EPA Weighs in on Mountaintop Permits

  • In mountaintop removal mining, explosives are used to get at coal that's close to the surface. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The Environmental Protection
Agency has approved one
mountaintop removal coal
mining operation. But, Lester
Graham reports, it’s asking a
federal court to delay another
mine in the same state:

Transcript

The Environmental Protection
Agency has approved one
mountaintop removal coal
mining operation. But, Lester
Graham reports, it’s asking a
federal court to delay another
mine in the same state:

The Environmental Protection Agency says it supports permits for one mine in West Virginia because operators agreed to some environmental protections.

But the EPA is asking a federal court to delay a decision on another mine. The Spruce Number One mine – owned by a subsidiary of Arch Coal – is one of the largest mountainop removal mines ever proposed in the area.The EPA says it’s concerned the mine would bury streams and contaminate water.

Bill Raney is the President of the West Virginia Coal Association. In a recent interview he said regulators are changing the rules.

“And it’s punishing the people here with uncertainty, not knowing what the future holds as to whether you’re going to get the next permit and are you going to be able to mine the coal, are you going to be able to use it in the power plant.”

The EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, said in a statement, the EPA is actually bringing clarity to the process.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Keeping an Eye on Fish Farming

  • Right now, there are no federal laws regulating offshore fish farming. (Photo by Randolph Fermer, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)

Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:

Transcript

Proposed legislation would put
in place the most sweeping
regulations yet on ocean
aquaculture – or offshore fish
farming. Samara Freemark tells us why people
think regulations matter:

Critics of aquaculture say the practice can spread disease, introduce invasive species, and pollute the environment.
The Ocean Conservancy’s George Leonard says that’s a problem.

“In the absence of an overarching framework, aquaculture continues to move forward kind of in fits and starts here in the US. And we think if it proceeds that way, many of the environmental concerns will kind of fall through the cracks.”

Legislation introduced last week in Congress could change that. The bill would require fish farmers to apply for federal permits before setting up shop. Those permits would set standards to protect ocean ecosystems.

The bill would also provide money to research how aquaculture is impacting the environment.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Part 3: Hydrofracking for Gas

  • Fracturing has increased available domestic natural gas supply by 35%. (Photo source: TheSilentPhotographer at Wikimedia Commons)

A new wave of natural gas drilling
is spreading across the country.
But the process is on hold in New
York state while regulators and
citizens debate the issue. Samara Freemark reports
that some New Yorkers see drilling
as a way to save the economy of a
particularly depressed part of the
state. But others say it could ruin
the economy for good:

Transcript

A new wave of natural gas drilling
is spreading across the country.
But the process is on hold in New
York state while regulators and
citizens debate the issue. Samara Freemark reports
that some New Yorkers see drilling
as a way to save the economy of a
particularly depressed part of the
state. But others say it could ruin
the economy for good:

When Kathy Colley heard that natural gas drillers were coming to upstate New York, it was kind of like someone had told her that the whole region had won the lottery.

“Here we have this wonderful god given opportunity. This is a blessing.”

That’s because Colley and her neighbors had learned that they had natural gas beneath their land.

New York State’s natural gas was supposed to be untappable- it was too far down, and it was suspended in tiny bubbles in shale rock. But a new technique called hydraulic fracturing made drilling possible in those kinds of shale fields. Fracturing has increased available domestic natural gas supply by 35%.

Drillers started moving into New York State last year. But officials there put a moratorium on the practice while regulators debated whether to allow fracturing.

For Kathy Colley, it’s a no-brainer. Drilling means saving a dying regional economy.

“It’s been such a depressed area. It’s struggling. The farmers are dying here. This is a time when it would just give people a life. Billions of dollars. Thousands of jobs. This is an opportunity to get healthy.”

A lot of local officials all across the country feel the same way. Gas drilling can mean tax revenues, and jobs, and economic development.

But some people say that while drilling may bring in some money at first, in the long run it’s a lousy way to develop a local economy.

“It’s an unsustainable form of economic development.”

That’s Adam Flint. He works with the Binghamton Regional Sustainability Coalition in upstate New York.

“However much gas is under the ground, it is unrenewable.”

And when the gas runs out, the jobs will go. So will the tax revenue. Flint estimates New York would get a couple of decades of gas production before the state’s fields are tapped dry.

