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‘I’m not voting for either’: fracking’s return stirs fury in Pennsylvania town whose water turned toxic

By: Oliver Milman - The Guardian

The small town of Dimock saw its water become brown, undrinkable, even flammable – and its residents are still feeling the effects

Fracking has burst back on to the national stage in the US presidential election contest for the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. But for one town in this state that saw its water become mud-brown, undrinkable and even flammable 15 years ago, the specter of fracking never went away.

Residents in Dimock, a rural town of around 1,200 people in north-east Pennsylvania, have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply that was ruined in 2009 after the drilling of dozens of wells to access a hotspot called the “Saudi Arabia of gas” found deep underneath their homes.

The company behind the drilling, Texas-based Coterra, was barred from the area for years for its role in poisoning the private water wells Dimock relies upon and, in a landmark later move in 2020, was charged with multiple crimes. But it has now been ushered back into the area following a deal struck by the state’s Democratic leadership.

The re-starting of drilling around Dimock late last year comes as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris clamor to cast themselves to Pennsylvania voters as supporters of fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, whereby water, sand and chemicals are injected deep underground to extract embedded oil and gas.

“If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said of Harris, who previously supported a ban, during the duo’s televised debate last month. The former US president has run a barrage of ads in the state accusing Harris of wanting to shut down the fracking industry. But during the same debate, Harris insisted “I will not ban fracking”, with the vice-president boasting of new fracking leases granted during Joe Biden’s administration.

This bipartisan embrace of fracking has stirred fury among residents of Dimock whose well water is still riddled by toxins linked to an array of health problems and, most spectacularly, contains so much flammable methane that people have passed out in the shower, wells exploded, and water running from the tap could be set on fire by match, according to official reports and accounts from locals.

“Sure as hell, I’m not voting for either of those two assholes,” said Ray Kemble, a bearded military veteran and former trucker, as he puffed on a cigar in his home. Reams of documents and photos chronicling the long fight against fracking lay on the table next to Kemble, along with a bottle of his murky tap water, three Sherlock Holmes-style smoking pipes and a briefcase filled with handguns.

Shortly after a gas well was drilled a few hundred feet from Kemble’s home, he said his drinking water turned from dark brown to green and finally jet back, with the liquid smelling like he had taken “every household chemical you can think of, dump it into a blender, take two asses of a skunk and put that in there, put it on puree, dump it out, and take a whiff”.

“The water is still not fixed,” said Kemble, who blames the loss of most of his teeth to the presence of uranium, along with other contaminants such as copper and arsenic, in his water.

“When a politicians’ lips are moving they are lying,” he said. “It’s a fricking nightmare. We are back to square one from before the moratorium came into effect – there’s massive drilling like crazy. I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”

Kemble, a Republican who has printed cards featuring the Gadsen flag snake coiled around a gas well, has found unlikely allies in this saga, with figures such as Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo voicing concern for Dimock’s plight. His neighbor Victoria Switzer, a former school teacher turned artist whose paintings adorn a soaring timber-framed home beside a bucolic creek, is a rare liberal in this staunchly conservative county but also shares Kemble’s frustration.

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By: Buff López - CleanTech Group

Ukraine Rewilding: Will Nature Be Allowed to Thrive When War Ends?

By Fred Pearce

Amid the war’s destruction, Ukrainian scientists are seeing signs of an ecological recovery. When the conflict ends, they say, the nation should not rebuild its massive Soviet-era infrastructure and instead continue the rewilding by letting nature keep restoring itself.

It was a monumental disaster. The dynamiting of the Kakhovka dam on Ukraine’s Dnieper River just before dawn on June 6 last year rapidly emptied Europe’s largest hydroelectric reservoir. Some 14 million acre-feet of water hurtled downstream for more than 100 miles to the sea. Around 80 villages were flooded, more than 100 people died, and more than 40 nature reserves were engulfed. In the Black Sea, the flood delivered a flush of industrial toxins, land mines, agricultural chemicals, sediment, and freshwater that killed fish and unleashed swarms of algae along the coast.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called it the “largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades” — since the meltdown at the country’s Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986. Within days, his government pledged to rebuild the dam.

But now the ecological consequences of this war crime — widely presumed to be perpetrated by the dam’s Russian occupiers — are being seen in a different light. The bed of the former reservoir is rapidly rewilding, with extensive thickets of native willow trees growing. The country’s ecologists are calling for plans for a new dam to be dropped, in favor of nurturing the ecological renewal. And they argue that some of Ukraine’s short-term wartime environmental catastrophes — on rivers, in forests, and across the country’s precious steppe grasslands — can be turned into long-term ecological gains.

“War-wilding” can benefit a country still chained to Soviet-era infrastructure, they say. After the war ends — which Zelensky said during a visit to the U.S. in September could be “closer… than we think” — Ukraine could secure its inadvertent ecological gains and ensure that reconstruction puts the environment at its heart.

There is no doubt that the breaching of the Kakhovka dam 16 months ago was a catastrophe for people living downstream. Many ecosystems were badly damaged. The question now is whether and how nature will recover. At least in the 155-mile lengths of the drained reservoir, the prognosis is remarkably positive.

