Yesterday, despite thousands of calls, letters, and
petitions to Senators, the bill to permit fracking was passed in the Senate
Appropriations Committee 13 to 6 with only a handful of comments on the amendments by
the Senators, before permitting the shortest possible public comment period
they could allow while still pretending that was part of the process, and no
further debate. This tactic was made possible by putting the
fracking bill last, with only twenty minutes left in the last and final session
and with most of those minutes taken up by reading the amendments. A couple of Senators asked “questions” that
honestly felt staged and rehearsed to me, especially in light of the responses
they received. More citizens came for this bill than any other, and they had
put in appearance slips at 10 am.
Clearly, the Senate Committee members were aware that people were there
to speak about this bill and though many had driven great distances to speak
and patiently waited all day, they were restricted to one minute or less to
voice their concerns and the Sierra Club lobbyist was denied, ostensibly due to
time constraints, from reading a passage from the bill that they likely did not
want the public to hear.
For a long time, my position has been that the government is
broken and I don’t want to have any part in it.
I am a very empathetic person and easily take in negative energy. I suspected I would become physically ill if
I entered into this arena and I was right, but boy was it worth seeing
firsthand–despite how incredibly discouraged I am as a citizen. I really believe that a Senate Hearing is a
process everyone should attend once in his or her lifetime, so that you become
aware just how your rights are being upheld or denied or whether you in fact
have any. Before I attended this
hearing, I suspected with we live in a Corporatocracy and not a Democracy. Now, I know this is most assuredly true and
that it all boils down to the power of Big Oil, which often appears to be wielded through
corruption, manipulation, and the stripping away of human rights, as well as
the rights of landowners and the land itself.
I do not believe this is at all what our forefathers had in mind when they
established our government and wrote the Constitution.
At the last water rally I attended in Tallahassee, David
Cullen, the Sierra Club lobbyist, told me that if I really followed through
with my stance and gave up on the government, then I was totally abdicating my
rights. And let me just add, that he is
a true gentleman and appears to be extremely respectful of the governmental
process and must at least want to believe you can work within it to accomplish
your goals or he likely wouldn’t work so hard at what he does. He spends countless hours going through every
bill and amendment in great detail, to make sure he understands the
intent. We need to applaud these people,
because the way bills are often worded makes them difficult to understand without
an interpreter and I frankly doubt if all the Senators understand what they are
voting on either, especially when the people they are supposed to represent
aren’t permitted to explain their objections and there is no time left for debate
before the vote. We are putting the
future of our State in the hands of our elected representatives, so I think it
is important to consider their qualifications, how deeply they study the bills,
whether they engage in true debate that examines the consequences of their
decisions, and whether they are free of undue influence. After yesterday, I cannot honestly vouch for
many of them.
Before we went back into the meeting after the noon recess,
David’s wife told me she was happy I was there and that I should never give up
my rights. They might try to take them
away, she added, but I shouldn’t abdicate them without a fight. Yesterday my rights were taken away, as were
the rights of all citizens in Florida who do not buy into the power of Big
Oil. The environment, I have known for a
long while, is without rights in this State, but until yesterday I was unaware
just how egregious the stripping of rights of Florida’s citizens truly has
become.
There were many bills up for consideration, as this was the
last day of these hearings. The first
bill had to do with the ending of the LIP program and the dire economic straits
hospitals are in. Ten minutes before I
entered the hearing room, I learned my mother had experienced a transient
stroke the night before and it had taken seven hours for her to get a bed in the
ER because so many people without coverage were using it as a doctor’s office. I was
indeed convinced that keeping hospitals open was critical and applies to
everyone, no matter what party they belong to.
Obviously, this was a worthy issue to consider and I could see why so
many people had flooded the hearing room.
