Steven Corso March 12, 2012
11863 Taylor Wells Rd
Chardon, OH 44024
To:
President Barack Obama Governor John Kasich
The White House Riffe Center, 30th Floor
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW 77 South High Street
Washington, DC 20500 Columbus, OH 43215-6117
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW 77 South High Street
Washington, DC 20500 Columbus, OH 43215-6117
Let me forge a connection as we three have something in common: We are all fathers of two girls.
I assume then that we also share similar hopes for our girls and their future. We each hope for the health and safety of two daughters as they grow into intelligent, independent women. We hope that the world they inherit will be one where a happy, healthy life will be likely. We hope that the country they grow up in will be a functional democracy, one in which they will know their basic interests are being considered, their values represented by elected officials, and their guaranteed rights respected and protected.
In fact, I'm sure we three do more than hope – we do and will do anything and everything we can to guarantee the best for our daughters.
However, my motivation for writing is that I am questioning my ability to keep safe and raise healthy girls. It's been difficult for me to have a genuinely positive outlook for my daughters' future because I find it difficult to even imagine an American political system that is of, by and for people – ordinary people like my daughters.
A little background on us: My family and I moved to northeast Ohio in the fall of 2010, after my wife and I both lost our high school teaching jobs in California. Our only employment opportunities came by way of three teaching offers for my wife – all in the Cleveland area. Since I had wanted to develop a market farm (and pawpaw orchard!), we saw the move across country as an opportunity for affordable land on which we, my wife and I, could give our girls (ages 4 and 8) a rural childhood and where I could pursue this new hobby-to-career path.
I first read about shale gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing in an article I found online (The Whole Fracking Enchilada by Sandra Steingraber) a few months after moving into our new house. This was also around the time that my cousin, who lives outside of Pittsburgh, conceded to paying hundreds of dollars to have her well water tested; she needed to establish a baseline of quality as new gas wells were being developed in her area. Then I opened my local newspaper to learn of the first deep shale gas well in my county and the “gas boom” that I was told would follow. In an attempt to educate myself I've done quite a lot of reading of scientific research papers and expert opinion, blogs from people in gas extraction areas (experts in their experiences), and legitimate journalism from the likes of ProPublica, the New York Times, and Scientific American. I've also watched uploaded videos of organized talks and those made by residents of gas drilling areas from the Rocky Mountains to the Mid-Atlantic states.
Now before you think this is just another hysterical complaint about fracking, let me say that it is, but it's also more than that.
It's true that I am beside myself in disbelief at what the gas industry expects to do: Take millions of gallons of drinkable water from municipal water supplies, aquifers, and streams and rivers; contaminate this water with tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals (some of which are toxins, carcinogens and endocrine disruptors); truck this water, chemicals and sand to a well pad in thousands of tanker trucks; pump the solution through the water table; capture and store much of this water when it comes back out with the natural gas – now the water contains heavy metals, high concentration of salts, and radioactive elements; truck it to where it needs to go and either pump it through the water table again and/or eventually dispose of this quantity of water in some as-of-yet unspecified manner. All the while generating hazardous air pollution and potent greenhouse gases and constant noise. And this will be happening in countless communities across the U.S. - multiply the above by 500,000 well pads in Eastern Shale Gas plays alone; 300 of these are planned for my county.
Yes I am incensed by the conclusion I've been led to by my research: That the gas industry is doing largely whatever it wants on an enormous geographic and human scale and yet the confidence it communicates to the public about its ability to extract this gas safely is grossly overstated if not completely unfounded.
Absolutely I am disturbed by the long-term ecological, financial, and human health costs that I now assume will be the burden of mainly rural Americans from this latest phase of fossil fuel extraction. That the research leading to the quantification of shale gas and the techniques of extraction were tax-payer funded – as you pointed out in your State of the Union, Mr. President - makes this last point all the more outrageous.
But I am also troubled by what this unfolding disaster says about the state of our democracy and political process.
The political watchdog organization Common Cause issued a report last year showing nearly $750 million in political contributions from the gas industry flooded the U.S. political system at the state and federal level over the first 10 years of the 21st century. During this time, the gas industry gained significant exemptions from the major clean water and air laws. Is there a cause-effect relationship here? It sure looks like it to this American citizen. The EPA has been criticized for a hasty claim of safety for the process of deep shale gas recovery that was based on a flawed paper published in 2004 – a green light for those exemptions that followed.
After years of citizen complaints and some solid data on water and air contamination – both from the EPA and independent labs – only now is the federal government thinking about stricter regulations for the industry – nearly a decade after the fracking booms out west and the establishment of a few thousand wells in the eastern states. And I must state that knowing what chemicals are being used in the process, while helpful in an accident, does not make them any less of a threat to public health.
For the most part, states were given authority to regulate fracking, despite the fact that national air and water resources – which cross state boundaries - were at stake. It seems to suit the gas industry just fine to have state control over drill permitting as demonstrated by the model bill produced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) entitled “Resolution to Retain State Authority over Hydraulic Fracturing”. I assume you are both familiar with ALEC.
Working in gas industry favor was the consolidation of control over drilling decisions by some states – removing the ability of local government, advised by input from residents, to determine appropriate drilling for their communities and landscapes. Ohio passed legislation giving the ODNR sole permitting power for gas wells in 2005. The ODNR, of course, collects fees from drilling permits but is geographically distant from where most drilling in the state will occur.
Pennsylvania's governor – a recipient of over $1.5 million in gas industry monies – tightened state control over drill permitting in mid-February. His comments about the bill were in line with fracking proponents – that in order for the gas industry to flourish it needed to be free from the tedium of dealing with local authorities – free from the heterogeneity of local values and local wishes.
