Sunday, March 1, 2015

No wonder Hackbarth reopened this issue for an industry whineathon

No wonder Hackbarth reopened this issue for an industry whineathon about regulations in his Mining and Outdoor Wrecks Committee without asking citizen groups as well.  See more in Mining & Outdoor Wrecks Committee: Hackbarth's frac sand industry showcase.
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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Stand Up for Environmental Review & Citizen Input on Jan. 29



On Friday, January 23, 2015 10:46 AM, Bobby King (LSP) <bking@landstewardshipproject.org> wrote:

 
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LSP Action Alert

Stand Up for Environmental Review & Citizen Input on Jan. 29

Plan to Attend Senate Environment Policy Committee Hearing Thurs., Jan. 29, at Noon, on the Importance of Environmental Review & Citizen Input

A recent decision by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Citizens' Board to order a much needed in-depth environmental review of an 8,850 cow mega-dairy has corporate ag interests out to gut environmental review and citizen input. (More details below.) Rather than let corporate interests set the agenda, Senator John Marty, Chair of the Senate Environment Policy Committee, is holding a hearing on the POSITIVE impacts of environmental review and citizen input in that process. The fact is that Minnesota is a better place to live because of policies that allow citizens to have a voice in decisions that will impact their community and that assess how potential environmental harm can be avoided BEFORE a project is permitted.
LSP dairy farmer-member James Kanne of Renville County will be testifying on why family farms and rural Minnesota are better off when we require large-scale factory farms to fully disclose the potential harm to the community through environmental review.   
Take Action to support strengthening environmental review in Minnesota and citizen input in the process.
1. Attend the Senate Environment Policy hearing Jan. 29, from noon to 1:30 p.m., in Room 107 of the State Capitol.
If you plan to attend, let Bobby King at LSP know at bking@landstewardshipproject.org or 612-722-6377. If you need a ride, we have a car coming up from southeast Minnesota and are arranging for carpooling in other parts of the state. If you do plan to attend, remember that there is extensive construction going on at the State Capitol and give yourself extra time to find parking. Parking information is here.
Can’t attend but want to watch? You can watch the hearing online here.
2. Contact members of the Senate Environment Policy Committee and let them know you think environmental review and citizen input make Minnesota strong and a great place to live and do business.
Suggested message: “As a member of the Senate Environment Policy Committee, you will be hearing about environmental review and citizen participation in the process at your Jan. 29 meeting. Minnesotans know that economic development does not have to come at the expense of our environment and that citizen input into major developments that will impact their community for decades to come is a good thing. This is what environmental review does. It assesses what the potential harm is up-front before permitting begins. This makes sense and I strongly support policies like these. Corporate ag interests want environmental review weakened because the MPCA Citizens’ Board made the right decision to order an Environmental Impact Statement on a proposed 8,000 cow mega-dairy. It would be wrong to weaken this bedrock environmental protection for corporate special interests.”
MORE DETAILS:
• The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Citizens’ Board ordered an Environmental Impact Statement on an 8,850 cow mega-dairy in Stevens County. Each year this operation would have used over 100 million gallons of water and generated over 75 million gallons of liquid manure. Neighbors wanted a complete assessment of the impacts to their community before it was permitted. This proposal was massive and would have been the largest dairy in Minnesota where 92 percent of all dairy farms are under 200 cows. The MPCA Citizens’ Board listened and made the appropriate decision to order an in-depth environmental review. The response from corporate ag interests has been to push for weakening environmental review, including the extreme proposal of eliminating the MPCA Citizens’ Board. More details are in the LSP blog: LSP Applauds MPCA Citizens’ Board Ordering of EIS on Massive Dairy Factory Farm.
• How many and how large are dairy farms in Minnesota? There are 3,422 dairy farms in Minnesota. The average dairy herd size is 105 cows. The median herd size is 60. Ninety-two percent of all dairy farmers are 200 cows or under. Only 30 dairy farms (less than 1 percent) are over 1,000 cows.
• Read the commentary from Rep. David Bly which is currently running throughout rural Minnesota: Family farmers are 'real ag' and key to rural Minnesota’s future


thedatabank, inc.










