Tag Archives: virginia

Virginia Republicans Change Vote-Counting Rules While Counting Votes

by John Grit Posted on November 11, 2013

Mother Jones

The race to become Virginia’s next attorney general remains in flux nearly a week after Election Day. Republican Mark Obenshain led Democrat Mark Herring by a little over 1,000 votes the day after the election, but that advantage whittled away to a toss-up as more exact results came in over the following days. Obenshain leads Herring by a scant 17 votes—out of over 2 million total—as of Monday morning, according to results posted on Virginia’s Board of Elections website. A recount is a certainty.

Legal wrangling is a given during any recount, but Virginia Republicans got off to an early start over the weekend, potentially exploiting the state’s new voter ID law to cast aside likely Democratic votes.

The vast majority of Virginia’s votes had already been tabulated by the end of last week, but a swath remains outstanding in parts of Fairfax County, a string of DC suburbs in Northern Virginia. Fairfax is still tallying provisional ballots—disputed votes that were set aside on Election Day. Virginia introduced a new strict photo ID requirement for the 2014 election; voters who lacked proper identification on Election Day could cast a provisional ballot to be assessed later. Fairfax County had previously allowed a lawyer or authorized representative to advocate on behalf of counting a provisional ballot during hearings to assess those votes. But on Friday, the Republican-controlled state Board of Elections sent a memo to the county ordering an end to this practice, shifting the rules after the election and midway through counting the votes.

As local radio station WTOP put it:

The state Electoral Board decided Friday to change the rules that had been followed in Fairfax County and ban legal representatives from stepping in to help get the ballot counted, unless the voter him or herself is there.

County Electoral Board Secretary Brian Shoeneman says he and board chairman Seth Stark disagree with the ruling, but they have to comply. The board is voting on some provisional ballots later Saturday.

“The office of the Attorney General advised us that this was the correct reading of the statute,” State Board of Elections Secretary Don Palmer says.

That attorney general is Ken Cuccinelli, the conservative who lost Virginia’s gubernatorial election last week. As AG, Cuccinelli filed one of the first legal challenges to Obamacare and asked the Supreme Court to uphold Virginia’s anti-sodomy law. Now he’s telling Fairfax to change its election rules mid-count.

Election expert Rick Hasen questioned the motivations of this new order in a blog post on Sunday: “It appears the directive came out after most of the provisional ballots (outside of Democratic Fairfax and Arlington counties) have already been counted—and it is not clear if the other counties used uniform standards in counting provisional ballots,” he wrote. “Further, it seems that the rule goes against both Fairfax County practice (which allowed legal representatives to argue for the counting of ballots rather than the voter in person), as well as Virginia’s Board of Elections posted rules.”

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Virginia Republicans Change Vote-Counting Rules While Counting Votes

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Marcellus Shale fracking wells use 5 million gallons of water apiece

by Bikor11 Posted on October 31, 2013

Marcellus Shale fracking wells use 5 million gallons of water apiece

By

cotterpin

Frackers are slurping this right up.

Forget about residents. Forget about fish. The streams and rivers of Pennsylvania and West Virginia are being heavily tapped to quench the growing thirst of the fracking industry.

According to a new report, each of the thousands of fracking wells drilled to draw gas and oil out of the Marcellus Shale formation in those two states uses an average of 4.1 to 5.6 million gallons of fresh water. That’s more than the amount of water used by fracking wells in three other big shale formations around the country:

EarthworksClick to embiggen.

And with approximately 6,000 wells in Pennsylvania alone, the industry is taking a heavy toll on the region’s waterways. The map below shows drilling permits in Pennsylvania and West Virginia; note the heavy concentration within the Susquehanna River basin.

EarthworksClick to embiggen.

Much of the water is being skimmed off the tops of rivers and streams. In West Virginia, the researchers concluded that 80 percent comes from these surface waterways.

