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A Bloomberg story blew the lid on one state senator's ties to the fracking industry yesterday. Turns out state Senator Tom Libous (R-Binghamton), who said in March that he'd "make sure no [fracking moratorium] bill passes the Senate," has deep ties to a real-estate company leasing underground natural gas rights to a drilling company. Now, Libous is feeling the pushback.

Libous' wife founded the real-estate company, Da Vinci II LLC, and a campaign donor, Luciano Piccirilli, runs it. Da Vinci also owns 230 acres of land leased to a drilling company on top of the state's Marcellus Shale deposit. Piccirilli, meanwhile, has contributed $28,000 to Libous' campaign over the years, and jointly owns two Florida homes with Libous, according to Bloomberg.

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Lopi LaRoe

Brooklyn-based artist and environmental activist Lopi LaRoe sees Smokey the Bear as a friend. As a kid raised by environmentalists, she grew up with him, she says, and feels a particular connection to the affable but informative cultural touchstone invented by the US Forest Service in 1944. "So I thought it was a perfect culture-jamming opportunity to take this very familiar conservationist and turn him into an anti-fracking activist," she tells the Voice.

The Forest Service, on the other hand, isn't a fan of LaRoe's representation of a Smokey who tries to prevent "faucet fires." Nearly a year after LaRoe began carrying images of a newly radicalized Smokey to protests, selling T-shirts, and circulating what soon became an Internet meme, the Forest Service asked LaRoe to cease and desist.

"The feds want to frack our national parks," LaRoe says. "It's not surprising that they're coming after me to try and censor my political speech."

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Wikimedia

Update: See statement from the DEC, and a letter from E&E explaining its relationship to IOGANY, at the bottom.

New York state might just have to scrap the latest draft of its environmental impact study on hydraulic fracturing. The New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) and state lawmakers are asking for a re-do after the discovery of a pretty large conflict of interest: Namely, that an environmental consulting group that helped prepare the draft study turned out to be a member of the Independent Oil & Gas Association (IOGA), a natural gas industry lobbying group.

In 2011, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation signed a $50 million contract with Ecology and Environment, Inc. (E&E), an environmental consulting firm. The company was also selected to provide an analysis of the economic impacts of fracking in the state. In August of 2011, E&E provided the DEC with that study, which some anti-fracking groups claimed was biased. The New York Times highlighted that skepticism when it pointed out that E&E "expedited permit applications for more than 200 pipeline and gas storage projects worldwide" in 2011, but couldn't establish a clear connection to any lobbying interest. That changed this week, when NYPIRG discovered that Ecology and Environment, Inc. appeared as a member of IOGA on a letter to Governor Cuomo, urging him to open New York to hydraulic fracturing.

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Okay. So, last year, Governor Cuomo and his Albany crew had no idea what the hell to do about this whole hydrofracking controversy. To frack or not to frack? That was the question holding up state legislators (but, apparently, not Mayor Bloomberg).

Cracking under pressure, Mr. Cuomo pushed back the decision to this month. Environmental activists have been hounding the Governor in recent weeks for stalling the procedure. Except it looks like they're going to have make it through winter.

The other day, the Governor's Office announced that it would, once again, have to really think about this one. According to the New York Times, the State's Health Department reports aren't in yet and they could take a while. Plus, once they're completed, there's a 45 day period where the public is invited to comment on the legislative proposal. Then, after that, who knows honestly.

So when are we going to make a decision on fracking in New York State?

Most likely never.

[jsurico15@gmail.com/@JSuricz]

New Yorkers believe that the economic benefits of drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale outweigh the risk of potentially harmful environmental repercussions, according to today's Quinnipiac University Poll.

The poll finds that 44 percent of New Yorkers think the economic pros of hydraulic fracturing outweigh its environmental cons -- while 42 percent say the potential damage would be too great.

Let's just hope that the poll respondents aren't relying too heavily on some of the shady hydraulic fracturing "science" that's been floating around lately -- like last spring's University at Buffalo study on fracking in the Marcellus Shale.

Last month the university shut down its Shale Resources and Society Institute amid findings of bias and compromised research coming out of the institute. The study released by SRSI in May found that the environmental risk of fracking in Pennsylvania, a hotbed for natural gas drilling, was decreasing and the risk associated with fracking in the Marcellus Shale would be even lower.

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In the late 1980s, George Mitchell, owner of Mitchell Energy & Development Corporation with a degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M, wanted a method that could find and extract formerly unseen deposits of natural gas. With a combination of horizontal drilling and something known as hydraulic fracturing, Mitchell pioneered the use of 'fracking' - a practice that pumps toxic chemicals into the Earth to simply push out the goods. Soon enough, gas companies picked up the money-making practice, spawning a new gas boom across America. 
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Does fracking make people sick?

The jury is largely still out on that one.

However, new info indicates that some claims about hydraulic fracturing's reportedly significant health risks appear to have been based on bad science.

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Can New York's environmental regulators keep up with fracking?

This is the question raised in a report recently published by Earthworks, a group that monitors the petroleum and mining industries.

Earthworks' new accountability project charges that New York's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the Division of Mineral Resources (DMR) -- which creates regulations and issues permits for oil and gas drilling -- already "struggles to adequately govern its existing oil and gas wells."

"The DEC is not prepared to oversee the expected shale gas boom," the report claims.

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Rock and roll, 62-ish, died Friday at 30 Rockefeller Center in Manhattan after a courageous battle with poor taste.

At the time of its death, rock and roll was surrounded by friends, family, and comedian Jimmy Fallon, as Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon -- the former wife and son (respectively) of Beatle John Lennon -- butchered the Bob Dylan classic "The Times They Are A-Changin'" in a poor attempt to protest the controversial natural gas extraction method of "fracking."

The contemporary take on a timeless classic included the younger Lennon repeatedly gurgling "don't frack my mother" -- as Ono (his mother) echoed "don't frack me" -- in an Oedipus-ian atempt at satire. It proved to be too much for the genre, and it was unable to survive the assault initially orchestrated by Ono when she broke up the Beatles in the late 1960s. 

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Can fracking pollute groundwater?

The jury's still out on this question, but a new study just came out linking hydraulic fracturing to mineral seepage into aquifers.

Because the research, conducted by Duke University scientists, connects fracking to natural mineral seepage -- not mining chemicals -- it doesn't do much to conclude definitively whether the process per se pollutes drinking water supplies.

Judging from the headlines, however, it would seem as if this study did make a case either for or against fracking's dangers -- with some media organizations flipping a shit and other media organizations voicing nonchalance.

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