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Here's what transpired at the House Mining & Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee meeting yesterday

Check out this website for an article about the frac sand proceedings in St. Paul yesterday.  See especially Lynn Schoen's three minutes of testimony:

http://theuptake.org/2015/01/27/mn-towns-ignored-in-frac-sand-mining-debate-says-wabasha-city-council-member/

Then read Katie Himanga's excellent summary below...Jeanne

"Here's what transpired at the House Mining & Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee meeting yesterday:

Industry representatives included CEOs, attorneys, Presidents and the like from Minnesota's largest companies. Several stated how pleased they were to be INVITED to testify at the hearing. Many, perhaps all, had prepared statements that they read into the record.

Several legislatures used time for questions to make effusive statements of support for the industries represented rather than ask a questionSome made statements (generally couched as questions) that reflect a lack of understanding of SE Minnesota geology, misinformation about the Silica Rule-Making Advisory Panel and, more than anything, bias in favor of industry.

Unimen paid Dr. John Richard, PhD, PE, QSTI Air Control Techniques of North Carolina to come to to the hearing (they had secured a slot on the agenda for him) and testify about air emissions. One legislator was informed enough to ask about the smallest particle sizes. Dr. Richard's had to shorten his presentation because other speakers had run long
Agency professionals from the EQB and PCA gave updates on the Rule-Making process. The DNR was asked to come back to another meeting due to time constraints

As a result of citizen complaints to the Committee, a few minutes were added to the meeting and citizens allowed to speak. Speakers from our area were Amy Nelson, Lynn Schoen and me. Amy and Lynn addressed the inappropriateness of a hearing on this subject with no time scheduled for citizen or local government input. I addressed reclamation.
The Chairperson made a point of mentioning that the Land Stewardship Project was invited to speak but had declined (they'd been told they could speak for 2 minutes during citizen input which is much different that equal-time-for-citizens that LSP requested)

My impression: the "informational meeting" was for the purpose of grooming legislators; preparing them to discredit the work of the Silica Rule-Making Advisory Panel, fight the adoption of Rules, continue with industry status quo and still be able to sleep at night.

Industry representatives have been respectful participants in the rule-making process, but I cannot imagine that they plan to do anything other than fight tooth-and-nail against adoption.

Katie"
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Tuesday, January 27, 2015

hearing that shuts out the voices of these rural Minnesotans while giving time to industry lobbyists is undemocratic and unfair.

Hi folks,
 
Rochester Post-Bulletin reporter Heather Carlson wrote a good blog post on tomorrow's events. It's here: http://postbulletin.typepad.com/political_party/2015/01/frac-sand-mining-opponents-want-house-hearing-cancelled.html
 
If you're so inclined, please considering leaving your own thoughts in the comments on the post, and/or sharing the post on social media. Heather told me she also plans to be there to cover the hearing tomorrow.
 
Johanna
 
Johanna Rupprecht
Policy Organizer
Land Stewardship Project
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
 
Representative Hackbarth, Chair
Mining and Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55155
 
January 23, 2015
 
Dear Representative Hackbarth:
 
The Mining and Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee has an informational hearing on the frac sand industry scheduled for Tuesday, January 27. It is clear from the meeting announcement that representatives of the frac sand industry will be given ample time to testify while no time at all is scheduled for citizens. Rural Minnesotans throughout southeast Minnesota and the Minnesota River Valley have made it clear that they are deeply concerned about this issue and want their voices heard.A hearing that shuts out the voices of these rural Minnesotans while giving time to industry lobbyists is undemocratic and unfair.
 
Therefore, we request that Tuesday’s hearing be re-scheduled for a future date, at which time the speaking time provided to citizens will be at least equal to that provided to corporate interests. If the January 27 hearing does take place, we request you hold a second hearing devoted to citizen testimony with sufficient advance notice for rural Minnesotans to participate.
 
Sincerely,
 
Johanna Rupprecht
Policy Organizer
Land Stewardship Project
Lewiston, MN
507-523-3366
 
Margaret Walsh
LSP Member
Winona, MN
 
Bonita Underbakke
LSP Member
Lanesboro, MN
 
Marilyn Frauenkron Bayer
LSP Member
Houston, MN
 
cc: Rep. Kurt Daudt, Speaker of the House; Members of the Mining and Outdoor Recreation Policy Committee


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Sunday, December 28, 2014

Everything's Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart

The Climate for 2015 
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed 1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over again.
In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the course of a speech she gave while accepting a book award she noted, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. It’s popular to say that the experiment failed, but that’s too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere).
Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).

