broken English, that, “we are no lawless people. We have a permit. We will [be] back in Haroni River to do our gold with law.”
Mutoko pushbackThe victory in Chimanimani is not an isolated event; it marks an uptick of grassroots defiance forming in rural Zimbabwe in areas where precious minerals are being discovered. In the granite-rich hills of Mutoko, 250 miles north of Chimanimani, a similar crisis boiled over in June. Mutoko has long been the center of friction over complaints that Chinese miner-exporters are blasting and digging up lucrative black granite and gold without consent — leaving in their wake damaged homes, polluted riverways, desecrated grazing and farming lands, and deformed hills. For example, Shanghai Haoying Mining Investments has been frequently cited by locals for continuing mining activities without obtaining community consultation or environmental approvals, and for threatening to evict locals.
In June, the community finally drew a line in the sand with a different band of Chinese miners, who, like the miners in Chimanimani, refused to give out their identity.
“My house has been shaken to the core — its roof and walls cracking from relentless blasting by nearby Chinese miners who are going for gold,” said Urai Godo, a mother of three whose home stands at the slopes of a contested hill. One day in early August, the building frustration finally boiled over when locals saw a crew at a Chinese gold prospecting site setting up wires and detonators. Locals feared that the hill was going to be destroyed by dynamite while kids were doing homework in houses nearby. Word filtered around the village in minutes and residents carrying pots and wooden sticks stormed the blasting site without warning, Godo said. A Chinese mining boss who called himself “Hei Chu” felt the pressure and gave orders for his workers to stop blasting preparations.
“We encircled the miners — chanting, singing, blocking their work progress. The rattled miners dropped their detonators, unwound the blasting wires, hopped into their cars, abandoned the site and never returned,” Godo recalled.
“Hei Chu” was not reachable for comment on why the miners had attempted to work on communal land in Mutoko because the number he gave the village head repeatedly went to voicemail and no longer seemed to be working.
Compromised governance and impunityThough still small, this growing pushback by rural residents against mining impunity is a damning example of how the state in Zimbabwe is now captive to foreign extractive corporations, said Ancelimo Magaya, an outspoken cleric based in Harare, Zimbabwe.
“Rural Zimbabweans are seeing this shady encroachment onto tribal lands without consent,” he said. “Rather than simply relying on hiring expensive lawyers to litigate or lodge complaints with the same tone-deaf government agencies, they are taking the miners head-on through peaceful grassroots protests.”
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DonateThe Environmental Management Agency of Zimbabwe doesn’t do much against these foreign mining syndicates, Magaya says. They often issue small, token fines. Some officials could themselves be compromised by the same mining syndicates. This has not escaped the attention of rural residents in Zimbabwe, and they are determined to mount active, peaceful grassroots resistance rather than wait for regulatory protection, which is often absent.
The spokesperson for the Environmental Management Agency did not respond to emailed questions about why mining in Chimanimani began without first obtaining community consent, an environmental impact assessment certificate, and all the necessary paperwork. However, speaking on anonymity, a senior bureaucrat denied such characterization.
“We are in a tricky situation,” he said. “We would like to do our jobs properly defending communities against ecological destruction. But we can’t match the money, tools and vehicles that these mining syndicates have — and the political influence they carry.”
Back in Chimanimani, Mlambo surveyed the banks of the Haroni River. The water is beginning to run cleaner, but the marks of devastation on the land remain. Some youths are replanting fruit and Indigenous trees to rehabilitate disturbed riverbanks. The scars on the land will take years to heal.
“We reasoned that the government in Zimbabwe won’t tackle these Chinese miners,” Mlambo said. “As Ndau people on both sides of the border, we resolve to be united and proactive in defending our ecosystems. It worked, and this is a model of how grassroots communities can defend their lands against corporate extractivism.”
The Chinese in Zimbabwe had never met this kind of bi-national grassroots community resistance to unaccountable mining, he says proudly. “We shocked them – they froze and we learnt lessons to refine our resistance next time should they try to mine on our lands again.”
This article Inside the successful campaign against illegal Chinese mining in Africa was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
ENCORE: Growing American Destruction in the Middle East, w Fadi Kafeety
Fracking Hazards Obscured in Failure to Disclose Wells – Bloomberg
Seeking to quell environmental concerns about the chemicals it shoots underground to extract oil and natural gas, Apache Corp. (APA) told shareholders in April that it disclosed information about “all the company’s U.S. hydraulic fracturing jobs” on a website last year.
Actually, Apache’s transparency was shot through with cracks. In Texas and Oklahoma, the company reported chemicals it used on only about half its fracked wells via FracFocus.org, a voluntary website that oil and gas companies helped design amid calls for mandatory disclosure.
