County Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava to propose resolution supporting a ban on fracking in Florida … by gimleteye

What a breath of fresh air to have a county commissioner like Daniella Levine Cava, who has proposed the county commission pass a resolution to encourage the state legislature to ban fracking in Florida.

Without pressure from local governments, state legislators are likely to pay attention only to what the fossil fuel industry lobbyists are promoting in Tallahassee.

It's their deep pockets and promises against our quality of life, health and property rights.

Fracking into Florida's porous underlying geology is utter, complete madness. The toxic flood of hydraulically injected fluids, to extract oil and gas, has created many problems -- unfixable ones -- in other parts of the nation with geology much, much more "hardened" than ours.

In Florida, most of the layers of earth beneath our feet are no denser than the sand on our beaches. Florida is the number one sinkhole state in the nation for exactly that reason. What are the chances that fracking fluid (the composition of which, by the way, the industry has successfully prevented from public disclosure because they deem it to be a "trade secret") will not contaminate our drinking water supply? Zero.

Zero, as in zero.

We have big enough problems with state-sponsored aquifer exploitation through aquifer storage and recovery wells and underground injection control wells. It's an issue the media covers rarely if ever.

The evidence is protected behind massive state agencies, blocking disclosure wherever they can. I know, because in the early oughts, I spent more than two years trying to penetrate the state veils of secrecy around Underground Injection Control wells. Those wells are how most of the wastewater in Florida is ultimately disposed. After treatment, billions of gallons of wastewater is injected into so many deep wells that represented on a map, the state of Florida would look like a piece of Swiss cheese.

Although the impacts of deep injection wells, like those used for fracking, are known as essential engineering infrastructure to keep nearly 20 million Floridians in place, very few people understand how, more than a decade ago, a Bush appointed 3rd District Court of Appeals in Atlanta rejected a Miami Sierra Club Clean Water Lawsuit against the relaxation of safe drinking water standards that led, directly, to the proliferation of tracking and BILLIONS in profits to corporations and political insiders facilitating the oil and gas industries.

At Wednesday's Board of County Commissioners meeting, elected officials have a chance to get common sense on the record. Call your county commissioner in the morning and tell him or her to support the resolution proposed by Commissioner Levine Cava.


TITLE
RESOLUTION URGING THE FLORIDA LEGISLATURE TO ENACT SB 166 OR SIMILAR LEGISLATION PROHIBITING HYDRAULIC FRACTURING IN THE STATE OF FLORIDA

BODY
WHEREAS, hydraulic fracturing is the process of pumping a fluid into or under the surface of the ground in order to create factures in existing rock for the purpose of producing or recovering oil or gas; and
WHEREAS, Florida’s water supply comes from highly permeable limestone formations which are vulnerable to contamination from hydraulic rock-fracturing activities designed to extract hydrocarbons; and
WHEREAS, Miami-Dade gets all of its water from groundwater sources, including the Floridan Aquifer; and
WHEREAS, Florida’s oil and gas regulations, Chapter 377, Florida Statutes, and Rules 62C-25 through 30, Florida Administrative Code, make no reference to hydraulic fracturing; and
WHEREAS, in January 2014, an oil drilling company in Collier County was discovered to be using high-pressure injections of acid and water to blast open bedrock to gain access to oil reserves near underground aquifers; and
WHEREAS, in July 2014, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection revoked the drilling permits of the oil drilling company and fined the company $25,000; and
WHEREAS, hydraulic fracturing poses potential risks for contaminating the Floridan Aquifer, the source of drinking water for nearly 10 million Floridians; and
WHEREAS, this Board believes it is imperative to take measures to adequately protect our State and County’s water supply and environment through better regulation of oil drilling methods and extraction techniques; and
WHEREAS, voters in Florida overwhelmingly approved Florida Constitutional Amendment 1, the Florida Water and Land Conservation Initiative, which is designed to protect Florida’s natural resources, including the state’s drinking water; and
WHEREAS, Senate Bill (SB) 166 would prohibit hydraulic fracturing in the State of Florida, and has been filed for consideration during the 2015 session of the Florida Legislature by Senators Darren Soto (D-Kissimmee) and Dwight Bullard (D-Cutler Bay); and
WHEREAS, this Board would like to express its support for SB 166 or similar legislation prohibiting hydraulic fracturing in the State of Florida,
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, FLORIDA, that this Board:
Section 1. Urges the Florida Legislature to enact SB 166 or similar legislation prohibiting hydraulic fracturing in the State of Florida.
Section 2. Directs the Clerk of the Board to transmit a certified copy of this resolution to the Governor, Senate President, House Speaker, State Senator Darren Soto, State Senator Dwight Bullard, and the Chair and remaining Members of the Miami-Dade State Legislative Delegation.
Section 3. Directs the County’s state lobbyists to advocate for the passage of the legislation set forth in Section 1 above, and authorizes and directs the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs to amend the 2015 State Legislative Package to include this item.