How to Topple a Giant
To use Le Guin’s language, physics is inevitable: if you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet warms, and as the planet warms, various kinds of chaos and ruin are let loose. Politics, on the other hand, is not inevitable. For example, not so many years ago it would have seemed inevitable that Chevron, currently the third biggest corporation in the country, would run the refinery town of Richmond, California, as its own private fiefdom. You could say that the divine right of Chevron seemed like a given. Except that people in Richmond refused to accept it and so this town of 107,000 mostly poor nonwhites pushed back.

In recent years, a group of progressives won election to the city council and the mayor’s seat, despite huge expenditures by Chevron, the corporation that also brought you gigantic oil spills onshore in Ecuador and offshore in Brazil, massive contamination from half a century of oil extraction in Nigeria, and Canadian tar-sands bitumen sent by rail to the Richmond refinery. Mayor Gayle McLaughin and her cohorts organized a little revolution in a town that had mostly been famous for its crime rate and for Chevron’s toxic refinery emissions, which periodically create emergencies, sometimes requiring everyone to take shelter (and pretend that they are not being poisoned indoors), sometimes said -- by Chevron -- to be harmless, as with last Thursday's flames that lit up the sky, visible as far away as Oakland.  

As McLaughin put it of her era as mayor:
“We’ve accomplished so much, including breathing better air, reducing the pollution, and building a cleaner environment and cleaner jobs, and reducing our crime rate. Our homicide number is the lowest in 33 years and we became a leading city in the Bay Area for solar installed per capita. We’re a sanctuary city. And we’re defending our homeowners to prevent foreclosures and evictions. And we also got Chevron to pay $114 million extra dollars in taxes.”

For this November’s election, the second-largest oil company on Earth officially spent $3.1 million to defeat McLaughin and other progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That sum worked out to about $180 per Richmond voter, but my brother David, who’s long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that, if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local politics, it might be roughly ten times that.
Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites, and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign can come up with, won.

If a small coalition like that can win locally against a corporation that had revenues of $228.9 billion in 2013, imagine what a large global coalition could do against the fossil-fuel giants. It wasn’t easy in Richmond and it won’t be easy on the largest scale either, but it’s not impossible. The Richmond progressives won by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life. They showed up to do the work to dent that inevitability. The billionaires and fossil fuel corporations are intensely engaged in politics all the time, everywhere, and they count on us to stay on the sidelines. If you look at their response to various movements, you can see that they fear the moment we wake up, show up, and exercise our power to counter theirs.  

That power operated on a larger scale last week, when local activists and public health professionals applied sufficient pressure to get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign legislation banning fracking statewide. Until the news broke on December 17th, the outcome had seemed uncertain. It’s a landmark, a watershed decision: a state has decided that its considerable reserves of fossil fuel will not be extracted for the foreseeable future, that other things -- the health of its people, the purity of its water -- matter more. And once again, the power of citizens turned out to be greater than that of industry.

Just a few days before the huge victory in New York, the nations of the world ended their most recent talks in Lima, Peru, about a global climate treaty -- and they actually reached a tentative deal, one that for the first time asks all nations, not just the developed ones, to reduce emissions. The agreement has to get better -- to do more, demand more of every nation -- by the global climate summit in Paris in December of 2015.  

It’s hard to see how we’ll get there from here, but easy to see that activists and citizens will have to push their nations hard. We need to end the age of fossil fuels the way the French ended the age of absolute monarchy. As New York State and the town of Richmond just demonstrated, what is possible has been changing rapidly. 
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Friday, October 10, 2014

Tell Gov. Dayton We Need Tough Frac Sand Restrictions

Tell Gov. Dayton We Need Tough Frac Sand Restrictions

Despite 2013 state legislation directing Minnesota agencies to create air quality standards and improve environmental review for frac sand facilities, the regulations are yet to be established. And we do not have a clear commitment from Governor Mark Dayton that these rules will be tough and put health, safety and rural communities before frac sand mining interests. This is a critical time to ramp up our efforts to demand that Gov. Dayton uses his authority to create stringent frac sand regulations.

Contact Gov. Dayton today at 651-201-3400 or 800-657-3717 and deliver the message that we need him "all in" when it comes to protecting Minnesota from the frac sand industry.