0:49
Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, talks about regulation of the energy fracking industry. She spoke with Bloomberg’s Benjamin Haas on June 6. (Source: Bloomberg)
Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., has praised the website and called for extending its voluntary approach to disclosure overseas. Photographer: F. Carter Smith/Bloomberg
“FracFocus is just a fig leaf for the industry to be able to say they’re doing something in terms of disclosure,” said U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Energy companies failed to list more than two out of every five fracked wells in eight U.S. states from April 11, 2011, when FracFocus began operating, through the end of last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gaps reveal shortcomings in the voluntary approach to transparency on the site, which has received funding from oil and gas trade groups and $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.
“FracFocus is just a fig leaf for the industry to be able to say they’re doing something in terms of disclosure,” said U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. DeGette, along with Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey, introduced legislation in March 2011 that would require companies to disclose fracking chemicals. The bills haven’t advanced in either the House or Senate.
With FracFocus, “companies that want to disclose can do it but the other ones don’t have to,” DeGette said.
85% FrackedBloomberg compared oil and gas well records from eight states — Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming — against disclosures that companies made for those states on FracFocus. While the state data didn’t reveal whether wells were fractured, regulators in each state said that at least 85 percent of their wells were fracked. The Congressional Research Service puts the national estimate at more than 90 percent.
In the eight states, companies told regulators that 18,158 wells were readied for production or were newly producing from April 11, 2011 through Dec. 31, 2011. They disclosed 8,555 of them on FracFocus. If 85 percent of the total wells were fracked, that means 45 percent of the fracks weren’t disclosed on the website.
Bloomberg’s analysis, covering states that accounted for 64 percent of U.S. gas production in 2010, shows the difficulty of getting a full picture of the industry’s transparency. Because there’s no official national database of fracked wells, Bloomberg chose states that had reliable records on when gas and oil wells started producing or were completed — that is, made ready to flow — and thus were candidates for posting on FracFocus.
No ReportsOil and gas companies have gotten better at listing their fractured wells on the website over time, said Dan Whitten, a spokesman for America’s Natural Gas Alliance, one of two industry groups that help pay operational costs for the website. Some states now require companies to make disclosures on FracFocus, he said.
“ANGA operators are committed to transparency, and support public disclosure of the additives used in the hydraulic fracturing process,” Whitten said in an e-mail. “If you were to look at a complete timeframe of FracFocus, you would see a progressively higher rate of participation.”
Companies participating in the voluntary system agree to disclose information about wells on the website once they have been fractured, which is the start of the completion process. Data from three other leading states — New Mexico, North Dakota and Pennsylvania — are incomplete or don’t list well-completion dates. For Texas, Bloomberg used the date companies submitted completion reports, which are supposed to be filed within 30 days.
Half UnreportedMore than half of new wells went unreported on FracFocus in each of three states: Texas, Oklahoma and Montana. In all, 1,126 companies had at least one well in the analysis period. While it’s possible that some companies didn’t use hydraulic fracturing, the data show that 1,038 of them, or 92 percent, didn’t report any wells on the website.
In hydraulic fracturing, companies blast millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals deep underground to break up rock formations and free oil and gas. The technique has unlocked vast new sources of energy. At the same time, concerns center on the hundreds of chemicals — including known carcinogens — used in the process.
Contamination ConcernsHomeowners in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming have complained that their well water was contaminated with chemicals or methane gas from nearby frack jobs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year linked the method to contaminated drinking water in Pavillion, Wyoming; the agency is now retesting some of those findings. The EPA has little authority to regulate fracking; Congress in 2005 stripped it of most such power.
States have responded in various ways. Pennsylvania officials require that companies disclose chemicals within 60 days after fracking. New York has a moratorium on the practice until its environmental impact can be determined. Vermont has banned it outright. Texas began mandating disclosure of fracking chemicals this year, after officials determined that operators were voluntarily reporting about half their fracked wells to FracFocus, according to the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas wells.
Oil and gas executives say the FracFocus website helps eliminate the need for any new federal oversight that might unify the regulatory approach.
‘Positive Thing’“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” said Cal Cooper, manager of special projects for Apache. “This is a positive thing. It shows industry can get its act together and make things happen in a short amount of time.”
Apache hadn’t reported some wells in Texas that received only minor frack treatments, Cooper said — though he said they should have been disclosed on the site. The company also struggled to get some of its contractors to disclose their chemicals, he said. Both issues have been addressed, he said.
