Protecting our communities from fracked-gas industrialization
Protect Northern PA is an alliance of community members, environmental groups, civic organizations, and local businesses formed to critically examine potential air, water, public health, safety, and climate threats from the natural gas industry in the Marcellus Shale region of Pennsylvania. We share a concern that a gas-related industrial buildout will negatively and irreversibly change the environment and character of the region.
Luminous Landscape, oil painting by Brian Keeler. Keeler's depiction of the Susquehanna River directly across from the planned LNG facility in Wyalusing Township. Brian Keeler Studio, www.briankeeler.com
We are in the midst of a gas-industry rush to create and lock in markets for Pennsylvania fracked gas before the winds of change turn gas into the new coal…the past.
Who decides what our economy, our landscape, and our planet will look like? The fracked gas industry wants to make that decision for us. They want to propose and build their projects, to perpetuate an economy based on fossil gas extraction.
But the residents of our communities have a different vision – a vision based on protection of those things we value - clean water, clean air, and preservation of our scenic and historic attributes. This vision includes an economy drawing on renewable energy to support small businesses, locally based agriculture, tourism, recreation, and healthy resilient communities across the broad landscape of northern PA.
Upon learning of a major fracked-gas-consuming industrial project, we realized that such projects gain a foothold in the absence of robust discussion of all facets of the operation and among all affected communities. One particular project, the New Fortress Energy LNG plant in Wyalusing Township, typifies a local decision with wide-area harms. In the host township, the project might be about what happens inside the fence line; but, beyond the fence line, the project jeopardizes hundreds of communities in two states and creates an expanded source of globally significant carbon emissions for decades.
We asked ourselves, how was this huge project so readily permitted by a DEP How is it that one township of 495 households could impact so many other communities across two states? We wanted to know why we, the larger impacted “community,” had no voice? Why are we in a position of asking questions after the construction has started? How do we protect northern PA from similarly determined micro decisions with macro impacts?
And, how is it that a project with major externalities goes forward when it does not reflect a community consensus?
This website will attempt to explain the many facets and externalities of this project and thereby educate communities take a stand for our safety, our quality of life, and our children’s future.
Wyalusing Creek - October Light
Brian Keeler Studio, www.briankeeler.com
“Climate change is a civilization challenging ethical and moral problem and this understanding has enormous practical significance for policy”
November Light-French Azilum, PA
Brian Keeler Studio, www.briankeeler.com
The site-specific permit granted by DEP only considers onsite greenhouse gasses (GHG). It does not consider fugitive methane losses “upstream” of the project for fracking, pipelines, and compressor stations. It does not consider and methane boil-off during overland transport, fugitive methane during transloading onto ships, and worldwide shipping. Pennsylvania DEP's GHG tracking program has not begun to look at the LNG-for-export business.