Syracuse Bans Fracking Inside City Limits
In a purely symbolic gesture, the Syracuse (NY) Common Council yesterday voted to ban the use of hydraulic fracturing inside city limits to drill for natural gas. It’s symbolic because new drilling rules, if ever released in New York, specifically prohibit drilling in the Syracuse watershed area. But politicians like Democrat Kathleen Joy, the driving force for getting the ban adopted, don’t let facts get in the way of political grandstanding.
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A list of 250+ physicians and other health care professionals, along with the usual group of opposition groups, sent a letter to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo yesterday requesting more study of shale gas drilling’s affects on health before approving new regulations and issuing permits to drill. A copy of their letter is embedded below.
MDN recently reported about two lawsuits filed (so far) in New York State that will set precedent in the state on the issue of whether or not local municipalities (i.e. townships) can ban gas drilling altogether within their borders.
Every time MDN writes about our observation that those who oppose drilling do so from an ideology, we get pushback from the man-made global warming true believers. If you want to believe that man causes global warming, be my guest. But don’t expect me to “go green” so you can feel good about yourself. I don’t believe it—not a word of it. It’s not been proven by any kind of science that stands up to scrutiny. It’s all ethereal theories and conjecture—not real, testable, measurable, objective and verifiable science.
Early today, Norse Energy, a Norwegian company with gas drilling operations in New York State, issued an interesting press release about laying off half of their employees (see the full release below). Norse holds some 180,000 net acres of natural gas leases in New York, of which 130,000 are in the Marcellus and Utica Shale zones.
Anschutz Exploration this week will file a lawsuit against the Town of Dryden (NY) to strike down the town’s recently passed ban on gas drilling. Dryden is a small township with two villages—Dryden and Freeville—located in Tompkins County, near Ithaca. Its land area is 94.2 square miles with some 13,500 people living there.
As many of you have heard via the national media, the Binghamton, NY (Broome County) area—where much of the drilling in New York State is likely to occur once drilling begins—was just hit with the worst flooding in its history, after the previous “worst ever” flooding occurred only five years ago, in 2006. This type of flooding is referred to as a “100-year flood” and it causes the government to re-draw floodplain maps to indicate where such areas are capable of extreme flooding.