“We certainly expect to post all of our 2012 frack jobs in the U.S. on FracFocus,” he said. The company is updating its 2011 disclosures on the site as well, “and we fully expect to reach our goal of 100 percent disclosure from Jan. 1, 2011,” Cooper said.
Some of the largest oil and gas companies posted more complete data to the site. For example, Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), Europe’s top oil producer, disclosed fracking chemicals for 107 wells in the eight states during the analysis period. The company reported 115 wells to state regulators, records show. Shell reported all its fracked wells to the website, said Kelly Op De Weegh, a Shell spokeswoman, indicating that eight of the wells weren’t fractured.
Chesapeake’s ReportingFor the same period in 2011, Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK), the second-biggest U.S. gas producer, disclosed information on 85 percent of the 1,148 wells listed for it in the eight states. Most of the missing wells were fractured before Feb. 15, 2011, when the company started reporting to FracFocus, said Michael Kehs, a company spokesman.
Chesapeake’s own records show it has withheld FracFocus reports on 10 wells fracked since it began disclosing on the website, Kehs said. In each case, there are unresolved discrepancies in information provided by contractors that did the fracking, he said.
“Chesapeake has reported 99 percent of our wells to FracFocus since the initiative was launched,” Kehs said.
Companies’ ChoiceWhile FracFocus was designed to display all wells fracked in 2011, its voluntary approach allows companies to choose when they want to begin reporting. ConocoPhillips (COP), the largest independent oil and gas producer by market value, decided to report only wells fracked after April 30, 2011, said Davy Kong, a company spokeswoman. That decision left 86 wells from the period Bloomberg examined that were fracked prior to May 2011 unreported, according to data the company provided.
Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), the biggest oil company by market value, didn’t publish 28 percent of the 856 wells listed in records for the eight states. Rex Tillerson, the CEO of the Irving, Texas- based company, has praised the website and called for extending its voluntary approach to disclosure overseas.
Exxon focused on training staff to file the necessary data during the first half of last year, said Jeff Neu, an Exxon spokesman. In the year’s second half, the company reported more than 80 percent of its fracked wells, and it expects to report all of them going forward, he said.
“Today, we have monitoring tools in place that show we are meeting that expectation,” Neu said.
Lowest RatesAmong the largest operators, the companies with the lowest rates of disclosure in the eight states were Midland, Texas- based Concho Resources Inc. (CXO), which reported none of its 160 wells to the website, and SandRidge Energy Inc. (SD), which didn’t disclose 84 percent of its 779 wells. QEP (QEP) Resources Inc. reported 74 of 153 wells listed in state records. Apache was fourth lowest.
Concho executives wanted to wait until various state regulators finalized their own reporting requirements before it began disclosing its chemicals, said Steven H. Pruett, the company’s senior vice president of corporate development. As of February, 2012, when Texas and New Mexico began mandating disclosures, the company has reported all its chemicals on frack jobs, he said.
SandRidge, based in Oklahoma City, began reporting all its frack jobs in Texas to FracFocus on Jan. 1, 2012, and those in Oklahoma and Kansas on March 1, 2012, Kevin White, a spokesman, said in a telephone interview. The company made only a few earlier reports, he said. SandRidge doesn’t drill in other states.
“We’re comfortable that we weren’t doing anything to the environment whether you had filing or not,” he said.
All CompletionsQEP began submitting reports to FracFocus in the third quarter of last year, said Noel Ryan, a spokesman for the Denver-based company. “QEP currently registers all new well completions on this database,” he said.
Continental (CLR) Resources Inc. didn’t report 54 of its 64 wells in the eight-state group. The company didn’t immediately require staffers to list wells on FracFocus, said Mike Cantrell, the Oklahoma City-based company’s vice president for government and regulatory affairs.
Cantrell initially said Continental began disclosing all its wells on Nov. 1, 2011. Data show the company reported only six out of 20 wells it completed in November and December 2011. In a subsequent e-mail, Cantrell said that three of those 20 wells weren’t fracked, and said the company didn’t begin reporting fracks in its south region, which includes Oklahoma, until January 2012.
Missing ThirdOf 22 companies with at least 150 wells in the eight states from April 2011 through December 2011, 11 didn’t disclose a third or more of them on FracFocus, the data show.
“The data is so incomplete, it doesn’t help,” said Shane Davis, research manager for the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club, which supports stronger state and federal regulation of fracking. Davis said he has studied more than 1,000 drilling-related spills in Colorado.
For members of the public, the website can be frustrating. Wendy Leonard wanted to know about wells in her area after she saw one being drilled near her children’s school in Erie, Colorado. She asked state regulators, who referred her to FracFocus, she said.
