NEWSAIR POLLUTION

America's early fracking frenzy has subsided into a rolling boil of controversy in states where the controversial natural gas drilling technique now threatens to expand its reach.

Seeing the disaster that fracking has become in places like Texas and Pennsylvania, citizens and environmentalists are pushing state legislatures and the U.S. Congress to stop it now. This doesn't mean wait-and-see. This doesn't mean letting drillers frack-up more rivers and aquifers, and then regulate later.

This means, Ban fracking now.

Food & Water Watch has launched a campaign on Change.org asking Congress to do just that. They are already gaining momentum around the country, and have released a report today making their case.

The group estimates that at least 55 localities across the U.S. have, over the past year, passed measures to stop fracking in their jurisdictions. Highland Park, a community in New Jersey, became the first town in the country to call for a state and national ban. Today, a number of state legislators in New Jersey joined this call. The latest locality to join to ban fracking is Morgantown, West Virginia, where a gas company had already placed a frack well near the community's water treatment plant and right near the Monongahela River.

When Peabody Energy, the world's largest private coal company, unveiled its new "Coal Cares" initiative this morning, the campaign immediately seemed too honest to be real.

Its goal? To 'end the stigma of childhood asthma' and 'asthma-related bullying' by giving away free inhalers to families near coal plants—a unsubtle acknowledgment of the deadly impacts of coal burning on our national public health. The free inhalers even came in Justin Bieber and Twilight themes.

Unsurprisingly, the press release and campaign website were soon revealed to be a hoax in the style of the Yes Men. The famous pranksters-in-the-name-of-progress actually worked with Coal Kills Kids, a newly-formed grassroots coalition, to develop the media campaign and unveil it today, the start of Asthma Awareness Month.

And awareness it definitely did raise, judging by the buzz the story has received this morning.

Recently, Washington's Gov. Gregoire formalized plans to phase out the state's only remaining coal-fired power plant by 2025.  Joining Oregon in its vision of a future without coal, the agreement sets the Pacific Northwest on the path to become the first coal-free region in the country.

This is great news for those concerned about clean air, healthy lungs, and the stability of the global climate system. But what if Washington is just exporting the world's coal problem to China?

This could be what happens if Peabody Coal gets it way. The largest coal company in the world is proposing to send coal through Washington and across the Pacific to booming markets in China and India. Its proposed giant export facility, the Gateway Pacific Terminal, would be built along Washington's scenic coastline and transport by rail 24 million tons/year of coal mined from Wyoming's Powder River Basin to the port.

Legislators across the country have plenty of reasons to be wary of a natural gas extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Use of the controversial procedure in places like Pennsylvania has produced a wide array of not-so-healthy-or-green results, from well explosions, to flaming tap water.

If fire-breathing faucets weren’t enough to raise a few lawmakers’ eyebrows, now there’s this bit of news: a Cornell University study has found that fracking is terrible for the climate. Indeed, while natural gas may burn more cleanly than coal, fracking actually renders it worse – by as much as 20 percent – in terms of overall climate warming effects, thanks to methane that escapes in the drilling process. That’s bad news for natural gas proponents who’ve been touting their product as a “cleaner" more “climate-friendly” alternative to dirty coal.

And this news makes it all the more unfortunate that the Maryland General Assembly failed to pass a vital piece of legislation called the Marcellus Shale Safe Drilling Act of 2011 during the recently ended legislative session. That bill would have helped protect western Maryland communities from the adverse health and environmental impacts of unsafe fracking by requiring gas developers to fund a two year safety study on the process before drilling could proceed.

Around this country, fracking has already destroyed thousands of water supplies, degraded air quality and ruined neighborhoods—a phenomenon made more widely-known recently by the outstanding but horrifying Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland. That's why the U.S. EPA has launched a two-year scientific study to, for the first time, officially evaulate the health and environmental risks of the "unconventional" yet highly controversial practice, which involves injecting billions of gallons of chemical-laden water through hard rock to extract natural gas.

Before states allow more fracking to go forward, wouldn't it make basic sense to let the EPA finish its study?

The Delaware Basin River Commission does not necessarily think so.

This obscure regulatory body is considering new regulations that would open up the watershed to gas drillers such as Halliburton and Chesapeake Energy, and allow them to go after the lucrative deposits underneath.