My review of Ohio state regulations of shale gas extraction, compared to what I know of the entire process summarized above, leaves me completely convinced of the inability of my state's regulators to protect the environment or state residents. I have emailed my state legislators about some of the five bills related to fracking moratoriums and regulations in Ohio – all of which seem reasonable safeguards to me. I have not heard back but word is that these bills, stalled for months in committee, will be killed. Coincidentally the Republican leadership committees of the Ohio state legislative bodies have received hundred of thousands of dollars from the gas industry and many individual members of the legislature have received varying sums of their own.
Has the financial contamination of the political process trickled all the way down to the local level? I can't say but I'm suspect. Last month I scheduled a meeting with my Township Trustees to ask that they consider passing a resolution to ask the state for a moratorium on fracking. To my knowledge, this is about the only power available to local officials in Ohio. My trustees easily worked me into their regularly scheduled meeting but, as I spoke, the trustee who I had scheduled through seemed inpatient for me to finish. As I took my seat I was replaced by another man who, it turned out, was a gas industry spokesman from a couple of counties to our south. He was hosted by the same trustee with whom I had arranged my first ever exercise in local government. I had not been told of his slide show presentation in advance – which consisted of the typical industry spiel about jobs and a deceptive history of safe fracking. Is this democracy in action? My trustee apparently thought that balancing the concerns of one township resident with the interests of the entire gas industry amounted to fair representation.
Lease broker meetings are generally well attended in Geauga county and the education they provide is predictably skewed. That the community meetings put on by the Farm Bureau are also uncritical of the fracking process is more troubling because I fear these two types of meetings constitute the sole education of many lease-signers in my community. With the publication of a few legitimate studies on methane and frack chemical contamination of ground water and air pollution, I would expect some state or local government agency to reach out and inform the public of the associated risks that are known or suspected. Information on the ODNR website looks like it was written by the gas industry and given to the agency. My impression is that many of my neighbors are dismissive of the risks; they've heard again and again how safe it is.
The decision-making process that will shape the landscape and quality of life of my county and, therefore, the health and happiness of its residents – including my growing daughters - seems to be in the hands of local residents in a vacuum of meaningful government authority and without lively and informative town meeting debates. Instead we will each “vote” in our own strange and corrupted “democratic” process. The ballot of a “Yea” vote is a signed lease, which is rewarded with the delivery of a handsome check a few weeks later. A “Nay” vote is not accompanied by financial reward but will yield, for those who cast it, the same detriments that those who are inviting the industry into the county will experience, whether they know it or not.
It's the tragedy of the commons writ large, encompassing every quality my family loves about Geauga county – dark nights, fresh air, sounds of nature or no sounds at all, clean free ground water, open roads, scenic rural landscapes, and the value – both monetary and personal – of our 7 acres and home.
You both have publicly supported the expansion of the gas industry a number of times, including in your recent addresses to the nation and the state. You have both acknowledged that the extraction of shale gas has to be done “responsibly” - a description I now believe is incompatible with the extreme nature of the fracking process. Will I ever tell my daughter that she should drive-while-texting responsibly? Some things just don't go together.
Will gas extraction be a godsend for local economies and the nation as a whole in hind sight when we're building new water treatment plants and delivery pipelines, assessing the health care cost associated with the industrialization of rural communities, and adding decades-worth of new “clean up” projects for our nations water ways?
Let's not wait for hind sight. The education I've given myself, while never complete, has yielded the answers already I fear.
For me, there has been a bright side to the threat posed by fracking – I have finally become a more fully-engaged American citizen, aware of avenues of information that I was not previously privy to. If I had continued to live far away from where the gas boom is happening, my awareness of fracking would have been short-lived, quickly being shelved away with other abstract outrages I've considered too overwhelming and distant for me to do anything about. And while I would have been able to say at any point in my adult life that money corrupts our political process, seeing it in action has been a dismal eye-opener.
But instead, I've been busy. I've involved myself in a local group of concerned citizens; I've written politicians asking for legislation to protect my family; I've written several published letters and articles to local newspapers; I prepared and presented a Power Point to locals in the county on what I've learned that is of concern.
Despite my engagement, I am not at all convinced that reason and precaution will triumph over gas industry profit motives. I am convinced however, that as a nation, we will never be able to overcome our challenges with such pervasive corruption of the political system. The rhetoric I hear about Big Government as the problem might not ring true for so many people in this country if it was more obvious that the government was doing the will of the people rather than the will of monied interests; if pointing the finger of blame at government was more akin to pointing at ourselves.
Until that day comes, I will do what I can to preserve my family's version of the American dream. What would you both do in my place? If you felt like the system was ignoring the well-being of vast numbers of American citizens, including some you know and love? Your girls will not likely come to know a gas well being drilled or a compressor station being installed in their back yard, but the benefits of re-thinking this latest energy boom, and seriously getting to work on other solutions to our energy needs, will be in their best long-term interests too. So will restoring real democracy in this country.
I've wondered if I will ever feel the need to resort to non-violent civil disobedience - the kind this country has turned to numerous times in its history of finding itself. Will I stand in front of tanker trucks full of unknown chemicals to make my point? I'd prefer sensible leadership from my state and federal governments. I'd prefer my elected officials represent what's best for people and the nation's long-term future. I'd prefer to work on my little farm and enjoy life in Geauga county without having to worry that it'll all be pulled out from under us.
Plus my wife thinks I'll look ridiculous standing in front of a tanker truck.
But if it comes down to it, I may just have to come up with a sign to hold up high in necessary defiance. Perhaps it'll say:
"I shall resist fracking tyranny to the uttermost."
Wouldn't you do the same for your girls?
Yours with an ounce of hope,
Steven Corso
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