Ecologists initially warned that the sediments exposed on the reservoir’s bed would either turn to desert and unleash dust storms laced with toxic detritus, or else be invaded by alien species. Neither has happened, according to Anna Kuzemko, a botanist at the M.G. Kholodny Institute of Botany in Kyiv, who has made three field trips to the reservoir bed, during one of which she was shelled by Russian mortars. The river has resumed its flow down old channels. Sturgeon have made it upstream to old spawning grounds near the dam. Nourished by rich sediment, native willows have grown across the reservoir floor, with reed beds fringing water courses.

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U.S.-China clean energy summit overshadowed by growing trade tensions

By Andrew Barber - Equities.com

Policy leaders, advocates and academics gathered in California over the weekend for the 16th annual U.S.-China Green Energy Summit, with former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu and China’s former Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang speaking. 

While the summit at Stanford University was designed to foster cooperation on climate policy between the world’s two largest economies, recent political events underscore growing tensions. 

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen emphasized the threat to U.S. businesses presented by unfair Chinese trade practices in a speech in Washington on Thursday.  

“China’s policies are also leading to industrial overcapacity in critical industries, threatening the viability of American and other firms and increasing the risk of overconcentrated supply chains that undermine global economic resilience,” Yellen said at a discussion hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Yellen’s warning followed a strongly worded speech last week in Portugal by Jose Fernandez, undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment at the State Department. Fernandez labeled Chinese lithium producers flooding global markets at uneconomical prices as “predatory.”

Fernandez stated that the move by Chinese state-owned firms to undercut global lithium markets was designed specifically to undermine the $400 billion Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate and energy program in U.S. history. 

China’s state investments into renewable technologies dwarfs U.S. efforts, with an estimated $890 billion flowing into the sector last year. A January 2024 report by Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, estimated that the clean energy segment alone accounted for almost 40% of the nation’s growth in 2023.

Critically, China’s manufacturing of electric vehicles (EV) accounts for over 65% of global production while producing nearly 80% of all EV batteries. 

While the Biden administration has continued to step up pressure on Chinese officials over trade practices deemed unfair, the policies supported by former President Donald Trump are even more draconian. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has proposed tariffs on Chinese imports as high as 60%. 

While the trade tensions simmer, China’s mammoth investment in clean technologies continue, providing investment opportunities for U.S. investors. 

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Idaho is coming around on clean tech, approves first-ever solar farm on state land

 

By: Paul Gerke - Renewable Energy World

For the first time, the Idaho State Board of Land Commissioners has voted to approve a lease for a solar farm on state-owned property.

At last Tuesday’s meeting in Boise, the board voted 3-1 in favor of leasing more than 11,000 acres of state endowment land to a PacifiCorp wind and solar project in southeast Idaho, near Idaho Falls in Bingham County. Dubbed Arco Wind and Solar, the clean energy farm will be mostly constructed on private land, particularly the wind portion. The entire project spans more than 32,000 acres in Bingham and Fremont counties.

NorthRenew Energy sold Arco Wind and Solar to PacifiCorp in February. Once finished, it will have more than 300 megawatts of combined wind, solar, and storage nameplate capacity. PacifiCorp is targeting late 2026 for commercial operations; construction on the land being used for solar is already underway.

The state’s land board expects to rake in between $1.5 million and $2 million annually in rent from the project, which could increase the state’s leasing portfolio by 25% by itself. The land previously generated about $.59 per acre via grazing leases- a figure blown out of the water by the estimated $200-$300 per acre the approved lease will generate. Idaho’s endowment trust funds (there are nine of them) support the state’s public school systems, multiple universities, state veterans homes, and more.

That’s a sweet deal for a state where many leaders have been skeptical of renewable energy projects, including Attorney General Raul Labrador, who voted against it. This summer, numerous Idaho legislators vowed to continue to fight against the Lava Ridge Wind project, which would be the largest wind generation facility in the state – calling the latest plans for the site “a slap in the face of Idahoans” that will ultimately benefit California rather than Idaho.

In spite of any preconceived notions, Tuesday’s meeting materials highlighted support for the Arco Wind and Solar project from neighboring landowners, who have been involved with this project since its inception.

“The project site, both on private and public lands, while sufficient for grazing, has limited broader agricultural value due to the desert climate and limited water resources in the area,” Bruce Wilding wrote. “The combination makes this an excellent location for renewable energy development.”

More than 70% of farmers are open to large-scale solar projects on their properties if system designs allow for continued agricultural production, according to a recent report by the Solar and Storage Industries Institute (SI2). Nearly half of solar developers surveyed believe that solar on farmland will make up a majority of their future business opportunities.

Solar progress in the Gem State

Although wind energy contributes approximately 17% of Idaho’s electricity, the Gem State and solar development have not exactly gone hand-in-hand in recent years. That said, the state’s renewable energy capacity is about to increase immensely, thanks in large part to new solar installations coming online.

A couple of big projects fired up in 2016, marking Idaho’s first dabbling into utility-scale solar: The 108 MW Grand View Solar Two (Clenera) in Grand View and the 54.6 MW ID Solar (Origis Energy) in Kuna. Utility-scale solar power generation accounted for 0.2% of the state’s mix that year.

In 2017, Idaho added the 40 MW American Falls Solar in the aptly named Power County and four more 40 MW projects in Elmore and Ada Counties.

However, any whiff of momentum died there and large-scale solar growth was stagnant in Idaho from 2018 through 2022, as indicated by the sad-looking middle of the Solar Energy Industries Association in the bar graph below.

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