Independent Coalition of Citizens Against Fracking
For Immediate Release September 21, 2011
Grassroots Groups Expose Bias of Cuomo’s Fracking Advisory Panel in
New Report
Contact: Carl Arnold, Chenango, Delaware, Otsego Gas
Drilling Opposition Group (CDOG): 347-254-0527 (cell); 718-788-5944
(land line)
Report available at GasMain.org
CALLOUT: The collusion of some of the big environmental groups, as
well as the incestuous connections between the industry, Governor
Cuomo’s advisers and vendors hired by his administration and his
environmental regulatory body, are a major threat to representational
government in New York State.
New York State’s recently named Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel is
stacked with appointees who have already made clear they’re on the
side of the gas industry’s plan to industrialize the state, say
grassroots organizations from around New York. The panel was
established by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s DEC commissioner Joe Martens in
early July—just a week after the governor ended the de facto statewide
moratorium on hydraulic fracking.
In a report released today, the grassroots groups show that the panel
is dominated not only by industry representatives and industry-paid
academics, but also by representatives of national groups that claim
to be working to protect the environment but actually are on record as
being promoters of so-called “natural” gas.
“The large national organizations’ coziness with polluting industries,
Albany and Washington explains their repeated betrayal of grassroots
efforts to protect communities and the environ ment,” said Robert
Jereski of New York Climate Action Group, a grassroots environmental
organization focused on climate change and ending industrial logging
of old growth forests. “These national groups were chosen by Cuomo
because he knew he could count on them to support the false notion of
‘safe’ fracking.”
Members of grassroots environmental, civic and community organizations
from across the state, who have been educating themselves and others
about fracking for several years, are sure the Advisory Panel’s
forthcoming report will contain no surprises.
Finger Lakes-based Lisa Wright, a longtime activist on shale issues,
pointed out, “New Yorkers and most people throughout the world who
have looked closely at unconventional gas development know that
fracking for gas is seriously problematic. Organizations that call
themselves ‘environmental’ need to stand up for our communities and
act like forward-thinking stewards of the earth, not shale-gas
salesmen.”
Cecile Lawrence of Tioga Peace and Justice, Green Party NYS 2010
candidate for U.S. Senate and 2011 candidate for Tioga County
Legislature, commented, “Andrew Cuomo has always been vague regarding
his stance on the fracking of the state. Through the makeup of this
panel, he has shown clearly that he has allied himself with fossil
fuel monied interests. The lack of presence of anyone from a true
grassroots organization, made up of people whose lives and livelihoods
are at stake, shows that Cuomo needs an education as to whom he was
elected to represent.”
Carl Arnold of Chenango, Delaware, Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition
Group (CDOG) also sees pro-“safe” drilling agendas driving some of the
larger, supposedly green groups represented on the panel. “Some groups
surely know that drilling can never be safe, yet are fudging on a
ban,” he said. “This contradiction is made clear when one examines the
connections between multinational polluters, large financial and law
firms, the oil and gas boys and some well-known NGOs that claim to be
protectors of the environment. Those connections raise the obvious
questions: What do they receive from the deep pockets of the oil and
gas industry? How can they work with those folks?”
The focus of many allied upstate and downstate activists is Part 2 of
a just-released report (available at gasmain.org) on the Cuomo
advisory panel members who were purportedly appointed to represent the
environmental movement.
Coalition to Protect New York is a collective of organizations around
the Finger Lakes, central, western, and Southern Tiers regions. “We’ve
learned from painful observation and experience,” said one of the
coalition’s cofounders, Jack Ossont of Yates County, “that there is no
way to ‘regulate safely’ this destructive industrial process. That’s
why informed New Yorkers as well as people across the country are
demanding that it be banned.”
Adds CPNY’s Kate Bartholomew of Schuyler County, “Even with our huge
and growing movement, the governor’s panel hasn’t got a single member
representing our position. To use taxpayer money — our money — to
establish this panel and to promote fracking using these discredited
‘environmental’ organizations and industry insiders is not only the
opposite of good representative government; it’s downright deceitful.”
In the report released today by the grassroots alliance, familiar
groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Sierra
Club, Riverkeeper and many others, including New York State level
groups, are examined. Their collusion, as well as the incestuous
connections between the industry, Governor Cuomo’s advisers, and
vendors hired by his administration and his environmental regulatory
body, are a major threat to representational government in our state.
In July the Albany Project reported that a vendor paid by DEC to
conduct an “independent” economic study of proposed fracking has no
expertise in such analysis. The firm is also a paid consultant for big
oil and gas clients.
“That’s antidemocratic and unethical,” said Dave Walczak of Bath-based
Citizens for Healthy Communities. “Besides, if the governor and
Department of Environmental Conservation needed a study on community
impacts, to save taxpayers the costs of this so-called ‘independent
study,’ all they had to do was drive across the Pennsylvania line
below Elmira. What you see there is not what we want in any part of
New York.”
A similar federal-level advisory panel examining fracking came under
fire recently when 28 top scientists challenged President Obama. His
panel, they charged, “appears to be performing advocacy-based science”
because its chairman profits from fossil fuel exploitation. Gas
industry representatives and academics who are publicly avowed
fracking advocates figured prominently on the federal panel.
Clare Donohue of Sane Energy Project expressed the question being
asked by thousands of New Yorkers: “Governor Cuomo, we demand an
explanation of why you have given the people on the ground, in
thousands of communities where fracking is proposed—we whose lives
would be forever altered—no seats on your advisory panel?”
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