Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
I spoke last night in rural, “red county” far western mountain Maryland. It was at a public hearing held to consider Republican Governor Larry Hogan’s new rules that will allegedly protect us from the unavoidable ravages of fracking, and was held at Garrett College, the Maryland Department of Environment presiding. Maryland has a temporary legislative moratorium on drilling, chiefly aimed at the two counties that are underlain by the Marcellus Shale formation, Allegany and Garrett, and these new regulations were developed to replace the supposedly “gold" standard ones left by outgoing Democratic Governor Martin O’ Malley, and must be in place by October 1, 2017. However, all present clearly understood that the actual political dynamics will now center on legislative efforts to ban fracking entirely in Maryland, and a number of speakers pointed out that there were other jurisdictions in Maryland which have shale gas pockets in different geological formations. So the stakes will be high.
The turnout was large and loud, but not out of bounds, some 150-200 people, filling the auditorium. I would say 80-90% attending were opposed to fracking and skeptical that these weakened, more “flexible” regulations would be effective — or that even the best intended and toughest regulations can be effective, given the 24/7 all-out industrial nature of the fracking process.
As if often the case at this type of public hearing, slated to run from 6:00-8:00 PM, with 50-60 people signed up to speak, a two minute time limit was slapped on the citizens, driving up the frustration level — on opinionated citizens with a lot to say, with hundreds of pages of regulatory complexity and sophisticated political maneuverings to unravel. So the mood turned informed populist, I would say, with more than a touch of anger with a process that has gone through Commissions, two rounds of regulations and an already monumental legislative struggle to get the current moratorium. Yet these emotions seemed fitting given the background of the populist revolt in both major parties, and now the upheaval against the Neoliberal governance of the European Union - and the British revolt.
This was my second public hearing in seven days, having spoken, unrehearsed, at the first one held last Wednesday at Allegany Community College, which was also well attended, filling the large classroom forum with about 60 people, also mostly all opposed to fracking. For last night’s hearing, I had formalized my previous comments, coming out at about 1,000 words, three pages, and intending to say something direct about the incongruous nature of these proceedings under anti-regulatory, anti-spending Governor Hogan, a Governor whose popularity rating is in the 70% range, deterring, for now, a “contemplating" Congressman named John Delaney from a potential challenge.
And of course, I intended to frame my comments so that these heavily Republican counties could hear, for once, unfiltered, an entirely different set of assumptions about regulatory and economic matters. And that’s because the local newspapers, The Republican, in Garrett County and the CumberlandTimes-News, covering the Potomac Highlands in MD and WVA, are heavily slanted to the Republican Right, although they will print dissenting letters to the editor from time-to-time. And of course, the radio air waves are dominated by the Right, all day, every day. Despite that, Bernie Sanders carried both counties in the April Democratic Party primary.
Before leaving you with the very slightly edited text of my 1,000 word formal speech, which I had to cut to barely a page and a half under the 2 minute gun last night, hardly enough time to fully shape what I had intended to say, I wanted to share some of my background thoughts over the past week.
The Maryland revolt against fracking has been led, its emotionally intense core, comes from those residents of the two western Maryland counties who have developed green leaning businesses or bought farms or retirement properties in the Deep Creek Lake area. I suspect quite a few are Libertarians at least, and many are long-time Republican voters. Everyone got a lesson in Neoliberalism’s reach, however, as they have learned that both liberal Martin O’Malley and conservative Larry Hogan each support fracking with varying degrees of regulation. The revolt against fracking has posed the greater problems, however, for the Republican Party in the state, because it is confronted by a deep split in its core constituency: business. That’s something the leadership ignores at its peril. Meanwhile, the Democrats have learned from the national curve that is turning against natural gas, and fracking, as the so called “Bridge to the Future,” the future being alternative energy. I address the evolution of the greens in the natural gas story in my formal comments.