Found Nothing“And then I’d go home and wouldn’t find anything,” she said. Leonard and her family ended up moving to a town an hour away because of health concerns related to fracking, she said.
FracFocus is operated by two groups: the Groundwater Protection Council, a group of state water officials; and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, an association of states that produce the fuels. The council’s own analysis shows that about half the wells that have been fracked in the U.S. have been reported through the site, said Mike Nickolaus, special projects director for the GWPC.
“Companies can take it or leave it where it’s voluntary, but we see more and more companies using FracFocus to say, ‘This is a good mechanism for us to get our information out there and be transparent,”’ Nickolaus said.
The website’s operational costs, which total “a few hundred thousand dollars” a year for server space and site maintenance, according to Mike Paque, executive director of the GWPC, are paid for partly by America’s Natural Gas Alliance and the American Petroleum Institute, two Washington-based industry groups.
Industry Benefit“We’re unapologetic about the industry cost-sharing on FracFocus because they get a big benefit from the website,” Paque said in a telephone interview. There’s no penalty for failing to participate, he said.
Public money helped create FracFocus. From 2009 to 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy gave grants totaling $3.84 million to the GWPC, records show. About $1.5 million of that sum was used to develop the website, according to Paque. The government plans additional grants for the GWPC totaling $2.12 million through 2014, Energy Department documents show.
Since the website’s inception, seven states, including Texas, Pennsylvania and Colorado, have either allowed or required companies to use FracFocus to fulfill disclosure mandates. The federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees oil and gas rights on 700 million acres — more than four times the size of Texas — is considering adopting FracFocus as the basis for chemical disclosures by companies operating on its land.
Trade SecretsGaps remain on the website even when wells are disclosed. Companies skip naming certain chemicals when they decide that revealing them would give away what they consider trade secrets. Many of the wells that are listed on FracFocus have at least one or two chemicals marked confidential. Others have far more.
Nine undisclosed chemicals were pumped into Marathon Oil Corp. (MRO)’s Cherry Bilsky well in Gonzales County, Texas, between San Antonio and Houston, according to the website. The company also withheld the amounts of eight other chemicals used in the well. The purpose of one product, identified only as “EXP- F1008-10,” is listed as “experimental.”
“Marathon Oil provides the fullest amount of information that has been provided by our suppliers for each fracturing job,” said Lee Warren, a spokeswoman for the company, in an e- mail. Some suppliers consider detailed listings of certain chemicals or specific ratios proprietary, she said.
Information RequirementsAll operators are required by law to keep detailed product information for each additive, and make it available to first responders and medical providers in cases of emergency, Warren said.
In May, Pennsylvania regulators issued violations after a pit for holding waste fluid from fracked wells in Tioga County leaked into the vicinity of the Rock Run stream and the surrounding landscape. The Responsible Drilling Alliance, an activist group that tried to figure out what was in the fluids, was stymied when it checked FracFocus, said Ralph Kisberg, the group’s cofounder.
That’s because EQT Corp. (EQT), the Pittsburgh-based company that operates the Tioga wells, omitted some information about its chemicals. Of five wells it disclosed in the county, one didn’t include any identification numbers for the chemicals, and four others provided no information about the quantities of chemicals used.
‘PR Effort’“There are mistakes; some of the data is incomplete,” said Kisberg, of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “We see FracFocus as a PR effort to placate people.”
EQT staffers made some errors in manually transferring data into the FracFocus system, said Natalie Cox, the company’s director of communications. After Bloomberg News asked about the incomplete disclosures, EQT fixed the errors, Cox said. The company is committed to fully disclosing its fracking fluids, she said.
States that require companies to disclose on FracFocus are adopting the website’s limitations. In North Dakota, where fracking has turned the state into the biggest U.S. oil- producing state after Texas, regulators mandate disclosure on the website within 60 days of a well’s completion.
“We require whatever FracFocus requires,” said Alison Ritter, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Mineral Resources’ Oil and Gas Division. “Whatever their rules are, those are our rules in terms of reporting.”
Private DatabaseThe website isn’t searchable by chemical, or by date. State regulators who wish to check whether companies are making their required disclosures face a time-consuming task. The website doesn’t make its underlying database available to the public.
Improvements are planned for this autumn that will allow users to search by chemical name, chemical abstract number and date. The groups that maintain the website are talking with industry representatives and state officials about how to give regulators in states that require posting on FracFocus access to the database, said Nickolaus, the GWPC’s special projects director.
It remains unclear whether the database will ever be downloadable for the general public. Nickolaus said that’s “not a specific goal of the system.”
Not releasing the database was a prerequisite that companies insisted on before they’d participate, he said.