That kind of boom and bust cycle is what Wes Gillingham is worried about. Gillingham is a farmer and environmentalist who heads an organization called Catskill Mountainkeeper. I met up with him and his family at his farm house.

He showed me a banjo he had bought cheap in Casper, Wyoming in the 1980s, at the end of an oil boom.

“I had never seen a place in my life that had so many pawnshops. And the pawnshops were just stuffed to the ceiling with really nice stuff- really nice stuff, at really cheap prices, cause everyone was just pawning everything they had.”

He’s afraid the same thing will happen in upstate New York.

“I always think about this when people say, ‘but we need the gas.’ Prices go up, companies come in, they put more rigs out, and there’s this huge influx of money and activity and then when the price drops back down they shut it all down. That has huge impacts on the community.”

And it’s not just the boom and bust. There are also environmental impacts like a legacy of water pollution, abandoned infrastructure, and habitat destruction.

Adam Flint says those kinds of problems would prevent upstate New York from ever developing any kind of stable long-term economy.

“It’s a question of which road to travel. We can have gas production and turn upstate New York into a major industrial zone. Or we can have tourism, agriculture, a green economy, alterative energy, jobs that all those things create. We can’t do both.”


New York state officials are almost certain to approve gas drilling this year – 2010. When they do, there’s a long line of community and environmental groups ready to challenge the state in court.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Part 2: Hydrofracking for Gas

  • Frackers dig mile-deep wells and pump them with millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals. (Photo by Vera Scroggins)

Natural gas burns a lot cleaner than
oil and coal, so a lot of people are
excited about gas’s role in a greener
energy sector. But drilling for natural
gas? That’s not quite so green. Samara Freemark tells us that
as a new kind of drilling spreads across
the country, so do environmental
concerns:

Transcript

Natural gas burns a lot cleaner than
oil and coal, so a lot of people are
excited about gas’s role in a greener
energy sector. But drilling for natural
gas? That’s not quite so green. Samara Freemark tells us that
as a new kind of drilling spreads across
the country, so do environmental
concerns:

It’s been about a year and a half since drilling companies first broke ground on natural gas wells in Dimock, Pennsylvania, in the northeastern corner of the state.

The drillers used a recently developed technique called hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. Frackers dig mile-deep wells and pump them with millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals.

Right now, fracking isn’t regulated by the federal government – though Congress is considering changing that.

So the process has generated a lot of concerns about pollution – in particular, fears that gas and chemicals could leach out into aquifers and groundwater.

Which is probably what happened in Dimock. Vera Scroggins is an anti-drilling activist who lives nearby.

“It started to happen pretty quickly because as they went down there, as they went through the aquifers they broke through the rock where the gas pockets are, and the gas got released into the aquifers and then it got into the water wells. So people started to notice like blackish, yellowish, bubbly water. So it’s been about 11 months that they haven’t drank their water.”

Since fracking started, Dimock has been plagued with environmental problems – chemical spills and leaks, gas found in drinking water, and fish kills in nearby streams. Dimock residents have filed suit against Cabot Oil and Gas, which controls most of the wells around Dimock.

And Scroggins says state authorities have penalized Cabot for spills and leaks.

“Cabot has been fined several times, even since September. They were closed down for two weeks for three spills in a two-week period. So it’s one accident after another.”

The drilling company says that doesn’t mean the problems were caused by drilling.

Ken Komoroski is a Cabot spokesman. He says the company is looking in to the incidents, but they haven’t found proof that fracking caused any problems.

“The company has not come to any conclusion as to whether or not its operations did cause contamination. It’s possible that it has, it’s also entirely possible that it has not.”

Many gas companies maintain that no one has ever proved conclusively that spills and leaks have harmed anyone. And it is hard to pin down figures on fracking accidents, since there’s no centralized database to keep track of incidents.

But problems have been reported at drilling sites across the country.

Many of the complaints center around the chemicals frackers mix with their pumping water.

Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Eric Goldstein showed me a list of those chemicals at an anti-drilling demonstration in New York City. The list was seven pages long – some 260 chemicals in all. Some seemed pretty harmless. But others were more troubling.

“I’m sure you could find a couple out of the 260 that you wouldn’t mind drinking. But you wouldn’t want to take any naphthalene, for example. Or petroleum naptha. Or any of the things we can’t pronounce here. You wouldn’t want to drink talc. Wouldn’t want to drink benzene. Why don’t we just stop right there. Ethyl benzene. That’s a known human carcinogen.”

