NEWSOIL & GAS

In the wake of Exxon Mobil's recent oil spill in Montana, it's now crystal clear (if it wasn't already) what a mistake the U.S. State Department would be making in approving the Keystone XL pipeline—a conduit that would carry Alberta's corrosive, carbon-heavy tar sands oil under the Yellowstone River and through America's heartland, in what remains today a poorly-regulated pipeline system.

Tens of thousands of Change.org members who took action to stop Keystone, through both the Sierra Club's and No Tar Sands Oil Coalition's actions, agree.

So do several Senators who sent a letter to the State Department on Friday. The letter, signed by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Ron Wyden (D- OR), Robert Menenedez (D-NJ), Frank Lautenberg (D NJ), and Ben Cardin (D-MD), called on the State Department to conduct additional environmental reviews. The EPA has already called the review thus far "insufficient," according to the Hill.  For example, the letter states that there was no consideration of an alternative route for the pipeline, one that would avoid a vast underground aquifer that supplies water to much of the Midwest.

For the last month, All Against the Haul has been running a campaign on Change.org to help them in their fight against Exxon's "megaloads" project. Read below for their reaction to the recent Exxon spill in Montana, and how their petition has gained momentum.

Nearly 6,000 people have signed the Change.org national petition and 2,000 people have signed All Against the Haul's long-running campaign.

MISSOULA, MT— As cleanup workers struggle to recover and clean ExxonMobil’s 42,000 gallon Yellowstone River slick, the oil company’s controversial bid to create a permanent industrial corridor through Montana and Idaho’s Highway 12 is drawing new fire from concerned citizens around the country joining local residents in their fight.

Highway 12 is one of only 120 National Scenic Byways, a windy mountain two-lane road passing through national forests and along Lewis and Clark’s historic route. Exxon is pressing forward with its “megaloads” program — a succession of hundreds of larger-than-life (three-story high, 200-foot long) trucks that carry refining equipment to Alberta that would help to increase America’s consumption of oil from Canada’s dirty tar sands fields. 

(Seeing is believing - click here for a video on Exxon's proposal, and here for pictures of what similar trucks look like).

I took my first trip to Yellowstone National Park last week, and it was spectacular. I’d been in the park for less than half an hour my first day when half a dozen of the country’s oldest and largest public bison herd merged with traffic and held our speed to 2.5 mph. I took pictures of a black bear up close, saw an elk sow while alone on a hidden lake hike, and saw—rather than read—the history of a still-active volcano.

One park ranger told us that she’d been in the park for 42 seasons, and each one was different than the last. This year what everyone noticed was the water levels – after a heavy snowpack and near-record spring rainfall, the Yellowstone Lake and Yellowstone River have been at or near flood stage for weeks. This made for some fun marina stories and gorgeously full waterfalls – but there’s a downside to the heavy rains, too, as the nation learned last week.

Thanks to these near-floods, ExxonMobil’s Silvertip pipeline spilled 42,000 gallons of oil into the river last week. Response teams haven’t been able to get close to the leak yet to give it a proper exam, but one theory is “that the flood scoured out the riverbed, laid bare the pipe, and exposed it to all manner of hurtling debris.” Residents in nearby towns were evacuated immediately, and the slick has since spread hundreds of miles to North Dakota. Cleanup will be delayed, thanks again to the flooding.

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.

Last month, the non-profit American Rivers announced its annual list of the country’s ten most endangered rivers, complete with ten Change.org petitions working to save each one. Less than three weeks later, that campaign is already making a difference.

American Rivers and other activists declared victory this week for the Chicago River, which had been number four on the list. The problem here was that Cook County was dumping 1.2 billion gallons of wastewater into the river every day. While reclaimed water is a good thing, refusing to sanitize it is not, and Chicago was the only city in the country to dump its wastewater without disinfecting it first.

But local officials were listening, and thanks in part to American Rivers, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago voted earlier this week to begin disinfecting the wastewater.

This is a huge step forward – but it’s not enough. From Alaska to Virginia, nine other rivers across still need our help. That’s nine sources of drinking water, recreation, and wildlife habitat.

Wenonah Hauter is Executive Director of Food & Water Watch

Energy industry executives and even some environmentalists are touting natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to our sustainable energy future. But hydrofracking, or fracking—the risky technology that has made once inaccessible deposits of natural gas accessible—puts our drinking water, local communities, and the environment at risk. Fracking is anything but sustainable, which is why we’re calling for a national ban.

The drilling technique involves injecting millions of gallons of fracking fluids — a mixture of nearly 600 chemicals, water and sand — into a gas well to create pressure that cracks open rocks underground, releasing natural gas.

The Marcellus Shale, which includes parts of Pennsylvania, New York, is a huge target for gas companies. But, unlike the gas sources energy companies have been extracting for years, the methane gas found in shale formations is, at best, difficult and risky to extract — even with Halliburton’s now well-known extraction methods. Conducting this business comes at a cost to public health and the environment due to the use of these dangerous chemicals.

I recently interviewed Zack Porter of All Against the Haul (AATH), a group of Montana organizers fighting against Big Oil’s “megaloads.” Porter and his colleagues are as talented and committed as they come, but alone, they stand no chance of defeating the world’s second largest corporation.

And that’s perfectly alright – because they’re not alone. AATH is just one of what Porter calls “an incredible assortment of groups, not just across this region but across the country” that have banded together to defeat ExxonMobil. This coalition includes National Forest supervisors, prominent Indian tribes, local authors and politicians, national environmental groups, and more - and they are winning.

The megaloads in question are 200 enormous trucks that haul foreign-made refining equipment through the northwest to the Alberta Tar Sands, one of the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel operations. When I say enormous, I mean three-stories tall, 200-feet long, and 650,000 pounds each. These megaloads are turning the Idaho and Montana portions of Highway 12 – a mountainous National Scenic Byway – into a permanent industrial corridor, cutting both National Forest trees and local electricity as they move. And all in the name of Exxon profits, global climate change, and Korean jobs.

Editor's Note: Below is a guest blog post written by Mike Gaworecki, a campaigner with Rainforest Action Network's "We Can Change Chevron" campaign and a former Change.org writer.

I’m standing up to Chevron.

Chevron was found guilty of deliberately dumping over 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadorean Amazon and ordered to pay $9 billion to clean it up. But the company has vowed never to pay.

When BP, a U.K.-based company, came to the U.S. and devastated the Gulf Coast, the company was forced to pay $20 billion to clean up and compensate the victims of its pollution. I think that when Chevron or any other American company goes to a foreign country and does the same thing, it’s incumbent upon us as Americans to hold that company to the same standard.

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.

“We are winning this campaign.”

These were not the words I was expecting to hear when I sat down with Zack Porter, campaign coordinator for All Against the Haul (AATH), at the Power Shift climate conference in Washington, DC last month. Porter and his team of Montana organizers are going to toe-toe with the second largest corporation in the world: Exxon Mobil. Their battle isn’t just David and Goliath; it’s David’s little brother and the guy who beat Goliath at his last wrestling match.

But Porter’s right – AATH and their allies across the northwest are winning this campaign.

At issue are Big Oil’s “megaloads” – over 200 trucks, three-stories high and 650,000 pounds each, transporting Korean-made oil equipment through rural communities and pristine National Forests to the Alberta Tar Sands. The megaloads have been on the road for less than three months but are wreaking havoc everywhere they go – cutting power to local towns, blocking traffic for hours at a time, putting the area’s rivers at risk (including the famous river that runs through it), and forcing forest supervisors to cut back trees on scenic byways.