400+ Groups to Obama: You Have the Power to 'Keep it In the Ground'
'You can't be a climate leader while continuing to open up large amounts of federal land to extraction and encouraging continued fossil fuel development.'
by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams
9/14/2015
Hundreds of prominent organizations and leaders from Alaska to Florida are formally calling on President Barack Obama to stop new federal fossil fuel leasing on public lands and oceans in the United States, arguing that doing so would accomplish more in the global fight against climate change than any other single action taken by the president's administration.
In a letter to be delivered Tuesday to the White House, the 400-plus signatories note that "up to 450 billion tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution could be immediately removed from the global pool of potential climate pollution" if Obama were to deem unleased oil, gas, and coal "unburnable."
What's more, the letter continues, as "the world’s largest historic cumulative polluter and a global economic leader," the U.S. has an obligation to take such a bold action.
The American public owns nearly 650 million acres of federal public land and more than 1.7 billion acres of Outer Continental Shelf—as well as the fossil fuels beneath them.
...snip....Rainforest Action Network executive director Lindsey Allen: "The federal government is enabling some of the wealthiest companies in the world, with names like Exxon and Peabody, to mine and drill America’s public lands for private profit. This egregious drilling, fracking and mining is devastating the health of communities and endangering the stability of our climate. We are simply asking President Obama to stop selling off our national forests, oceans and sacred heritage sites for pennies on the dollar and slow the effects of climate change by stopping fossil fuel leasing on public lands."
An analysis released last month by Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity—both signatories to this week's letter—showed that allowing unleased publicly owned fossil fuels to be developed would "cripple the U.S.' ability to meet its obligations to avert the worst effects of the global climate crisis," as the green groups put it at the time.......
full story~
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/09/14/400-groups-obama-you-have-power-keep-it-ground
= new reply since forum marked as read
didn't make a bit of difference.
2013:
...Recently, the Wayne National Forest faced an imminent gas and oil lease sale of over 3,000 acres, most of it in the Hocking River Valley. Maps of the parcels to be sold revealed all to be riddled with abandoned coalmines. Two cities in the watershed, Nelsonville and Athens, rely on the Hocking River aquifer as their sole-source drinking water supply. The sale would threaten the drinking water of more than 70,000 people.
....Our region, long a sacrifice zone, was heavily affected by nineteenth and twentieth century coal mining and is just beginning to recover with an attractive university, healthy tourism and a nationally recognized farmers’ market and local food economy. The fate of this newly flourishing community now lies with the BLM and President Obama, putting it in grave danger.
The BLM’s proposed rules for fracking on federal lands will not protect our water supplies from tens of thousands of pounds of undisclosed toxic chemicals, many of them known carcinogens or neurotoxins, used per frack. Casings inevitably leak, and acidic mine water makes well failure likely sooner rather than later.
Furthermore, Ohio law permits unlimited water withdrawals from public waterways (each frack job uses as much as 10 million gallons of water). It also permits air emissions of volatile organic compounds, including the known carcinogens benzene and toluene, which average 23 tons per well according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). There could be thirteen well pads in the Wayne forest in the next three years, each potentially containing 10 wells. Fracking and drilling there would add six million pounds of toxic pollutants to the air, excluding truck carbon dioxide emissions and methane leakage.
Methane is as much as 105 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide at the 20-year time frame. Methane leakage alone makes fracking for natural gas worse than coal for our climate. Fracking also produces millions of gallons of radioactive toxic waste per well. More than a half billion gallons were injected in Ohio in 2012, more than half from out-of-state.
National forests are owned by the American people. We must fight to protect what is rightfully ours—the Wayne National Forest and other lands managed by the BLM.
Fracking destroys water supplies, pollutes air and threatens local food, tourist economies and the climate. Fracking must be banned for the sake of our nation’s public, environmental and economic health and for the sake of our communities and our planet’s future. Our land and planet are NOT up for grabs.
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/blogs/protect-the-wayne-protect-our-planet-say-no-to-new-blm-fracking-rules/
Apparently, our land and our planet are up for grabs. The (cheap) sale went through. Its madness. Private profit off of public lands, while ruining those lands & putting communities in harms way. Madness.