From the report [PDF], which was produced by researchers at San Jose State University and consulting firm Downstream Strategies for the environmental nonprofit Earthworks:

[T]he entire flow of the Susquehanna River contributes 26 billion gallons of water per day to the Chesapeake Bay. The cumulative volume of water used by all wells in Pennsylvania is roughly equal to the daily flow from the entire river basin. These cumulative impacts are especially important because such a large percentage of the water injected does not return to the surface and is lost to the hydrologic cycle. The volume of water injected to date in Pennsylvania is also roughly 1% of the 2.5 trillion gallons of total surface water in Pennsylvania alone. While overall, 1% might be seen as only a marginal impact, these volumes could be critical in times of drought. Also, as drilling expands, the cumulative impacts are likely to grow proportional to water use. The development of the deeper and thicker Utica Shale that underlies the Marcellus with similar techniques will require substantially more water.

The report notes that much of the data its researchers had sought was unavailable. Lax water-reporting rules mean the region is swimming in uncertainty over how much water is actually being used by Marcellus Shale frackers, and how much wastewater they’re dumping or injecting into disposal wells.

“Our analysis of available data and identification of missing data indicates that, even with new reporting requirements, we still don’t know the full scale of impacts on water resources,” researcher Dustin Mulvaney of San Jose University said. “States should require operators to track and report water and waste at every step, from well pad construction to fracturing to disposal.”


Source
Water Resource Reporting and Water Footprint from Marcellus Shale Development in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, Downstream Strategies

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Marcellus Shale fracking wells use 5 million gallons of water apiece

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Virginia voters know we’re changing the climate, Republican candidate does not

by Leon Russell Posted on October 28, 2013

Virginia voters know we’re changing the climate, Republican candidate does not

By

chesapeakeclimateTerry McAuliffe gets climate change. So do most Virginians.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe is ahead in the gubernatorial polls in Virginia, despite accusations from his climate-denying Republican opponent that he’s waging a “war on coal” in a coal-powered state. His lead might be partly attributable to the fact that Virginians actually are concerned about global warming.

With a week remaining before the election, Old Dominion University polling [PDF] is showing that 44.1 percent of likely voters intend to support McAuliffe in the race for governor. Republican Ken Cuccinelli is favored by 36.9 percent of poll respondents, while 6.9 percent said they plan to vote for Libertarian Rob Sarvis.

Notably, the pollsters found that Virginia voters strongly shared their favored candidate’s views on climate change — which is bad news for the Republican:

62.7 percent of likely voters indicated that they believed “human activity is a major contributing factor in climate change,” while 34.5 percent indicated that they did not believe this to be the case.

66.4 percent of Cucinelli supporters indicated that they do not believe human activity is a major contributing factor in climate change, while 88.5 percent of McAuliffe and 68.1 percent of Sarvis supporters indicated that human activity is a major contributor to climate change.

Climate Progress puts the poll results into some context:

Gage SkidmoreKen Cuccinelli does not get climate change.

Cuccinelli has made his opposition to climate science a key selling point of his candidacy. In Thursday’s final debate, he boasted of his unsuccessful lawsuit to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases and accused McAuliffe of waging a “war on coal.”

In the debate, McAuliffe criticized Cuccinelli’s also-unsuccessful attempt to wage a witch hunt against a University of Virginia climate scientist that cost the university $570,000. Cuccinelli “intimidated scientists at our great universities,” McAuliffe observed, warning that this would scare off businesses from investing in Virginia.

Also check out: The Virginia governor’s race, the craziest political race of the year, is putting climate in the spotlight


Source
Summary of Results from Social Science Research Center Poll, Old Dominion University
Virginia Poll Finds More Than 60 Percent Believe Human Activity A Major Cause Of Climate Change, Climate Progress

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Virginia voters know we’re changing the climate, Republican candidate does not

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How many people does it take to save a coastline?

by Myrna Posted on October 24, 2013

How many people does it take to save a coastline? It takes all of us. View article: How many people does it take to save a coastline? Related Articles We’re a platform… not the black helicopters How do you stop a bad coastal project which has more lives than an ill-conceived TV zombie? Ready for a demolition party in South Texas?

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How many people does it take to save a coastline?

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Lagoons filled with toxic water coming to Ohio’s fracklands

by berrywood1 Posted on October 14, 2013

Lagoons filled with toxic water coming to Ohio’s fracklands

By

National Energy Technology Laboratory

via NRDC

A fracking wastewater impoundment lot.

Where frackers go, lagoons filled with toxic wastewater follow.