Drilling companies say that while those chemicals might be dangerous, they’re used in such small quantities that they’re not harmful to people. And companies say they’ve developed protections that keep the chemicals from leaching out into aquifers. For example, drillers line their gas wells with cement casings to keep fracking fluid contained.

But Vera Scroggins – the activist from near Dimock – says she doesn’t believe companies have figured out how to drill safely.

“As they go along, they’re learning things. So we’re being experimented on.”

Until they’ve learned how to prevent all dangerous leaks and spills, Scroggins says, companies shouldn’t be allowed to drill at all.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Part 1: Hydrofracking for Gas

  • Fracking has made billions of cubic feet of natural gas available. That’s fuel that can be used for cooking, heating, and some transportation. (Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory)

A new technique for extracting
natural gas is making it profitable
to drill in new gas fields all over
the country. The technique is
called hydrofracking, and it has
raised the nation’s natural gas
reserves by 35%.
But hydrofracking is not without
its critics. Samara Freemark tells us why some people
say the industry is moving faster
than regulators can keep up:

Transcript

A new technique for extracting
natural gas is making it profitable
to drill in new gas fields all over
the country. The technique is
called hydrofracking, and it has
raised the nation’s natural gas
reserves by 35%.
But hydrofracking is not without
its critics. Samara Freemark tells us why some people
say the industry is moving faster
than regulators can keep up:

Ten years ago the American natural gas market wasn’t looking too hot.

“In theory, America was running out of natural gas.”

That’s Susan Riha. She’s a professor of earth sciences at Cornell University. Riha says underground pools of traditional natural gas were starting to dry up.

But there’s another kind of gas – ‘unconventional’ natural gas. It’s suspended in tiny pockets in shale formations, like water in a sponge. And there’s unconventional natural gas all across the United States, especially in the Western states and Pennsylvania and New York.

But recovering large amounts of natural gas from shale formations was until recently, pretty much impossible.

“In the past, it’s been extremely difficult to get that gas out of that rock. They drill down, but the gas is only going to flow from right where they drill. But people began to put effort in to figuring out how to get this gas out. And maybe starting about a decade ago they began to get economically viable ways of recovering shale gas.”

The technique that drillers developed is called hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. Frackers dig mile-deep, L-shaped wells and blast them full of millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals. That solution holds open tiny fissures in the shale so the gas flows out.

The process raises some eyebrows in the environmental community, but we’ll get to their concerns in a second.

First let’s look at the upside.

Fracking has made billions of cubic feet of natural gas available. That’s fuel that can be used for cooking, heating, and some transportation.

And natural gas is a domestic energy source. It burns a whole lot cleaner than coal and oil. A lot of people say it could be a crucial part of the transition to greener energy.

Which is the point Thomas West made when I met up with him at a public hearing on gas drilling. West is a drilling advocate and attorney who represents gas companies in New York State.

“You have to realize that the shale plays, these unconventional resources, have changed the game in the United States. We now have a hundred years of capacity, which means we no longer have to rely on Mideastern oil. Gas is very usable, it doesn’t take much to make it usable, and it has a dramatic impact on air quality.”

But critics say fracking is a mixed bag.

“Things too good to be true, usually are.”


That’s Al Appleton. He’s an environmental consultant, and he says hydraulic fracking can cause all kinds of environmental problems – water contamination, ecosystem destruction, noise and air pollution.

And Appleton says the process is essentially unregulated. In 2005, Congress passed a law specifically exempting fracking from almost all federal environmental regulations.

“Basically what the law said is that things like the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Hazardous Waste Materials Act, the Clean Water Act, and other significant pieces of federal environmental legislation were not to be applied to the natural gas industry. So in essence, what your local dry cleaner has to comply to all sorts of regulations, the natural gas industry, they don’t have to follow these.”