What's the difference between the Collier County Commission and the Miami-Dade County Commission when it comes to standing up to the State and Big Polluters? … by gimleteye

Collier County doesn't come much into view from Miami. At the risk of being "verbose, repetitive and pedantic, " (the criticism of an EOM regular), Collier County is on the other side of Tamiami Trail.

Collier County, facing west to the Gulf of Mexico, shares a hotly contested interior where suburban sprawl has had its way.

Miami-Dade shares the Everglades, literally, with Collier.

Last week, the Collier County Commission did something that its bigger neighbor, Miami-Dade, could never find the willpower to do: it stood up to a big polluter.

The case involved county permitting related to oil drilling and acid fracking. The county commission, faced with a clear violation by a permittee from Texas, Hughes and Co., stared down both the state and the acid fracker when evidence -- presented by an environmental organization -- showed the state of Florida has proven incapable of monitoring and enforcing against well drilling operations in the past.

"In a live update from the commission meeting, Naples News reporter Greg Stanley tweeted: "No trust here for the DEP or any other state or federal regulators when it comes to oil. Not competent or capable enough to enforce safety." (Broward New Times, link below.)

In 2007, the Miami-Dade County Commission ignored testimony from environmental groups -- ignored evidence provided by its own staff and by the state -- and surrendered zoning to FPL for its expansion ambitions including $26 billion in two new nuclear plants without any evidence that the environment -- in this case, Biscayne National Park, could be protected. Just wrote off its responsibility.

What's worse, evidence against FPL involved clear fact that the leviathan has violated its stipulated agreement to protect water quality in South Dade through its existing nuclear reactors. Briefly, highly saline cooling water is drifting underground from FPL cooling canals at Turkey Point.

I'm glad Collier County is handling the acid fracking issue for Florida because if it was left to the Miami Dade County Commission, there would be a fracking well wherever a big campaign contributor wanted one.

Read the report on what the Collier County commission did, from Broward New Times.

Keystone Pipeline Sucks But Bill Nelson Sucks More for Voting In Favor. By Geniusofdespair

From Common Dreams:

"In a 62-37 vote late Friday, the US Senate passed a non-binding amendment calling for the approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

Environmental groups and climate activists were quick to condemn the vote, but said the "symbolic vote" was valuable because it revealed which members of the Senate have received the message on the seriousness posed by climate change and which continue to bend to the demands of industry lobbyists.

A post-vote analysis by Oil Change International, in fact, revealed that supporters of the amendment "received 3.5 times more in campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests" than those who voted against it. In total, the researchers found that supporters took an average of $499,648 from the industry before voting for the pipeline, for a total of $30,978,153."

Senator Bill Nelson actually voted with Marco Rubio, and Inhofe. Bad, bad Bill! You should have followed your fellow party members.

Deepwater Horizon: "managing expectations" of oil spill, Part II ... by gimleteye

Deepwater trouble on the horizon: oil discovered floating near source of Gulf of Mexico spill (Photo gallery, video)
Ben Raines, Press-Register
Posted: 08/24/2011 7:17 PM

MOBILE, Alabama -- Oil is once again fouling the Gulf of Mexico around the Deepwater Horizon well, which was capped a little over a year ago.

Oysters, Tarpon and Tornadoes ... by gimleteye

For the past two springs, migrating tarpon in the Florida Keys have been plentiful. This is, on face value, startingly good news in an age of dwindling fisheries. It is perplexing, though, because water quality in the Keys has sharply declined in recent decades.

Miami Herald fishing writer Susan Cocking suggests—because there is no knowing—that tarpon in the past two seasons have been attracted to warmer water temperatures. For certain, the same warm gulf that is half the equation of the massive spawn of tornadoes in the American south is good for tarpon. There is another possible explanation.

Tarpon are migratory and spend a good part of their life cycle traversing the Gulf of Mexico, from Mexico along the Texas coast into Gulf waters, then around the Florida peninsula towards North Carolina. In other words, through the region where Deepwater Horizon triggered the worst environmental disaster in US history.

We can't ask these prehistoric creatures whether bad Gulf water chased them across the Gulf into the Keys, instead of lingering where food supply may be even more scarce; but these stupid fish are pretty damn smart when it comes to getting out of harm's way. They didn't survive millions of years on luck.

They are hard wired to evade threats, and that's more than I can say about our highly evolved species. We are wired to the short-term. In a recent speech, former vice president Al Gore noted-- with some humor-- that we respond to the scrolling bars at the bottom of CNN and Fox as a matter of instinct: back in the day when predators chased us, failing to capture the smallest changes in our environment could be the difference between life and death.