Fracking wastewater impoundment lots as big as football fields already dot heavily fracked landscapes in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The lagoons are built to help the industry manage and reuse the vast volumes of wastewater that it produces.

Ohio lawmakers looked admiringly to their neighboring Marcellus Shale states and decided to draw up their own rules for wastewater lagoons. From The Columbus Dispatch:

“We are putting in a process to outline their standards of construction and their length of use,” said Mark Bruce, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

A provision in the most-recent state budget requires Natural Resources officials to create rules and permits for them. …

Tom Stewart, vice president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, said the lagoons would be built with plastic liners to prevent leaks. He said treatment operations would strip out harmful pollutants.

“They want to clean it up and use it again,” Stewart said. “That means getting the water back to as fresh a state as possible.”

But environmentalists worry the wastewater pits will pose threats to streams and groundwater. Trent Dougherty, a lawyer with the Ohio Environmental Council, also warned that they could be used as long-term storage for tainted water: “There is a point in time when temporary storage can become long-term storage,” he said.


Source
Big lagoons could hold Ohio fracking waste, The Columbus Dispatch

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Lagoons filled with toxic water coming to Ohio’s fracklands

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Ready for a demolition party in South Texas?

by Myrna Posted on October 14, 2013

South Texas wins a precedent setting case for the State. Originally from:   Ready for a demolition party in South Texas? ; ;Related ArticlesWe’re a platform… not the black helicoptersBeaches belong to the public. They are not for sale.Transforming the game one bag ban at a time ;

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Ready for a demolition party in South Texas?

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Feds to frackers: “No, please — let us help you find a place to dump your wastewater”

by NielPostma231 Posted on September 25, 2013

Feds to frackers: “No, please — let us help you find a place to dump your wastewater”

By

Bill Baker

Good call.

The Northeast’s fracking boom has left drillers with millions and millions of barrels of wastewater and nowhere to dump it. Some frackers have simply injected into deep wells, causing earthquakes; others have simply allowed their waste to flow into rivers.

Big government to the rescue: The Department of Energy will fund a $1.8 million, two-year project by Battelle that aims to find somewhere to stash that gross dross for an eternity. From the Columbus Dispatch:

With more drilling and fracking expected, oil and gas companies will need to find the best locations to safely inject more waste, said Neeraj Gupta, senior research leader for Battelle’s subsurface-resources group.

“That’s one of our objectives. Where is the injection capacity?” Gupta said.

Right now, it’s in Ohio, where more than 14.2 million barrels of fracking fluids and related waste from oil and gas wells were pumped into 190 disposal wells last year. That was a 12 percent increase over 2011.

Much of the waste — 8.16 million barrels last year — came from Pennsylvania, which has seven active disposal wells. West Virginia has 63 disposal wells.

If only we could find a source of energy that doesn’t consume fresh water and produce wastewater, maybe some mysterious source that protected the climate as well. If only such a thing existed …


Source
Sites sought for region’s fracking residue, The Columbus Dispatch

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Big Coal, Republicans go after Obama’s energy nominee, saying he’s too green

by Abraham Lowe Posted on September 18, 2013

Big Coal, Republicans go after Obama’s energy nominee, saying he’s too green

By

rbinz.com

Ron Binz

Ron Binz is an experienced electricity regulator who understands the important role that wind and solar power are playing as they pour electrons into grids across the country. He was the lead author of a paper last year that described how boosting renewable energy infrastructure could hedge against fossil-fuel cost increases, aging equipment, and other risks.

“This is no time for backward-looking decision making,” he wrote in that paper [PDF], published by the nonprofit Ceres. “It is vital — for electricity consumers and utilities’ own economic viability — that their investment decisions reflect the needs of tomorrow’s cleaner and smarter 21st century infrastructure and avoid investing in yesterday’s technologies.”

So no frickin’ way is this guy qualified to oversee the nation’s power lines! Am I right?

No, of course I’m not right. But that’s what the coal sector is arguing as it desperately rallies Republican opposition to President Obama’s nomination of Binz to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The New York Times reports that the “fight over Mr. Binz has been unusually public, considering that the job at stake is at an agency most people cannot name.” From Bloomberg’s coverage of a Senate confirmation hearing held on Tuesday:

Senator Lisa Murkowski [R] said she won’t support the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s choice to lead the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, raising uncertainty about the agency’s future leadership.