But what I wanted to share most with readers here at the Kos were my thoughts on driving the 32 miles west and then south from my home in Frostburg, MD to the hearing site. Five miles from home on U.S. 68, I see the sign that says I’m entering Garrett County; another tells me I have crossed the Eastern Continental Divide, the watershed line which delineates which waters flow East to the Atlantic, and which flow west to the Mississippi and then to the Gulf of Mexico — or perhaps north to the Great Lakes in some cases. It always surprises me when I encounter this Divide so far east of the “Father of Waters.” Another sign notes Big Savage Mountain, 2860 feet high, and I recall reading of the labors and groans of Coxey’s Army of economic protestors struggling to climb it up the slope of Route 40, the Old National Road, heading east in the spring of 1894 to petition Congress for public jobs to fight the horrendous unemployment levels in the wake of the great financial panic of 1893. That was at a time in the nation’s political economy when government intervention into the economy, much less the sacred labor market, was unheard of, unthinkable, unless one had read a lot of Thomas Paine and had a very good memory — a century long memory, in fact. And the Neoliberal stances of both parties have brought us back to those “liberal” (read conservative laissez-faire) 19th century economic “commandments,” the same ones that dictate that German Banker minds cannot approve of a New Deal for Greece — the proposal which Yanis Varoufakis has advocated, and still is pushing in his attempts to “Democratize" Europe with his DiEM25 movement.
Forgive me here: I should mention that every time I pass that Continental Divide sign, I start to think in large terms, continental terms, and beyond: there is something stirring about the very words, and you begin to think of the great Western push out of the seaboard in the 18th century, and the costs of it, the "Last of the Mohicans." And I begin to think about the coming election and what is at stake.
And then I’m heading south on a state road, MD-Route 495, and I’m in the local world, heading steeply downhill for about a mile, with curves bending back against themselves. It’s a state road, but it is only two lanes, and there are long stretches of guardrails to warn of the nature of the rugged, mountainous terrain all around you. The speed limit is 50 miles per hour, 40 at the bad curves, but it’s hard to keep that up for safety’s sake, and I find my eyes pulled off to the gorgeous scenery of 19th century farms, and the famous hollows of the region. It’s a struggle between beauty you can’t resist for long — and common sense safety . And then you realize that this would be one of the main routes for the fracking traffic, heavy truck traffic, 24/7 with bleary-eyed drivers, probably not entirely local, struggling to stay awake at 2:00 AM on the same road challenging me even on a beautiful early summer’s day, in broad daylight. It’s a big national economic obsession, fracking is — international now thanks to Sec. Clinton’s State Department — meeting some daunting local realities, and I hope that this incongruity is registering on the minds of the local and state Republican leaders. And with the permanent Maryland Governor, Senate President Mike Miller and Speaker Busch over in the other house. It’s another aspect of the local-global tensions so well written about by Naomi Klein in her book This Changes Everything, and the national forces, led by unhappy middle class and working class workers getting the short end of the economic stick in Neoliberal dominated Europe. These tensions are threatening to break up the U.K. itself, shatter what has stood since the early 18th century.
My eyes want to look up to the landscape’s great beauty, and my mind wants to soar a bit over that “Eastern Continental Divide," but I have to pay attention to the local reality, that I’m driving on dangerous roads...and about to speak in very red territory, and say things that are not often mentioned in public here. Civility prevailed, I’m pleased to report. What sunk in, registered, I’ll probably never know.
That’s what I tried to do in my speech. Here it is:
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials, State Environmental Protection Staff:
My name is “BillofRights" ; I am a resident of Frostburg, MD and have lived in Maryland for more than a decade. I am the former Director of Conservation for NJ Audubon Society (1989-2001), where I spent a lot of my time commenting on proposed federal and state environmental regulations.
Tonight, I am going to take an unusual step for a citizen of our decayed democracy in 2016: I’m going to take at face value the goals and directions declared by Governor Larry Hogan at his Inaugural Address on January 21, 2015 and his two subsequent “State of the State” speeches.
In these formal presentations, I heard old Republican gubernatorial mantras, and they were as contradictory as ever I remember all the previous ones: we cherish our beautiful environment, but in the Governor’s own words, “We must get the state government off our backs, and out of our pockets, so that we can grow the private sector, put people back to work, and turn our economy around…Maryland is open for business…” but suffers from “over-regulation, (and) an anti-business attitude.”
The Governor also wants to make fiscal responsibility – budget balancing - his top priority, and has pledged to reduce taxes, and cut or eliminate fees; in short, to be a model of Neoliberal austerity, as indeed every Republican candidate must be – or else risk “Excommunication” from The Party.
