NEWSBYKEITH HARRINGTON

It seems the news just keeps getting worse these days for those in the Marcellus Shale gas-fracking business. First there was the damning new Cornell University study which revealed the worse-than-coal climate impacts of the natural gas drilling procedure. Then, the Chesapeake Energy Corporation experienced the mother of all bad press days when one of its Pennsylvania wells experienced a massive blowout, spewing thousands of gallons of frack fluid into a nearby stream. In a poetic touch, the blow-out occurred on the one-year anniversary of the gulf oil spill.

While nowhere near the scale of the BP blowout, the Chesapeake Energy frack-up certainly echoed the massive gulf disaster in terms of the outrageous incompetence and recklessness of the well’s owners.

According to a Pro-Publica article it took the company a full 13 hours to respond to the accident. The reason for the egregious delay: despite widespread fracking activity in the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale, the state did not have a single team of specially trained fracking accident responders, and instead had to fly in workers from Texas. In the end, thanks to the holdup, it took no less than two days from the time of the accident before workers managed to cap the spill.

In the tragic aftermath of last April’s catastrophic BP oil spill, advocates of a sane national energy policy could take hope that the days of reckless calls for expanded offshore oil drilling might soon be a thing of the past. Against the horrendous images and stories emerging from the Gulf, it became hard to justify the expansion of an industry that was already too big to regulate, and the ranks offshore-drilling-friendly politicians started to thin a little. Indeed, just months after a decision to end a long-standing moratorium on drilling in certain coastal areas, the Obama administration reversed itself and has yet to look back.

Unfortunately, it now appears that the political class's stances on offshore oil drilling can be as vulnerable to oil-price volatility as consumers’ pocketbooks, and there are signs that whatever sanity had crept into the political sphere vis-à-vis offshore drilling may have started a gradual retreat.

Just when you thought the disaster in Japan might help put the breaks on dangerous nuclear projects in the States, it turns out a little-known oversight panel has approved what one spokesperson has called “a major milestone” for the U.S. nuclear industry.

If a decision rendered in January by the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission is allowed to stand, 36 states could soon start transporting nuclear waste across the country to a permanent storage site in Andrews County, west Texas. Sources close to the case also report that waste could be shipped to the dump from overseas as well.

Though the site will be used to store only low-level radioactive wastes, groups including the Texas office of Public Citizen and the Sierra Club warn of a serious contamination threat to the Ogallala Aquifer – the largest freshwater aquifer in the country – which lies dangerously close to the site. In the wake of the decision, these community advocacy groups have launched a campaign to challenge the decision via an array of legislative, legal and administrative pathways.

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.

Some political traditions are hard to take issue with. A few examples might include the State of the Union Address (most of the time) or the presidential turkey pardoning. Of course there are many, many others that most of us would probably rather see scrapped. In the Maryland General Assembly one such highly dispensable tradition is the tendency to take at least two years to pass vital, transformative clean-energy legislation like Governor Martin O’Malley’s Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2011.

That bill, which would have initiated a process to construct a 400 – 600MW wind farm about ten miles off of the coast of Ocean City, stalled in the General Assembly late last week after months of productive debate and relentless pressure for passage from citizens across the state. Advocates for the bill had done their homework for those debates, and came armed with numerous studies on Maryland offshore wind energy and detailed answers for essentially any major question or concern legislators could raise. Still, that apparently just wasn’t thorough enough for some lawmakers who decided to shelve the measure for reconsideration next year, citing the need for “further study”.

It’s unclear what additional evidence legislators could need regarding the bill’s potential benefits to Maryland. After all advocates had supplied very convincing data to show that the bill would create thousands of manufacturing jobs for Maryland workers, cut global warming and other air pollution, and provide stable, reliable energy prices for over two decades. And as if that wasn’t sufficient, the bill included an escape clause which would have allowed state officials to throw out any proposals from wind developers that could not reasonably ensure such benefits to Marylanders.

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?

Fear and money, as these past few years of recession have made abundantly clear, are two very powerful political forces especially when combined. And as we’re seeing right now in places like Wisconsin, powerful political and corporate players are hard at work exploiting fears over money to advance their political agendas. It’s the worst form of cynical political ploys – a stratagem that attacks vital public services in the name of public service, and that ultimately only serves private moneyed interests.

And it’s a stratagem that was on full display by critics and opponents of Governor Martin O’Malley’s Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act at the bill’s first hearing in the the state's General Assembly this past Thursday.

Undoubtedly stoked by somewhat misleading media reportage about the costs of the legislation for Maryland electric rate payers, certain members of the House Economic Matters Committee set the tone for the hearing by showering the Governor and his administration officials with questions about how the bill would affect their constituents’ pocketbooks.

Golden Agri Resources’ recent move to stop swapping rainforests and peat land for palm plantations was a landmark achievement in efforts to curb the palm oil industry's environmentally-destructive reputation. And if a recent paper by the free-market, libertarian think tank the Adam Smith Institute is any indication, it’s clear that the move has sent more than a few ripples through the ranks of industry apologists.

The ASI paper blames the ‘environmental lobby’ for distorting the truth about the palm-oil business in Southeast Asia. Among the ‘distortions’ cited in the report is the well-founded fact that the deforestation and other land use changes associated with palm growing are contributing to climate change. Indeed, the authors went so far as to assert that palm plantations actually help mitigate climate change. They also attacked conservationists’ concerns about the destruction of orangutan habitat, characterizing them as “a cynical device” that could “have profoundly negative consequences for people trying to work their way out of poverty.”

Pennsylvania is one among several states whose residents have experienced the painful costs of a reckless rush to exploit natural gas reserves through the controversial drilling process called hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”. The residents of western Maryland have so far been spared those costs, such as flaming tap water, but with the region straddling a prime area of the Marcellus Shale gas reserves, that could soon change.

That is of course unless Delegate Heather Mizeur and Senator Brian Frosh have anything to say about it.

Mizeur and Frosh are currently leading the charge in the Maryland General Assembly to pass the Marcellus Shale Safe Drilling Act of 2011 – a bill designed to ensure that any drilling that occurs in the Marcellus Shale is done in an environmentally- and socially responsible way.

If President Obama is right and the U.S. is facing a new “Sputnik Moment”, we shouldn’t have to look too hard to find examples of foreign countries rocketing past us with the new competitive technologies of the 21^st century. Not hard at all. In fact, when it comes to the technology sector at the top of the President’s list— clean energy—the examples are practically falling in our laps.

The situation we’re facing today on the clean-energy front is something like what it would have been like if over a dozen countries launched satellites into orbit before us in 1959. It’s more like a “Sputnik-times-ten Moment.”

Just take Europe, for example. When it comes to offshore wind energy they have a nearly two decade lead on us with well over 38 operational farms, totaling more than 2,000 megawatts of installed generating capacity, and many thousands more in the pipeline. Just this past week the French government announced plans to seek proposals from wind developers to install 3,000 megawatts of wind energy along its coasts.