To contact the reporters responsible for this story: Benjamin Haas in New York at bhaas7@bloomberg.net Jim Polson in New York at jpolson@bloomberg.net Phil Kuntz in New York at pkuntz1@bloomberg.net Ben Elgin in San Francisco at belgin@bloomberg.net
Fracking Hazards Obscured in Failure to Disclose Wells – Bloomberg.
Fracking Operations Run Roughshod over Pennsylvania Homeowners
On a recent trip to western Pennsylvania, I visited a man who lived along a leafy country road. He showed me around the house he had built for his wife and three sons and said he wanted to raise his family in a quiet rural area. He thought he had the perfect spot until an energy company showed up on his property and said it had the rights to drill for natural gas beneath his land. Although he owned his land and home—and paid taxes on them—he could not protect his property from a drill pad, wells and a pipeline he did not want.
Soon tractor trailers began delivering compressors the size of shipping containers, tanker trucks hauled in fracking chemicals, and workers built an industrial drill pad near his house. The last straw came when the company hired security guards to patrol the area—and stationed them right in the middle of the family’s yard.
There was nothing the man could do to stop them.
Every affected family that I met with in western Pennsylvania said they felt displaced on their own property after natural gas companies muscled their way into backyards and fields. Existing health or environmental safeguards are too weak, and poorly enforced. Instead, gas companies are allowed to run roughshod over homeowners and their communities.
Fracking operation, including wastewater pit, next to corn field. Photo: Melanie Blanding
Pennsylvania is no stranger to fossil fuel development. The first oil discovered in America was found in Oil Creek in 1859, and Standard Oil built its empire on the state’s oil fields. Coal has been mined in the region for decades, and old mine shafts dot the landscape.
Local residents told me they thought natural gas would be the next wave in a familiar tide. Most were used to seeing the occasional “donkey” oil pumps bobbing up and down on a hillside, and figured natural gas operations would have a similar profile.
But once drilling began, they realized that fracking goes way beyond anything they had seen before. Instead of a single donkey, a drill site can be the size of several football fields. Half of it may consist of a huge pit holding water and wastewater. When a well is fracked, operators run compressors 24 hours a day for days. People told me their houses shook the entire time.
Even people who gave energy companies the right to drill on their property are overwhelmed by the scale of industrial development. One man told me, “My dad allowed oil drilling on his land years ago, and he got income from the company. It was just one pump out there. It wasn’t a big deal.” He figured he would follow in his father’s footsteps, but then the massive fracking equipment arrived, and he realized he had been boxed into a corner.
Many oil and gas companies turn out to be careless and furtive neighbors. Homeowners are especially concerned about the chemicals sitting in the giant open wastewater pits called impoundments. Yet the oil and gas industry has resisted every attempt to make companies more transparent, and as a result, too few states require them to disclose the chemicals used in fracking fluids, even in some cases to doctors trying to find out why people may be suffering from medical conditions. Standards for managing and reporting on toxic wastewater are too lax and companies sometimes flout the rules. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that one company worker was dumping fracking wastewater right into a local river.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Researchers at PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center found that of the 4,596 fracking sites operating in Pennsylvania between 2008 and 2011, companies violated environmental laws 3,355 times. Some companies see the meager fines levied against them as a cost of doing business. Homeowners, meanwhile, pay the price in polluted air, contaminated water, and decimated property values.
Strong national standards could help protect residents from reckless companies and ineffective state regulators. Yet Senator Hoeven (R-ND) recently introduced a bill that would make it harder for the federal government to regulate fracking. Big Oil’s giant lobbying association, the American Petroleum Institute, welcomed the bill, but many local residents will not. Americans should be protected from the hazards of fracking no matter what state they call home.
NRDC is helping achieve that. We are fighting to put stronger state and national safeguards in place, and we created the Community Fracking Defense Project to help local communities to define their own fracking ordinances.
Lawmakers may sit in Harrisburg or Washington and say there is no need for environmental standards, but people living next door to leaking wastewater pits and polluting wells know better. It’s time we honor their experience and start holding companies accountable.
Chesapeake Testing ‘Green’ Fracking Fluids in Shale Wells – Bloomberg
SAFE comments: Development of environmentally friendly constituents for “slick water” used in fracking does not eliminate, reduce or otherwise rectify that highly saline and radioactive materials, in addition to volatile chemicals inherent in petroleum harvesting, will still come up with the waste water. No amount of “green” fluid injected into the ground can prevent these constituents from coming back up in the flowback.
Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK), the second- largest U.S. natural gas producer, is testing hydraulic- fracturing fluids composed solely of environmentally-benign components in wells.
