Author: CCAN Supporter

Sierra Club legal case challenging Dominion Resources brings activists from across Maryland in show of support

100 demonstrators gather with placards to ask appeals court for justice as Dominion seeks to fast-track massive fossil fuel export facility on the Chesapeake Bay

ANNAPOLIS—Demonstrators from across Maryland gathered at the steps of an Annapolis courthouse Wednesday to support the Sierra Club in a landmark case that could determine the long-term scope and size of gas “fracking” in Maryland and surrounding states. As demonstrators waved placards and held banners outside, oral arguments began inside the courthouse on the Sierra Club’s case challenging Dominion Resources’ plan to export natural gas to Asia through the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

Maryland Sierra Club director Josh Tulkin told demonstrators that Dominion, in proposing a $3.8 billion plant in Calvert County to liquefy and export gas from as far away as Ohio, is breaking an explicit and pre-existing legal agreement with the environmental group. That agreement gives the Sierra Club the ability to reject any significant changes to the purpose or “footprint” of the company’s existing facility that presently only imports liquefied natural gas (LNG) from overseas. The facility is located at Cove Point in southern Calvert County.

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As key August deadline looms, Western MD landowners and environmental leaders call passage of statutory protections imperative this year

Rally-goers display map of gas basins at risk of being fracked across MD, including just south of Annapolis, to underscore the statewide threat

ANNAPOLIS—More than 100 grassroots supporters of fracking moratorium legislation rallied across from the State House in Annapolis on Wednesday to declare 2014 a make-or-break year for General Assembly passage of statutory drilling protections. Western Maryland and statewide environmental leaders warned that, with Governor O’Malley’s three-year executive order halting drilling permits set to expire in August, the decision as to whether or not to frack in Maryland could be made shortly thereafter—regardless of the results of as-yet-incomplete risk studies or the will of the General Assembly.

Rally-goers underscored these stakes by asking arriving lawmakers if they were prepared to sign a “waiver” ceding their “right to protect my constituents from the dangerous impacts of fracking.” Activists, who travelled to Annapolis from as far afield as western Maryland, Frederick, Baltimore, the DC suburbs, and southern Maryland, also displayed a large map of the five gas basins stretching statewide that are at risk of being fracked. Over the border in Virginia, a Texas-based gas company has already declared its intent to begin fracking in the Taylorsville basin—which extends underneath Charles, Prince George’s, Calvert, St. Mary’s and Anne Arundel counties—within the next 18 months.

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BALTIMORE, MD– On December 17th, 2013, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that “Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Director Tommy P. Beaudreau today joined Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley to announce the proposed notice of sale for nearly 80,000 acres offshore Maryland for commercial wind energy leasing.”

Offshore wind is Maryland’s single largest source of clean energy, with enough potential to power more than one third of Maryland’s homes and businesses. So it can and should be a foundational element of Maryland’s strategy for transitioning to a clean energy economy.

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