There clearly is no way that hospitals can close, or the health of the
population will be even more threatened than it already is now. People like my mother and the senators
considering appropriating funds for hospitals might have a life-threatening
emergency at any time and need to go to one. Hospitals aren’t just for the
homeless or people on welfare, so they get support. Yet fracking is just as serious an issue for
the health of every person in this State no matter what party they belong to or
how rich or poor, and the way this issue was handled in the Senate yesterday
was appalling.
Merrillee Jipsom-Malwitz, of Our Santa Fe River, Inc. and
Save our Suwannee, Inc., and I arrived a little before the session began at
10:00 in the morning. She planned to
speak and I had driven up with her to talk about her work on behalf of these
two rivers and all she had been doing to educate the public about
fracking. The bill about closing the gap
on Federal Lip money that was running out took the whole morning until recess
to consider. When we returned, to the hearing room many other smaller bills
pertaining to settlements, alimony, and other issues were voted on, so many in
fact that before the water bill even came up, I had to go out and feed the
parking meter. While I was walking to
the parking lot, I suddenly realized that they were going to address the
fracking bill last, probably to leave little time to address it and in the
hopes that many people had left by then.
No one in the hearing room seemed to have an agenda, just papers that
had bill numbers on them that weren’t being followed in any order. Discussion about the education bill went on
for at least 45 minutes, even though the senators had conceded early on that
they were going to have to continue their conversations later. I couldn’t help
but wonder if there was intentional stalling going on. There was a small pretense that comments were
going to have to be restricted to get through the agenda, but that didn’t
really happen until the fracking bill was up and then they got very serious
about time limits.
Though I believe very strongly in the importance of
education, women’s rights to alimony and support, especially when they try to
re-enter the workplace in middle age like I have had to do, and compensating
people when they have suffered wrongful harm, many of these issues could be
revisited and remedied at a later date. Even the water quality bill keeps
coming up for consideration on a yearly basis.
Standards can and are changed constantly, though albeit in Florida the
changes often relax the law and make the standards less stringent (one water amendment
voted upon stated water quality must now be seriously harmful and not just
harmful, probably to protect Big Sugar) but that is another issue.
The problem with the fracking bill is that if it gets
enacted and oil companies begin drilling, there is no way the damage can be
undone. It will be too late. For something of such serious magnitude, did
this not deserve more than twenty minutes–especially since so many of those minutes
had to be spent reading amendments and not examining the overarching issue of
fracking or debating whether it should be allowed at all? Why was this issue being silenced, and why
was it only being considered in a Senate Appropriations Committee? The severity of the impacts of fracking are
beyond monetary, as the waste from it can never in fact be cleaned up no matter
how much money you throw at it. The
argument supporters of this bad bill frequently use is that any regulation is
better than no regulation.
Unfortunately, that presupposes allowing fracking in the first place and
it is way too dangerous for many reasons citizens tried to spell out that were
either not allowed to be voiced or were given short shrift. Senator Joyner withdrew several amendments
that would have made fracking difficult or impossible with little explanation. Senator Dean was not there to discuss his
amendment that proposed a moratorium on drilling until testing was
complete. From what I had observed all
day, the fracking bill was being handled in a very different and strange way.
Senator Negron did ask if under the new amendments fracking
would be more or less safe, but this only provided an opportunity for Senator Richter
to use the fallacious argument spelled out above. The Senator Latvala chimed in that he too had
received lots of calls from his area and asked for some reassurance from the
DEP that it was a good bill. Shockingly,
Ms. Cobb from the DEP came up to the podium and said with a big smile, “It is a
good bill.” That was it. What her grounds were for considering this a
good bill she clearly did not feel she was being asked to specify, nor did she
appear to feel it was necessary for the people in the room to know. Her smile alone should have reassured us
all. I was frankly very offended and the
thought came to me that the DEP no longer deserves to have the P in its name,
because it is clearly not protecting the environment, at least in Florida. Only one Senator, Senator Montford, said that
he felt the bill deserved more time to be analyzed and that he would like to
have questions answered and the bill and amendments explained in more
detail. He represents many of the
counties where fracking could take place, including Leon County, the very
location of our State Capitol. Of
course, there was no time for that.