Chesapeake plans to develop a 100 percent green mixture of fluids used to fracture gas and oil formations underground, Jody C. Jones, the company’s manager of environmental and regulatory affairs, said today during a gathering of energy-industry executives in Columbus, Ohio.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves using high- pressure jets of water, sand and chemicals to smash fissures into rocks so gas and oil may flow. Current fluid formulations often include hazardous components such as hydrochloric acid or diesel fuel and environmentalists say the practice poses a threat to water supplies. Chesapeake, based in Oklahoma City, is testing various green recipes in several shale formations that Jones declined to identify.
“It’s not quite there yet,” Jones said at the Utica Shale Development & Growth Forum sponsored by IQPC Ltd. “The main concern with testing something like this is you just spent $4 to $6 million to drill a well and taking an untested frack system and shooting it down a well could ruin a reservoir and you’d be throwing away all that money.”
Chesapeake is experimenting with green fracking fluids to minimize threats from surface spills near lakes, creeks and rivers that abut drilling sites, Jones said. Such formulations also would reduce workers’ exposure to potentially harmful substances, he said.
Bacteria SlimeSome of the world’s largest fracking-service providers have been working on ways to offer more environmentally friendly fluids. Halliburton Co. (HAL), the world’s largest fracking company, now offers “CleanStim,” which uses food-safe ingredients to stifle the growth of subterranean bacteria that can form a thick slime and impede oil and gas flow.
Halliburton has also developed a process using ultraviolet light to kill bacteria in the fracking fluid, pairing the technology with a recycling process called “CleanWave” that uses an electrical charge to separate contaminants and clean the water.
Baker Hughes Inc. (BHI), the world’s third-largest provider of fracking services, offers a fluid called “VaporFrac” that replaces almost all of the water used in fracking with nitrogen- based foam.
Chesapeake rose 1.3 percent to $19.54 at the close in New York.
Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM) is the biggest U.S. gas producer.
To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Carroll in Chicago at jcarroll8@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Susan Warren at susanwarren@bloomberg.net
Chesapeake Testing ‘Green’ Fracking Fluids in Shale Wells – Bloomberg.
Oil and Gas Leases: Issues and Considerations
Leases do not include the same information that companies give to their shareholders. Landowners are not told the actual risks associated with hydraulic fracturing. There are ways to challenge a lease if a company was not honest about the risks associated with the processes involved in fracking.
The following document regarding gas leasing practices provides important insight into issues to be considered regarding leasing and what is often omitted in leasing offers. The entire content of “Drilling Doublespeak” can be obtained for download at the following link:
http://static.ewg.org/pdf/Drilling_Doublespeak.pdf
SAFE has been examining leases, and is working toward building this page as one that will help you assess your own lease for language that protects you (issues such as burden of proof , compensation for damages). Please check back on this page as we update this information.
Contact Our Legal Committee
L. Cook
legal@dontfractureillinois.net
SAFE has seen a lease that explained the lessee’s rights as follows:
“with the exclusive right for the purpose of exploring *** and operating for and producing *** and the exclusive right *** to inject water, brine and other fluids into the subsurface strata, as well as any industry enhanced recovery methods.”
Note the use of the relatively innocuous sounding term “other fluids” after “water” and “brine” and also note the use of the term “industry enhanced recovery methods”. The lessor explained to us that they were not told that horizontal high-volume, high-pressure hydraulic fracturing could be used on his property.
If this language was intended to encompass horizontal fracking, it is far from a model of clarity and is misleading.
Royalties
Other lease specify royalties that are calculated “at the wellhead.” This means that no matter what is stated anywhere else in the lease, “at the wellhead” means the company is entitled to take all costs (i.e., any cost it can think of) out of its profits before it calculates any royalties.
Pipelines
Leases typically have paragraphs that sound like care is taken regarding pipelines, e.g., that pipelines will be buried below the plow line in crop fields. Yet those leases do not say that pipelines must be buried in a location that is not a crop field. This means they reserve the right to run a pipe line through your yard if they want to.
Damage Clauses
The “famous” liquified damages clause limits any damages payable to you (for any damages, of any kind, ever) to $5,000. We have even seen damage limits as low as $3,000.
Hold Harmless and Indemnify
Perhaps worse, the “hold harmless and indemnify” clause says no matter what happens, you, the landowner, is liable: for injury, damage to the land, to property or anything else. We have a signed copy of one of those leases. The Johnson County clerk’s office has many, many of these leases filed.
FAQ
Will Not Signing a Lease Prevent Drilling?
