Natural gas in NOT a bridge fuel. Please sign and share. AMERICANS AGAINST FRACKING SIGN ON LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA Please sign your organization onto the sign on letter by filling out the fields below before August 19th: (Sorry no individuals, only organizations) Begin letter here: August 22, 2013 Dear President Obama, We were greatly encouraged by the speech you delivered in June on climate change, but we are writing to express our concern over your embrace of natural gas as a key part of your Climate Action Plan. As you know, aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are essential if we are to successfully avoid catastrophic changes in the stability of our climate. Failing to achieve these cuts will severely impact the quality of life of our children and grandchildren. So we applaud your commitment to reducing U.S. carbon pollution and to ensuring that America becomes a leader in the global efforts necessary to address the climate crisis. However, your Climate Action Plan embraces hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, for natural gas, and we the undersigned believe this is a serious mistake. In your remarks, you called for the United States to become “the top natural gas producer because, in the medium term at least, it not only can provide safe, cheap power, but it can also help reduce our carbon emissions.” While it is true that burning natural gas instead of coal or oil leads to reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, carbon dioxide is not the only type of “carbon emissions” that result from natural gas development. Methane, the primary constituent of natural gas, is a potent greenhouse gas, at least 25 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat over a 100- year time frame, and causes between 79 to 105 times the climate forcing of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame. Estimates vary widely as to how much methane leaks into the atmosphere as natural gas is extracted, processed, transported and distributed, hence it is far from clear that natural gas can “help reduce our carbon emissions” over the “medium term.” In fact, independent estimates of methane leakage by researchers at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, using aircraft monitoring, suggest that the rate of methane leakage in at least two active natural gas fields are much higher than the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory’s current estimate. The implication of these new independent estimates is that burning natural gas may actually increase carbon dioxide equivalent emissions over the medium term, relative to burning coal for electricity and to burning petroleum to heat buildings or fuel transportation. Further, this implies that expanded use of natural gas, and thus accelerated drilling and fracking, could set off irreversible and exceedingly destructive tipping points in the climate system even sooner. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel that, when burned, produces significant amounts of carbon dioxide. In fact, even if methane leaks could be minimized to about 1 percent of what is produced, the International Energy Agency has estimated that a scenario of increased global dependence on natural gas would increase the global average temperature by 3.5° Celsius, or by about 6.3° Fahrenheit, by 2035. Put simply, doubling down on unconventional natural gas development all across our country does little if anything to address carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, and may even make matters worse. And of course there has never been any pretense that widespread drilling and fracking for oil is anything but a disaster for our climate. While many decisions on fracking are made at the state or local level, the decision on federal lands is something you can directly impact. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) controls access to over 700 million acres of federally owned mineral rights, most of which is beneath federal public land and Indian land. Currently, about 38 million acres of federal public land are leased, and each of the past four years the oil and gas industry has drilled over 3 thousand new wells, most of which will be or have been fracked. In addition to the many other public health, environmental and socioeconomic problems that accompany widespread drilling and fracking, the climate impact of drilling and fracking for oil and natural gas is a major reason why we are writing to ask you to stop permitting such activities on our public lands. Given the potential “ravages” of global climate change, as you have put it, it is critical that you use your executive authority not to expand or facilitate fracking on federal lands, but to ban this practice. Beyond the impacts on climate, drilling and fracking on federal lands threatens some of our most treasured natural places. Among the federal lands targeted for drilling and fracking are watersheds vital for the provision of clean drinking water for millions of Americans, such as the Shawnee National Forest in Illinois, Wayne National Forest in Ohio and George Washington National Forest in Virginia. Also targeted are federal lands near iconic national parks, such as Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah, Sequoia National Park in California and so many others. U.S. energy independence and energy security can be achieved through energy conservation, deployment of proven energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, and through funding research and development to improve on these technologies. The current hype over natural gas, particularly artificially low U.S. natural gas prices, threatens to keep the country from aggressively moving toward this future and maintains our current course toward catastrophic changes to our climate. President Obama, on June 25th, you said: “So the question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it’s too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren.” Today, we are asking you to recognize that drilling and fracking for oil and natural gas on public lands does not serve the best interests of our children and grandchildren, and to call for a ban on fracking on all federal lands. https://docs.google/spreadsheet/viewform?fromEmail=true&formkey=dEM2NFZuZTlWRmRZSGwxb0YzMEs1c3c6MQ
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 01:25:13 +0000
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