Drilling Down: Maryland’s first statewide fracking conference

UPDATE (12/10/12): Read on to take action and to download and view featured presentations from the conference.

On Saturday, nearly 300 Marylanders from across the state are gathering in Baltimore to discuss a big emerging threat to our communities: fracking.

Fracking is a dangerous method of drilling for natural gas linked to widespread environmental and health impacts in neighboring states. The conference is the first to bring activists from across Maryland together with state lawmakers, national climate and health experts, and people on the front lines of fracking in western Maryland and Pennsylvania to discuss the risks of fracking and how our state should respond.

To join us on Saturday and for more details, go to: http://mdfrackingconference.eventbrite.com.

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Sandy was a wake-up call

The Virginian-Pilot
By Beth Kemler
I have friends who are survivalists. They have three months’ worth of food, water and ammo stowed in their basements. I used to think they were a little nuts. I joked that they were ready for the zombie apocalypse. After a year of completely unprecedented weather fueled by climate change, I’m starting to think they’re a little smart.
Superstorm Sandy was just the latest disaster that gained ammunition from climate change.
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WANTED: Icy-Cool gift donations for this year's Polar Plunge!

Polar plunge

Less than a week into my new job as CCAN’s Virginia Campus Organizer, I heard some pretty crazy rumors going around–something about jumping into freezing cold water in the middle of January?? Well, it turned out the rumors were true, and come January, me, my climate-loving co-workers, and our amazing (and brave) climate activists will be taking a dip into the icy Potomac to ‘Keep Winter Cold.’ Polar plunge

 

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Over 1,700 VA students take the PowerVote pledge for clean energy

Over 500 students pledged to be a Climate Voter yeterday before the polls closed

Yesterday, over 500 students across Virginia pledged to be a Climate Voter before they hit the polls to cast their ballots.  Wow! I could feel the electoral energy as I stood outside with Virginia Commonwealth University students eager to get last minute pledges for clean energy.

Election Day’s big success adds to the past two weeks on the ground across VA where students have come together in a push to get over 1,700 students pledging to vote for a clean energy future. Over 500 students pledged to be a Climate Voter yeterday before the polls closed

 

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After Hurricane Sandy, can we finally talk about climate change?

The Baltimore Sun
By James McGarry
The candidates won’t discuss a warming planet, but Hurricane Sandy filled in the silence
Every four years, presidential candidates tell the American people that this election is a turning point for the country. This year they might actually be right. To be sure, there are always differences between candidates. On a range of issues, from health care to tax reform, voters face a real choice about two different approaches to governing.
But the most profound turning point in this election may be the fact that the neither candidate is talking about one of the most critical issues of our time. I refer to the silence around climate change.
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We Are All from New Orleans Now: Climate Change, Hurricanes and the Fate of America's Coastal Cities

The Nation
By Mike Tidwell
The presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change. But climate change has decided to speak to them. And what does a thousand-mile-wide storm pushing 11 feet of water toward our biggest population center want to say just days before the election? It is this: We are all from New Orleans now along the U.S. east coast. Climate change – through measurable sea-level rise and a documented increase in the intensity of Atlantic storms – has now made 100 million Americans virtually as vulnerable to catastrophic impacts as the victims of Katrina seven years ago.
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Sandy Reminds Us to Harness Winds and Mitigate Their Wrath

Maryland was just hit by Hurricane Sandy, the largest storm ever recorded to hit the East Coast, but not as hard as states like New Jersey and New York:

“We all dodged a bullet on this one,” Anne Arundel County Fire Battalion Chief Steve Thompson said Tuesday from the county’s emergency operations center. “If that storm would have wiggled a little bit south, with those winds, it would have been a doozie.”

Yet, 300,000 people from Virginia to Baltimore remained without power Tuesday evening and many areas of the state experienced extensive flooding.  The fishing pier on Ocean City’s iconic boardwalk is now half-gone.  Sadly there were also a couple storm related deaths in Maryland as well as a number of injuries.

As we begin to rebuild, the first thing we must do is make sure everyone is safe and has what they need to survive in our state and across the country.  Please donate if you can to the American Red Cross as they most certainly will need more robust funding in the coming years and decades.

Once we get back on our feet, with the metro running in DC and the subways back on track in New York City, we must immediately focus on what we can do to lessen the wrath of ever-worsening storms like Sandy.  Perhaps Stephen Lacey and Joe Romm put it best when describing the link between human-caused climate change and these new super-storms: 

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Superstorm Sandy

Much of New Jersey, New York City and elsewhere definitely got hit very hard by Superstorm Hurricane Sandy yesterday: several feet of sand covering roads close to the ocean in Point Pleasant and probably elsewhere—50 or so homes burned down in Queens—extensive flooding of the lower Manhattan NYC subways—7 million or more customers without power—blizzard conditions in the Appalachians—and much more, without question.

I live in NJ, about 12 miles west of Manhattan. We didn’t get much rain but we did get very high winds, probably 80 mph or so, and as my wife and I huddled together on the couch last night, we held our breath more than once as the strong winds howled outside. Was a tree or a huge branch going to be uprooted or broken off onto our house or the electrical wires?

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Hurricane Sandy: The worst-case scenario for New York City is unimaginable

What might Hurricane Sandy do to New York City? See excerpts below from my 2006 book The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities (Simon and Schuster/Free Press). It’s a depressing title meant to help shock us into preventing these worst-case scenarios from coming true via global climate change. But it might now be too late for parts of imperiled New York. As you read, keep in mind that as of Sunday night October 28th, the National Hurricane Center was forecasting that the storm could hit anywhere between Delaware and Rhode Island, with a surge tide as high as 11 feet in some places. Even if New York City avoids a direct strike, it is still facing a potentially “worst-case scenario” in terms of surge tides.

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