Q. I am an owner of an oil/gas lease with Next Energy, LLC. They have sent us a form that requests to change the original lease to allow horizontal drilling. With everything I have read, I have not signed it as yet. Will my not signing (my brother and sister haven’t either) prevent anything?
A. First, we need to know how the mineral rights are owned, before we can answer the question about you and your brother/sister not signing the lease. If they own any of the rights, and none of you have signed the lease, then yes, that can make a difference. The issue is a little complex, but basically it is this: In contract law, an issue has to be “within the contemplation of the parties” when they sign a contract for there to have been a “meeting of the minds.” If there has not been a meeting of the minds, there is a very good argument that a contract is invalid.
I am assuming that the contract that was originally signed was before horizontal fracking became an issue? If that is the case, then the parties had no way of knowing that the oil and gas company could potentially use fracking on their property, and therefore did not sign a lease with any intention of allowing horizontal fracking to take place. Therefore, there was no meeting of the minds, and if the oil and gas company does not get an amendment signed, and goes ahead with fracking anyway, they run the risk of being taken to court for an injunction forcing them to stop operations after they have already committed serious time and money and materials to the project.
So, NextEnergy is covering their bases and trying to get the amendment signed. Now, I must warn you they may try to bully you into it, by threatening you and saying they have the right to do it anyway, so you might as well sign. DO NOT fall for it. This is a standard tactic. They may also say you might as well sign, because they can drill on your neighbor and steal your gas, so you might as well sign. NOT TRUE. There IS something called forced pooling in Illinois, but if by some chance they get any gas or oil from under you, they have to pay you for it, no matter where they drill. And right now IDNR is not allowing forced pooling anyway, and has not even issued one permit for forced pooling in all this time. I talked to IDNR about this myself. So do not fall for that one either.
Threatened to Sign A Lease
Q. My husband’s family has been presented with leases for their surprise inheritance of indivually-small shares in mineral rights under some property in southern Illinois. Ugh! I’m a member of a grassroots fractivist group in Colorado and am appalled. I thought it was a load of frack-fluid when the landman told my husband that if he didn’t sign the lease, my husband would become like a part owner of the drilling company and would incur expenses of drilling before receiving any royalties.
This sounds crazy, but it’s what the landman told us; he even sent us a copy of a letter to someone owning property in Louisiana (not Illinois) to present the idea. Also, I’ve heard from an attorney in Colorado that it is possible, but he’s not familiar with Illinois laws.
Can you help me with this? Have you heard this before? I haven’t had any luck in looking at the Illinois oil & gas regs.
A Chicago (where I grew up) attorney offered to check into it for $300-$400/hour; I’d have to sell my house to afford that. We’re contemplating the HORRIBLE idea of signing the lease and donating any royalties (expected to be very, very minimal – but even if they were huge) to fractivist organizations, including SAFE. Another HORRIBLE idea is to sell our house and try to hide the money if there’s any profit, rent an apartment, declare bankruptcy, and then sign the lease.
By the way, we’re so impressed with the SAFE newsletter, actions, number of volunteers, etc. Kudos! We wish you the very best – a statewide ban – of course!
A. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard yet. No, you do not become part owner of the drilling company just because you do not sign a lease, and it is legally impossible to “draft” someone into becoming part of any company; no, you do not incur expenses of drilling before receiving any royalties just because you do not sign the lease. Yes, it is a load of frack fluid.
The only grain of truth in it is, if you DO sign a lease expecting to receive royalties, and the lease says your royalty is computed at the well head, they get to deduct all kinds of expenses before computing the royalties.
I would doubt anything the landmen say; I would doubly doubt any copies of letters they say they sent, as this is easily faked; and I would especially doubt anything they say they sent to Louisiana, as Louisiana is under Neopolitan law, unlike the rest of the US, and their laws do not apply to us.
Cabot’s Methodology Links Tainted Water Wells to Gas Fracking – Bloomberg
Halliburton’s Radioactive Frack Rod Found Alongside Texas Highway After Going Missing
Holy frack that was close!
Public relations people and top-level executives at Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oilfield services companies, are likely breathing a sigh of relief after the oilfield services company found a radioactive rod that it lost last month, the Guardian reports. The seven-inch rod of americium-241/beryllium was found alongside a Texas highway some miles away from where it was being used to locate oil and gas deposits eligible for fracking.
Previously, members of the FBI, the Texas National Guard and Halliburton had been searching for the radioactive tool that is classified as a “category 3” source of radiation and could prove fatal if held for an extended period of time. It is the first incident of a lost radioactive tool of its kind in the past five years, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Bloomberg reports.