Here are some of the issues Senator Montford and the rest of
us should have been allowed to hear, and these are just the ones I have learned
about:
1)
The type of fracking to be used in Florida is
much more dangerous than typical fracking, and will require 10 to 20% acidizing
versus 1%. With the limestone geology of
our state, which is essentially already naturally fracked because of its porous
nature, EPA records show that injected fluids might migrate and surface,
especially in improperly plugged wells from the 1940s.
2)
We do not want these chemicals to ever come in contact
with our water supply. It is known that
high levels of toxic benzene are found in fracking wastewater. Exposure to benzene will make everyone very
ill, no matter what party affiliation they have. Ray Bellamy and Ron Saff, both from
Physicians for Social Responsibility, were there to explain all the health
issues that would ensue, although they too were cut short. To make matters worse many of the chemicals
in fracking wastewater are considered proprietary and there is a huge screen of
confidentiality about exactly what would be released, even though these
chemicals could end up in our water supply.
Once we become ill, we would not be able to get into the wells to find
out from what.
3)
For the first time in human history, we are
essentially taking water completely out of the hydrological cycle. Fracking wastewater is so toxic that it has
to be injected deep into the earth. It
cannot be cleaned up. Even if the wells
were never to fail, which is highly unlikely give how frequently wells,
contamination ponds, pipelines etc. have failed since the oil industry began,
fracking would still be reducing our water supply and as the world is running
out of water and more serious wars will erupt over that than over oil, this
does not seem wise at all. In California,
fracking uses 82 billion gallons of water a year, which is enough supply for
the populations of San Diego and San Francisco for an entire year, according to
a recent article in The Washington Post. In Florida, we are already draining the
aquifer at an alarming rate and we are simultaneously suffering the effects of
saltwater intrusion, which will only get worse.
In fact, I have been told the springs will not last my lifetime.
4)
Not all the wastewater ends up in injection
wells. Some of it still comes up as back
flow and that water is likely quite toxic too.
5)
Many landowners do not own the mineral rights on
their property. If you don’t and the oil
companies discover you have oil, they can drill on your property. Additionally if they drill within ½ mile of
your property, your well water supply will likely be contaminated and your
property values are going to go down.
6)
If Big Oil is allowed to extract all the oil in
its reserves, the planet will become uninhabitable from pollution and the
effects of climate change. Wall Street
analysts are aware that oil stocks are seriously overvalued for this reason,
but this is something Big Oil absolutely does not want us to know.
These are very serious issues that the very survival of the
planet and the human species revolves around.
No wonder the whole atmosphere of the hearing room changed when the
fracking bill finally made it to the floor.
Right before it was announced, I noticed the Senators’ gazes becoming
more intense and people standing at the sides of the room began puffing their
suits. It was as if their body language
indicated a flexing of muscles designed to keep the citizens in order and make
sure this bill made it swiftly through at all costs, despite the wishes of the
public. I had to wonder how many people
in this room had been paid off in one way or another.
I am not an angry person and consider myself an advocate and
not an activist. Making it through this
day required all my inner strength and grace and repeated consideration of how
the Dalai Lama might handle being in this space. I am so grateful to Dave Cullen, Merrillee
Malwitz-Jipson, Ray Bellamy, Ron Saff, Amalie Datz, John and Gale Dickert, Karen Dwyer, and the
countless others who have either appeared at these hearings, or organized
virtual events. They do their very best
to educate the public and ensure that our voices are heard and the repeatedly
go back into the fire over and over again.
The time is now to band together and start from the bottom up to create
change on all levels: our dependence on energy, who we elect, the way the
political system functions, all of it. Sadly,
the system is even more broken than I anticipated it would be, and that breaks
my heart when I think of the earth, my children, and future generations for as
long as there are any.