At a time when everything from family planning to National Public Radio is taking the rap for our deficit woes, a justice for the federal district court in Washington, D.C. has scored one point for rationality in his decision to question a controversial coal plant that recently won final approval in Kansas.

The coal plant in question is the Holcomb II addition, which for the past five years has been the source of a costly debate for the citizens of Kansas. At times the debate centered around the fact that the plant would not be, as the energy cooperative Sunflower Electric Corp. put it, the cleanest coal plant in the world. At other times the question was largely a practical one for Kansans, who would be exporting almost all of the energy the plant would produce while accepting almost all of the pollution. Justice Emmett Sullivan, it seems, could not ignore a third glaring weakness in the venture: the fact that the company planning the addition still owes the federal government at least $200 million.

Linda Tucker is a real Texan lady who won't take no for an answer.  She has a rare form of non-smoker's lung cancer, and she knows exactly why she has it.

She can see the conveyor belt for a ignite mine, the Monticello strip mine, from her home. She can see the toxic dust created from the strip mine accumulate on her car and on her windowsills.  And the Monticello coal-fired power plant that burns that lignite, one of the biggest industrial polluters in the state, is only about 45 minutes away from her home in Sulphur Springs, a town nestled in East Texas an hour to the east of Dallas.

Lignite is the lowest grade of coal, and burning it generally produces much higher rates of CO2. It's also a top offender when it comes to mercury: Monticello is the fifth largest emitter of mercury of all powerplants, nationwide.

Tucker called the TCEQ to ask them to check out the situation. A representative showed up while she was out of town, but, she states, "my husband took care of them. They tried to blame the dust on the roofing construction going on. My husband took care of that too. He show them the pink dust on the windowsill, etc."

The Arlington City Council has just rolled out the red carpet for Chesapeake Energy to drill a fracking gas well only a few thousand feet from the Dallas Cowboys football stadium.

In a meeting last week, officials approved one well after giving the gas drilling giant plenty of maneuvering room to work the application in their favor.

Kim Feil, who lives close to the site, had been using her campaign on Change.org as one tool to fight the application. Her brave and dogged work had gained the notice of area media and definitely caught the Arlington Mayor and City Council's attention. Nevertheless, in a city such as Arlington, where hundreds of wells have already been drilled and where gas companies have successfully portrayed drilling revenues as "the right" of property owners to collect, Feil was fighting an uphill battle.

Two decades in the making, the U.S. EPA has finally proposed to set tough new standards for mercury and other toxic air pollutants.  Heralded as the strongest health protection issued since the Clean Air Act, the new standards are already under attack by the industry who see the rules as another cost to cut their bottom line.

During the ongoing public comment period for the regulations, the regulations need support to show utility companies that health of people and the planet trump corporate profit.

Mercury is known to cause neurological damage in fetuses, leading to birth defects including mental retardation.  In adults, it can cause infertility, memory loss and blindness. Other toxic heavy metals addressed by the standards are known to cause cancer.  Plus, all these particulates eventually wind up in the environment, polluting land, lakes and sea.

The new reductions in heavy metals, including mercury, arsenic, chromium and nickel, are expected to lead to major health benefits such as preventing up to 17,000 premature deaths.  They are also estimated to decrease heart attacks  by 11,000, prevent more than 110,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms, and avert 850,000 emergency room visits—resulting in enormous cost savings that swamp the estimated $11 billion dollars it will cost the energy industry to meet new standards.  And, the new standards will also create jobs—an estimated 31,000 in short-term construction and 9,000 in long-term utility positions.

One of the great ironies of the national clean energy debate is that the current lack of a robust green-jobs sector is now often used as an excuse to block policies needed to grow it.

It’s a little bit like complaining that we shouldn’t waste water on a dry garden because the seeds haven’t sprouted yet.

Nevertheless, green jobs skepticism is now en vogue among some politicians, as has become clear in the debate over the Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2011. More than one member of the two General Assembly committees that may vote on the bill this week have expressed concerns that the thousands of promised offshore wind energy jobs could go to neighboring states, even as they suggested waiting and letting other states take the lead on developing the Mid-Atlantic offshore wind energy industry.

In other words, they're worried about entering the race for fear we might lose. How’s that for political leadership?