Some members of Congress are trying to change that. They’ve introduced legislation to repeal fracking’s exemption, give the Environmental Protection Agency authority over the process, and require the industry to disclose what kinds of chemicals it injects into wells. As you might expect, the fracking industry is fighting the bill.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

EPA: Greenhouse Gases a Threat

  • The EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, announced the U.S. is moving ahead to eventually restrict greenhouse gases. (Photo courtesy of the US EPA)

The US Environmental Protection
Agency has ruled CO2 is a dangerous
pollutant. Lester Graham reports
the finding gives President Obama
something to take to the climate
talks in Copenhagen:

Transcript

The US Environmental Protection
Agency has ruled CO2 is a dangerous
pollutant. Lester Graham reports
the finding gives President Obama
something to take to the climate
talks in Copenhagen:

The EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, announced the U.S. is moving ahead to eventually restrict greenhouse gases.

“EPA has finalized its endangerment finding on greenhouse gas pollution and is now authorized and obligated to make reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse pollutants under the Clean Air Act.”

But even with an administrative rule, Jackson says it’s still important that Congress pass a climate change law.

“I stand firm in my belief that legislation is the best way to move our economy forward on clean energy and to address climate pollution.”

The new rule sends a strong message to the climate summit currently going on in Copenhagen that the U.S. is getting serious about the emissions that are causing global warming. And next week, President Obama will go to Copenhagen with something a little more substantive.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

European Cap-And-Trade Example

  • Europe was the first to do carbon cap-and-trade, four years ago. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Congress is haggling over a climate
bill that includes a carbon cap-and-
trade system. In many ways, it’s
similar to the one the European Union
put in place several years ago. Liam
Moriarty looks at what
the European experience has been and
what the lessons for the US might be:

Transcript

Congress is haggling over a climate
bill that includes a carbon cap-and-
trade system. In many ways, it’s
similar to the one the European Union
put in place several years ago. Liam
Moriarty looks at what
the European experience has been and
what the lessons for the US might be:

Slashing greenhouse gas emissions is hard. Our economy is powered mostly by fossil fuels. Switching to clean fuels will be disruptive and expensive, at least to start with.

So how do we get from here to there? The approach that’s proving most popular is what’s called “cap-and-trade.” It works like this – first, there’s the cap.

“We’re going to put an absolute limit on the quantity of carbon-based fuels that we’re going to burn. And we’re going to develop a system to make sure we’re not burning more fossil fuels than that.”

Alan Durning heads the Sightline Institute, a sustainability-oriented think tank in Seattle. He explains that once you put the cap in place…

“Then, we’re going to let the market decide who exactly should burn the fossil fuels based on who has better opportunities to reduce their emissions.”

That’s the “trade” part. Companies get permits to put out a certain amount of greenhouse gases. Outfits that can cut their emissions more than they need to can sell their unused pollution permits to companies that can’t.

The cap gets ratcheted down over time. There are fewer permits out there to buy. Eventually even the most polluting companies have to reduce their emissions, as well.

The goal is to wean ourselves off dirty fuels by making them more expensive. And that makes cleaner fuels more attractive.

Europe was the first to do carbon cap and trade, four years ago. And things got off to a rough start. They set the cap on emissions too high and way overestimated the number of permits – or allowances – that companies would need.

“We have too many allowances. Simple supply means that the prices of those allowances crashes. They don’t have much value, and therefore the price went down to close to zero.”

That’s Vicki Pollard. She follows climate change negotiations for the European Commission. She says the whole system got knocked out of kilter.

For the first two years, European carbon emissions actually went up. After the collapse of Phase One, big changes were made. The next phase of the trading system has a tighter cap, more stringent reporting requirements and enforcement with teeth.


Today, Europe’s on track to meet its current emissions target. But environmentalists, such as Sanjeev Kumar with the World Wildlife Fund in Brussels, say those targets are still driven more by politics than by science.

“We have a cap that’s very weak, i.e. that means that it doesn’t mean that we’re going to achieve the levels of decarbonization that we need within the time scale.”

Leading climate scientists say we have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by the middle of this century to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Business still has concerns about the EU cap and trade scheme. Folker Franz is with BusinessEurope, sort of the European version of the US Chamber of Commerce. He says companies worry about the additional cost of carbon emissions putting them at a competitive disadvantage.

“If you produce one ton of steel, you emit roughly one ton of CO2. So any ton of steel produced in the EU is right now some 17 dollars more than outside the European Union. And that makes a difference.”

But, Franz says, European businesses accept the need to take prompt action on climate change and are on board with the stricter cap and trade rules coming over the next few years.

