Chesapeake Climate Action Network has reached its tenth birthday and a lot of progress has been accomplished in this past decade. There have been moratoriums on offshore drilling and the birth of a booming offshore wind economy. Coal plants have been shut down and pipelines have been delayed. We look forward to leading the charge in these crucial next ten years of progress.
This past Sunday I was in Williamsport for the Tour de Frack event at the Desert Rose Cafe. Below is a great blog cross posted from Climate Howard: http://climatehoward.wordpress.com/ a blog written by Elisabeth Hoffman in Howard County.
Here’s how testing companies determine if your water has been contaminated by fracking. First, they don’t step foot on the property. The drilling company provides all the information, such as about the geology of the area, and then the testing company decides whether the water was likely to have been contaminated by fracking. In the case of families from Connoquenessing Township in Butler County, north of Pittsburgh, the testing company determined that the drillers could not have contaminated the water because the drilling operation was downhill from the wells. Based on that report, the state determined the water safe to drink. And the driller stopped providing substitute water.
This is the procedure Jason Bell (pictured here, photo by Ruth Alice White) described when he visited Williamsport in western Maryland Sunday afternoon at a stop along Tour de FRACK’s 400-mile bike trek to Washington, DC, for the Stop the Frack Attack protest July 28. He carries with him 6 gallons of brown, murky, “safe-to-drink water” from tap water near a fracking site in Connoquenessing Township, PA.
This blog post was written by Michael Greenberg who is one of CCAN’s summer interns. He’s been working hard to get the word out about the Stop the Frack Attack rally happening on the 28th!
“If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”
― Paul Hawken
Author and activist Paul Hawken, who was speaking about the world’s future in general, could well have been describing the corrupt and dangerous practice of fracking and the movement that has arisen in order to protect our civilization from its dangers.
Check out this awesome video of Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon on Jimmy Fallon singing “Don’t Frack My Mother.” They went on to announce a new initiative “Artists Against Fracking.” It is a really cool website with lots of information about fracking and a long list of artists fighting against it.
More and more people are joining the fight against fracking: don’t forget about the huge Stop the Frack Attack Rally happening on the 28th!
Mark Ruffalo and Josh Fox have just released a short video about why it is so important for people to come to Washington, D.C. on July 28 to take part in the Stop the Frack Attack demonstration.
They’re right! It is! Join them!
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of watching The Island President at a movie screening in Norfolk at the Naro Cinema. These are my thoughts of the movie and its message.
*Cross-posted from We Are Powershift.org*
Virginia students are at it once again! This summer, CCAN’s internship program has expanded to college campuses, and interns are working on the campaign to expose Dominion-Virginia Power all over the state. They are working on a variety of things, including gathering petitions, writing letters to the editor, and building networks of CCAN activities in their communities and on their campuses. The students are excited, because this is the first chance some have had to finally take action on saving the climate. Indeed, this excitement becomes especially relevant when you look at their results. In the last week of June alone, the on-campus team collected over 200 petition signatures asking Dominion to fulfill its clean energy commitments with real, Virginia-made renewable energy.
Reading the article below by Julia Olson made me cry.
One of the big memories of my childhood is a one-month vacation trip my family took when I was 14 years old, driving from Lancaster, Pa. to Colorado and staying in Manitou Springs, just outside of Colorado Springs, for two weeks. Now, Manitou Springs is burning.
As the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act came down today, I was reminded of how remarkable our justice system really is. It’s a system of finely-tuned checks and balances that determine every branch of government’s role and boundaries within the Constitution. Regardless of your own personal beliefs about the validity of said law, we can all applaud the foundation upon which our country rests…the rule of law. Where facts still matter and justice prevails.