Some of us are resentful that science will never overtake the complexities of a changing climate or our influences. But we do have guides from the past. Dr. Harold Wanless, the chair of the geology department at the University of Miami, has been studying core samples taken from the tip of the Everglades. The relic oyster shells and fossil record shows that sea level rise, as a consequence of global climate events, has exposed and submerged Florida several times. Science also shows that when sea levels rose, they rose rapidly.

Can we learn to pay our debts, forward, instead of consuming everything at hand with self-righteous justifications? We are a remarkable species. Moreover, in America we crow about "exceptionalism" but our politics are as base today as they have ever been. The question for civilization is: can we by-pass what harms us and reverse climate change. Can we change our behaviors without the assurances of science to predict exactly where the next tornado will strike? We had better adapt quickly, because the lessons from Florida is that putting the pieces back together once the whole has been broken-- the Everglades-- makes us less likely than tarpon to survive what comes next.

The Republican 5 Step Program For America ... by gimleteye

If you are voting GOP, do you know what you are voting for? Here is the Republican 5 Step Program:


1) De-regulate, because industry can protect people better than government. (Example: federal supervision of public lands, oil lease program)

2) Capture regulatory agencies that can't be trusted, using political appointees to make sure regulators and the science they depend on are repressed, shuttered, and redacted. (Example: the former Bureau of Management Services, Department of Interior)

3) Divide and Conquer environmentalists by providing exclusive political access to one or two "soft" green or "brown" green groups. (Example: Gulf restoration groups funded by Big Oil)

4) Coordinate media to persuade voters that regulations are bad for jobs, bad for business, and bad for taxpayers. (Example: Fox News)

5) Elect GOP officials to high government positions who reiterate the theme that individual liberty is better protected by private profit than by liberals, unions or the government they trust. (Example: any national Republican official since Ronald Reagan, but especially George Bush and Dick Cheney)

The example of the oil industry is the most visible, of the GOP model. But in Florida, you could take your pick of issues where government regulation runs straight up against land speculators. Take the issue close to EOM's heart: growth management. The GOP-led Florida legislature has been hell bent on dismantling growth management. During the two terms of Jeb Bush, the divide and conquer strategy among environmentalist groups was in full force. Bush officials engaged in active pressure of media on growth issues. Every GOP leader in the legislature-- including Marco Rubio, now candidate for US Senate-- was expected to and did toe the party line in respect to easing controls on regulations protecting water quality, quality of life, and the integrity of land use planning. Special interests associated with Florida's model of growth-at-any-cost have funded the effort to stop Amendment 4.

And for a View How It All Turns Out:

New York Times
October 28, 2010
Firms Knew of Cement Flaws Before Spill, Panel Says
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — Halliburton knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable but still went ahead with the job, the presidential commission investigating the accident said on Thursday.

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday.

Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.

Although Mr. Bartlit does not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he makes clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressured oil and gas out of the well bore, there would not have been an accident.

Is it safe to eat Gulf shrimp and fish, now? or now? or, now? by gimleteye

The University of Georgia came out with an analysis yesterday that sharply contradicts the claim that most of the Gulf oil from the Deepwater catastrophe simply disappeared into thin air. (I called readers' attention to the work of the University of Georgia in early June.) According to UGA scientists, the vast majority of oil is disappearing into water column, trapped by layers of cold and salinity. From there, microscopic beads of remnant oil will leach into the food chain, starting with micro-organisms, and accumulate up into the seafood we like to eat. The uncertainties from there pile up like tar balls. When carcinogens are measured in parts per million, and when food and water safety is a lesser concern of government officials than covering their asses, getting re-elected, or safeguarding their pensions, knowing when Gulf shrimp and fish is safe to eat is an individual decision. Is it safe to eat Gulf seafood now, tomorrow, or, the day after? If you are fishing in so-called clean water, is it possible the snapper you catch might have swum or fed from water through which a toxic oil plume passed? It is the same kind of question that confronts homeowners in The Acreage in Palm Beach where cancer clusters have popped up. When do you cut your losses and give up what you value-- and what cost you a lot of money-- just to protect your health? Environmental catastrophes are forcing people to flee from what they value and where they have invested. These catastrophes are created by bad decisions. Shouldn't there be a law criminalizing decision-makers who push citizens into this race to the bottom? Now, all the talk in the Gulf is about getting federal regulators off the back of the oil industry. We need jobs! So, who will then be held accountable if ten years from now, you get a life-threatening disease that may or may not have been caused by oil in your food supply? The answer is, no one. Maybe you also watched a food inspector in the Gulf, on NBC Nightly News, do a "smell test" for oil in fish fillets in a restaurant. Like that's a very scientific method for protecting your health. Stick your shnozz in a piece of raw grouper. No thank you. Pass the "organic" kale, please.