 For more information, see LSP's Frac Sand Organizing web page or contact LSP's Bobby King by calling him at 612-722-6377 or sending an e-mail.
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Sunday, September 28, 2014

Evidence Mounts of Hidden Fracking Hazards

Published on Frday, September 26, 2014 by Common Dreams

Evidence Mounts of Hidden Fracking Hazards

"We need strong state action to protect the public health from yet another troubling side effect of the unprecedented wave of shale gas development," environmentalist warns
byDeirdre Fulton, staff writer
A web of roads, pipelines, and fracking wells. (Photo: Simon Fraser University/flickr/cc)
A major report released Thursday exposes a hidden hazard of fracking: the mining of the special sand—known as 'frac sand,' for short—that is essential to the practice.
Frac sand mining uses significant volumes of groundwater, contributes to air pollution, and has negative socio-economic impacts, according to "Communities At Risk: Frac Sand Mining in the Upper Midwest" (pdf), produced by the the Civil Society Institute's Boston Action Research project in cooperation with Environmental Working Group (EWG) and Midwest Environmental Advocates (MEA).

Analysts estimate that fracking operations will use 95 billion pounds of sand this year, up 30 percent from last year and 50 percent higher than initial forecasts. The sand, which must be uniform in shape and the grains able to withstand enormous pressures at great depth underground, is currently mined most heavily in Wisconsin and Minnesota, though the report identifies sand deposits in 12 others states (including New York, North Carolina, Maine, and Virginia) that could be affected as fracking demand grows. Wisconsin alone is on track to extract 50 million tons of frac sand a year—the equivalent of 9,000 semi-truck loads a day.
"Citizens living near frac sand mining in Wisconsin are witnessing a massive destruction of their rural landscape."
—Kimberlee Wright, Midwest Environmental Advocates

The mining process, which involves blasting off the soil, rock, and vegetation above a sand deposit, then washing, drying, and storing the excavated sand, uses between 420 thousand and 2 million gallons of water per day, according to the report, potentially drawing down groundwater supplies. In addition, the use of added chemicals when processing the sand could lead to contaminated run-off in nearby streams and wetlands.

 Even more troubling is the release of fine particulate matter, such as silica dust, at mining sites and in the surrounding areas. Frac sand mining produces "very small and very dangerous dust particles," the report reads, which have been linked to respiratory infections, lung cancer, and cardiovascular disease. While air samples have shown particle pollution around mining sites exceeds safe levels, there is little regulation of these emissions. "[M]onitoring of this rapidly expanding industry has been outpaced by the rate of development," the authors note.

"None of the states at the center of the current frac sand mining boom have adopted air quality standards for silica that will adequately protect the tens of thousands of people living or working near the scores of recently opened or proposed mining sites," said EWG's executive director Heather White. "EWG's mapping research found frac sand sites in close proximity to schools, hospitals and clinics, where children and patients may be exposed to airborne silica. Chronic exposure can lead to emphysema and lung disease. We need strong state action to protect the public health from yet another troubling side effect of the unprecedented wave of shale gas development."

Other economic impacts are harder to measure but no less important to consider. The report raises questions about how frac sand mining operations affect property values, infrastructure costs, and demands on health care providers, cautioning towns and local communities to "exercise precaution" when evaluating potential sites in their region.

"Citizens living near frac sand mining in Wisconsin are witnessing a massive destruction of their rural landscape," said MEA executive director Kimberlee Wright. "Elected officials and our states' natural resources protection agency have largely dismissed local citizens' concerns about their health, the health of their environment and their quality of life. Without a clearer view of the big picture of frac sand mining's impact, laws that protect our communities' air and water aren't being developed or enforced."

The other end of the shale gas extraction cycle is no less toxic. A separate peer-reviewed study, published earlier this week in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology, suggests fracking wastewater can endanger drinking water even after it has passed through treatment plants and been diluted.
According to UPI:
Most fracking operations store their wastewater in holding ponds. Eventually, that water is filtered through municipal or commercial treatment plants and emptied into rivers, lakes and ponds.
But new research suggests that wastewater contaminants, when subjected to traditional treatment methods like chlorination or ozonation, encourage toxic byproducts.
Researchers with the American Chemical Society found that even extremely diluted wastewater can still produce these byproducts during the treatment process. Scientists say their findings suggest regulators and energy officials should be more careful about which surface waters treated wastewater is emptied into.
The scientists and engineers from Duke and Stanford Universities used water samples from Pennsylvania and Arkansas frack sites.

 “The drinking water facilities should be aware of this,” said Bill Mitch, a lead author on the study and an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. “You need a lot of dilution to make these discharges no longer matter.”

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