Governor Hogan wants Maryland, the state of “Middle Temperament,” to avoid the ideological feuding, high temperatures and gridlock of national politics, and he sets an admirable, low key tone in trying. However, the problem is not in the tone, but in the ideology that proclaims loudly over the whisper of good manners: all that the private sector does is good & worthy; all the public sector does is the devil’s work, an impediment to prosperity. We’ve been fed those lines for almost forty years, since Reagan, and yet economic history shows the average citizen was better off under the old New Deal’s values. Sorry Mr. Reagan and Gov. Hogan: Western Maryland would be better off with a new Civilian Conservation Corps than a fracking regime. And I do mean “regime.”
Let’s see now, isn’t the job before the Department tonight to regulate a notoriously powerful industry, to protect public and environmental health from the same industry which has bent federal environmental protections to its will - thank you Dick Cheney…bowled over and “captured” West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and before them, Texas? And how will the Department pay for the additional personnel and expertise, and equipment needed to regulate this industry? Why of course, by imposing fees and charges on the industry. I see some problems ahead, don’t you, given the Governor’s low key speeches?
Does the Department really believe that given the stated values of Governor Hogan and its own pointing to Pennsylvania and West Virginia as regulatory models - something I never heard anyone else point to during my 13 year environmental career - does the Department really think that anyone who has ever looked at this issue would believe that they are going to be tough regulators of one of the most powerful private interests in the world – which turned Hillary Clinton’s State Department into a marketing agency for the natural gas industry? This is unbelievable.
There are times when regulations can work, especially when they have emerged from a surge of environmental organizing. But even then….in New Jersey, no sooner had we enacted the nation’s toughest freshwater wetland law in 1987, than the private sector began to pry it apart, like the Ocean Spray cranberry growers in the early 1990’s …For too many years now, NJ environmentalists have watched in horror as Governor Chris Christie has proceeded to eviscerate laws and block effective governance by appointing pro-industry personnel to all the key oversight posts…and who was it that introduced Larry Hogan, on Inauguration Day, January 21, 2015? Why none other than Chris Christie himself.
Some on the Republican Right have called EPA a “Gestapo” like agency, a very ugly thing to say - despite the fact that it has failed to carry out its own mission to test, much less regulate the vast majority of chemicals it is legally charged with examining - the vast chemical ocean we now all swim in. And how come, then, if that’s true, if EPA is so overbearing, NC Warn, an North Carolina environmental group, has asked the EPA’s Inspector General, on June 8, 2016 via a 68 page complaint to investigate the conflicts of interest of the EPA’s former head of their Science Advisory board, Dr. David Allen, who refused to hear complaints from the inventor of the measuring tool for methane gas leakages, who said the device was underestimating the amount of leakages, thus invalidating studies done which in 2013 showed no major problems. Dr. Allen is accused of taking funds from the oil and gas industry while a professor at the Univ. of Texas at Austin and serving EPA. Here at: www.ncwarn.org/...
In my own investigations of major fracking explosions, fires and spills in PA and WVA, conducted in 2014, I found that even with the best of intentions, the 24/7 industrial activity called fracking is dangerous and liable to catastrophe at any and all stages of the process.
Yet today, the entire context for gas fracking has shifted, and the methane measurement problems and conflicts of interest are just the introduction. Bill McKibben’s March, 2016 article in The Nation magazine, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry,” presents an entirely different view of natural gas and its effects upon global warming than those held just a few years ago, even by some leading environmentalists, like the head of the Sierra Club and RFK Jr. The process is leaking more methane than we ever thought; methane is proving even a greater heat trapper than previously understood especially over the short run; and these discoveries mean that our national measurements of alleged progress in reducing Green House gases were completely wrong: we’re not making progress and natural gas is no “bridge to the future,” it’s more of a dangerous diversion undercutting the prices needed to move to genuinely alternative fuels. Here at: www.thenation.com/…
For all these reasons, Maryland citizens should not entrap themselves in debates over regulations that cannot work due to the nature of the process on the table – fracking - and especially under a governor who doesn’t really believe in regulation. Maryland should instead ban fracking entirely and get to work building an alternative future for itself, free of as many carbon dependencies as our inventive imaginations and political will can make possible.