Pro and Con on Offshore Drilling Ban in the Miami Herald Today. by geniusofdespair

When reading these pro and con editorials in the Miami Herald, you MUST educate yourself on who is writing them. I have no love lost with Eric Draper, as I feel he makes deals sometimes but Barney Bishop I totally disagree with on everything. He is not credible in my opinion. I have a file of 12 posts on him in the index at right. I would totally ignore his argument and listen to Draper on this one.

General Rule: When given the chance to vote on something: You should always take it. Second Rule: Never listen to Barney Bishop. He does not want to help people, only business and corporations, and he always does it in a cocky, nasty way which grates on me.

Governor Bobby Jindal's Stupid Idea. By Geniusofdespair

Against the advice of environmental experts, offshore oil drilling proponent, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal had an idea to protect the shoreline: to create artificial islands. Lots of cost was involved with little results according to Discovery News. They said:

Two months ago, against the advice of many coastal scientists, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal began furiously campaigning for the construction of six artificial islands to hold back the advancing oil. The federal government quickly granted Jindal his wish, and construction on the islands has been continuing apace.

But images taken of one construction site near the northern edge of the Chandeleur islands appear to show the sea washing away a giant sand berm over the course of about two weeks.

The first image, at top, was taken on June 25. The second, below, was taken July 7. Can't this guy Jindal get anything right?

Marco Rubio, have you seen Pensacola Beach this morning? By Geniusofdespair

Pensacola beach at 9 am today. Wonder what the Anti-Crist, Drill-Baby-Drill Marco Rubio would say about this surf on one of the country's top beaches. He has been staying clear of Pensacola Beach for some reason.


Gregg Hall, the videographer, says that they are dumping rock pit sand on the pure white beach at Pensacola. There are dump trucks in this video. Are they taking sand away or covering up the mess? Gregg seems to think they are ADDING sand.

Meet Gregg from Pensacola. by Geniusofdespair

This was taken this morning of Gregg Hall by another videographer. I feel like I know Gregg as I have watched almost all of his daily videos of the Gulf spill on Pensecola Beach. He almost always starts out with: "Okay guys"...and then the awful report follows.

Pensacola Beach this morning. By Geniuofdespair

Gregg Hall posted 4 videos this morning.

Pensacola Beach Report. By Geniusofdespair

And in Alabama:

The Little Crab that Couldn't. By Geniusofdespair

If you don't see a video hit here.

Remember my blog June 20th - just 10 days ago - where I took a video of a crab digging a hole? I said "I wonder if he could complete this flawless maneuver with oil lodged in his joints?" Well I have my answer now with this video from Pensacola. And it is a big fat NO!

An Hour Ago: Tar in Surf at Pensacola Beach. By Geniusofdespair

30 second Video: Pensacola beach at 8:45 this morning.

Pensacola Beach: Oil Filled Tidal Pool. By Geniusofdespair

The latest video. Also watch the dying crab video Greg Hall has posted.

Pensacola Beach 4pm Report: Hiding the Tar Balls. By Geniusofdespair

See my post earlier today on the sign cover-up on Pensacola Beach. What is going on? You can't just bury the tar balls. Don't see video, hit this link.

Gregg Hall's Video Tapes from Pensacola. By Geniusofdespair

Every day Gregg Hall is video taping the toxic oil on the beach in Pensacola, Florida - I posted one a few days ago. You can Subscribe to his YouTube page or visit it often. He updates often. He found these curious covered up signs along the beach. Gregg tore one open (see above) and it is a warning to beach-goers. Why are they covered? Hall exposed oil under the sand in one of his videos, does the cover come off the signs ONLY when oil is visible on the beach? Below are two maps, one showing about where Gregg is taking his videos in Pensacola, the other is a zoom out of the coastal area with a red "A" marking so you can see where he is videotaping in relation to the Gulf Coast. Hit on maps to enlarge them.

Gregg says in his profile:
I love the water and anything to do with it... I walk/jog the beach every morning for over an hour and I am in the gym after work then usually some biking on the beach...I love to snorkel, fish, dive, kayak, etc. He includes this on his page:

"Only after the last tree has been cut down...
Only after the last river has been poisoned...
Only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten." - Cree Indian Prophecy

Pensacola Beach Covered with Oil Video by Gregg Hall - June 23rd. By Geniusofdespair

Don't see video, use this link.

NOAA Chief on the Oil Catastrophe. By Genius of despair

Dr. Janet Lubchenco talked about the Oil Catastrophe in the gulf on Wednesday at the Public Meeting of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force June 23 at the County Commission Chambers. If you don't see video hit this link.