Americans have watched Europe struggle with carbon cap-and-trade. The Sightline Institute’s Alan Durning says we can benefit from Europe’s willingness to break new ground.

“It was a big advance when they started it, because nothing like it had ever been done. But, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. In fact, the United States now has an opportunity to learn from their mistakes and leapfrog ahead to a much better climate policy.”

Durning says an American cap and trade system could avoid the costly stumbles that’ve hampered Europe’s carbon reduction efforts.

For The Environment Report, I’m Liam Moriarty.

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Regulating Hydrofracking

  • Natural gas well drilling site. (Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory)

A new drilling technique called
hydrofracking has opened up previously
inaccessible natural gas fields all
over the country and created a boom
in natural gas production. But it’s
also generated a lot of controversy,
since hydrofracking is exempt from
almost all federal regulations.
Samara Freemark reports
that legislation currently moving through
Congress would change that:

Transcript

A new drilling technique called
hydrofracking has opened up previously
inaccessible natural gas fields all
over the country and created a boom
in natural gas production. But it’s
also generated a lot of controversy,
since hydrofracking is exempt from
almost all federal regulations.
Samara Freemark reports
that legislation currently moving through
Congress would change that:

Hydrofracking involves pumping millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals a mile into the ground to break up rock and extract gas. But since 2005 the technique has been exempt from federal environmental legislation like the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.

Now some members of Congress have introduced a bill to restore federal oversight over fracking. Kate Sinding is with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which supports the bill.

“So what has been proposed is known as the FRAC act. And what that would do is restore regulatory authority over hydrolic fracturing which means we would have some federal standards about how to regulate this activity. And it would require the public disclosure of the fracturing fluids that are used in fracturing fluids.”

That’s an important point for fracking opponents, who say those chemicals have contaminated wells and groundwater across the nation.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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New Regs for Old Homes

  • The rules the EPA is proposing would apply to homes built before 1978. (Photo source: Daniel Schwen at Wikimedia Commons)

Renovating old homes or apartments can
mean scraping or sanding lead paint.
That lead paint dust can settle where
children play. That can put them at risk
for learning disabilities. Shawn Allee reports why the government’s
tightening rules on home renovation:

Transcript

Renovating old homes or apartments can
mean scraping or sanding lead paint.
That lead paint dust can settle where
children play. That can put them at risk
for learning disabilities. Shawn Allee reports why the government’s
tightening rules on home renovation:

The Environmental Protection Agency just finished rules about home renovation and lead paint, but children’s advocacy groups said they weren’t strong enough.

Anita Weinberg is with Lead-Safe Illinois. She says some rehab contractors are trained on how to handle lead paint safely, but only some property owners are required to hire them. Weinberg says the rules didn’t apply if there were no kids in that unit at the time.


“That’s perfectly fine, but tomorrow you turn around and sell your home to a family with children. And the work that was done, if it wasn’t done safely, there’s certainly the possibility there’s still going to be a lead hazards in that home.”

So, now the EPA’s proposing, if you hire a rehab contractor at all, that contractor must be trained to handle lead paint – regardless of whether children live there now or not.

The rules would apply to homes built before 1978.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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The EPA and CO2 Regulations

  • This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Graph courtesy of NASA and NOAA)

The Environmental Protection Agency
is trying to figure out how it might
regulate greenhouse gases. Lester
Graham reports language in the
Clean Air Act is not helping:

Transcript

The Environmental Protection Agency
is trying to figure out how it might
regulate greenhouse gases. Lester
Graham reports language in the
Clean Air Act is not helping:

The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the EPA to decide whether greenhouse gases are pollutants. The EPA is making the case that they are.

But setting rules to reduce those emissions is problematic.

The Clean Air Act says it you emit 250-tons a year of a pollutant, you need a pollution permit. 250-tons of CO2 a year is not a lot.

Jeff Holmstead worked in the EPA on air pollution issues during the last Bush Administration. Now, he’s a lawyer with the Washington DC firm Bracewell and Giuliani.

“You know, 250-tons of CO2 according to EPA would include most schools, most apartment buildings, any kind of commercial building. It just isn’t possible to develop permits for all of these sources.”

So the EPA plans to raise the amount to 25,000-tons. But, that’s not what the Clean Air Act says.

That’s one reason why the Obama Administration prefers a climate change law passed by Congress.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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