“At this point in time, I’m not prepared to support your nomination,” Murkowski, of Alaska, told Ron Binz at the end of his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in Washington today. …

Her decision not to support Binz, combined with an uncertain vote from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, casts doubt over whether Binz, 64, will survive the nomination process. Binz, a former chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, has been the object of a public-relations battle between free-market and coal-industry groups, who want to block his nomination, and clean-energy organizations who support him.

Greenwire steps back and explains the opposition:

Nominated to replace outgoing FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff, Binz has become a lightning rod, pitting libertarian-leaning groups, the coal industry and some senators — including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — against clean energy advocates and former FERC commissioners.

His foes say Binz would be key to the Obama administration’s plans to tackle climate change through regulatory actions that end-run Congress. Binz’s agenda, they say, would give all the breaks to wind and solar and elbow out fossil fuels.

Ben Cole, a spokesman for the libertarian-leaning American Energy Alliance, said Binz’s agenda would constitute the “third leg” of Obama’s climate plan, which also includes U.S. EPA’s clampdown on greenhouse gas emissions at power plants and the administration’s limiting of access to federal lands for oil and gas drilling.

Obama’s decision to go around Congress on climate change and Binz’s “troublesome” advocacy for renewable energy sources have sparked a confirmation fight that’s raised the profile of FERC from a sleepy regulatory agency, Cole added.

In the face of all this hubbub, Binz has turned to an unlikely ally. The Washington Times reports that he emailed BP officials, asking them for “any intelligence or advice” regarding the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “You’re welcome, or not, to put in a good word for me with any of the members with whom you have a relationship.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Big Coal, Republicans go after Obama’s energy nominee, saying he’s too green

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North Carolinians could be forced to accept fracking on their property

by euro9 Posted on August 29, 2013

North Carolinians could be forced to accept fracking on their property

By

Donald Lee Pardue

Forced fracking could be coming to Chatham County, N.C.

Not willing to sell out to frackers? If you’re a property owner living above natural gas reserves in North Carolina, you might not have a choice.

A panel charged by the state’s legislature with developing hydraulic fracturing guidelines recommended Wednesday that property owners be forced to allow drilling beneath their property if enough of their neighbors want it. From the Associated Press:

A panel commissioned by state government said Wednesday that forced fracking should be allowed in North Carolina.

Forced or compulsory pooling allows the state to let energy companies drill into natural gas reserves under non-consenting property owner’s land. Property owners in the state receive a percentage of the profits from gas extracted from under their property.

The study group recommended at least 90 percent of acreage of a drilling area be voluntarily leased before remaining property owners are forcibly pooled.

The News & Observer reports that the recommendation is expected to be adopted by the state legislature this fall. More from the article:

The proposal by a state study group endorses a rarely used 1945 law that’s never been tried here on the kind of scale that would be required for shale gas exploration, or fracking. Thousands of property owners could potentially be affected in the state’s gas-rich midsection in Lee, Moore and Chatham counties. …

“We are talking about a for-profit industry taking away personal freedoms with the blessing of the government,” Therese Vick, a community activist with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, told the Compulsory Pooling Study Group.

Taking away those personal freedoms is already the norm in some states. In Ohio, there’s an unofficial guideline stating that if 90 percent of property owners in an area consent to the sale of a gas deposit, everybody else has to sell out to frackers too, according to the Compulsory Pooling Study Group’s draft report [PDF]. In Kentucky, the figure is 51 percent. In Virginia, it’s just 25 percent.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Surfrider chapter in Wisconsin? Yes.

by Myrna Posted on August 22, 2013

I love this video from our Wisconsin chapter, it wonderfully reflects our mission. View this article:  Surfrider chapter in Wisconsin? Yes. ; ;Related ArticlesWhat do you do when you find 7 tons of debris on a beach?Is there anything more authentic than a child’s drawing asking us to preserve our oceans?Is New Jersey screwing up the Hurricane Sandy rebuild? ;

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Surfrider chapter in Wisconsin? Yes.

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