But radioactive materials sometimes do turn up in unexpected places. In 2010, Italy experienced the worst radiological incident in its history when a shipping container arrived in the port city of Genoa with unsafe levels of radiation, WIRED reports. The source turned out to be a radioactive rod not much larger than a pencil.
Still, concerns over safety violations are nothing new for Halliburton. The conglomerate once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney faced criticism for its role in BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill after reports emerged that it provided faulty cementing in constructing the well. More recently, critics have raised concerns over the effects its fracking fluid has on nearby drinking water, even prompting one executive to publicly drink Halliburton fluid to prove that its ingredients are benign .
Halliburton’s Radioactive Rod Found Alongside Texas Highway After Going Missing.
Italy earthquakes = FRACKING! Two DOZEN people dead in two weeks !! – YouTube
Two DOZEN people killed in since May 20, 2012 (the first large 6.0M+ at this location)…At the epicenter — drilling / pumping / fracking operation .
The days of denying — by so-called ‘professionals’ — are over. Coordinates for this recent 5.8M today (5/29/2012) from USGS:
44.814°N, 11.079°E
USGS stats: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usb000a1mn.php
download google earth for FREE here … http://earth.google.com
At least 15 people dead THIS time (5.8M on 5/29/2012)
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/29/world/europe/italy-earthquake/index.html
7 dead on May 20, 2012:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Emilia_earthquake
Category:
5/29/2012 — Italy earthquakes = FRACKING! Two DOZEN people dead in two weeks !! – YouTube.
#fracking #humaninducedearthquakes #Italy #Earthquakes #frackingandearthquakes
No fracking for ten years – says EU Commissioner for Energy – Local – Leitrim Obse
No fracking for ten years – says EU Commissioner for Energy – Local – Leitrim Observer.
Senator Paschal Mooney with EU Commissioner for Enerfy G�nther Oettinger.
Published on Saturday 29 September 2012 09:00
EU Commissioner for Energy Gúnther Oettinger has informed Drumshanbo Senator Paschal Mooney that no decisions should be taken on hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for ten years.
The Commissioners opinion was in response to a serious of questions from Senator Mooney at a meeting of Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport Energy and Communications which the Commissioner attended during his visit to Ireland last week.
In a series of questions submitted by Senator Mooney to the Commissioner about the EU Commissions Policy on fracking Commissioner Gúnther Oettinger replied that he believed no decisions should be taken until the environmental impact of fracking was established and that could take between five and ten years. He further informed Senator Mooney that he was already in discussions with scientists and those with technical expertise and has opened a dialogue with the Polish Government where fracking has already commenced. The Commissioner revealed that the extraction of shale gas could be chemical free in a number of years which is a major point of controversy and he intended visiting the United States next Spring to see at first-hand how shale gas is extracted.
“I welcome this recognition by EU Energy Commissioner of the sensitivities involved over this controversial process” stated Senator Mooney. “The Commissioner is obviously aware of the adverse environmental impact of current practices associated with the extraction of shale gas. The Commissioner is proceeding cautiously before coming to any conclusions. I am delighted that the person charged with Energy Policy in the European Union is consulting widely with the scientific technical and political community as part of an on-going process and I am now confident that the Energy Commissioner will not rush into a decisions that would harm the environment as a result of the fracking process” concluded the Leitrim Senator.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin MEP and Environment Committee member, Martina Anderson last week voted in the European Parliament against the exploration and extraction of shale gas.
Speaking from Brussels she welcomed the outcome of the vote. “Among the encouraging proposals voted by the Environment Committee are; mandatory environmental impact assessments for fracking projects, the exclusion of EU funding for the shale gas industry and the obligation for fracking companies to declare which chemicals are used in the fracking process.”
“Given the associated risks with the process used to extract shale gas known as hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’, it is baffling that a more robust system of regulation is not already in place. Local communities’ concerns regarding the environment and public health must outweigh any commercial and monetary incentives for large gas companies.”
“The very real and dangerous risks of water contamination and noise pollution from fracking have the potential to seriously damage both agriculture and tourism – two very important sectors of Ireland’s economy. Even before exploration of the gas begins an Environmental Impact Assessment should be an absolute necessity. There is too much at stake to continue with these risks.”
“Indeed, at a time when we are quickly heading towards a point-of-no-return with climate change and the environment, it seems that we’re missing the bigger picture. With an agreed upon need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is essential that we move away from the business-as-usual use of fossil fuels and towards renewable energies and a greener, safer and more sustainable economy.”
#FrackingChemicals #EuropeanUnionNoFracking #FrackingMoratorium #banfracking #media #EU #FrackingintheEuropeanUnion #moratorium
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