Here's my latest story in the July/August issue of Sierra Magazine:
The supple hills of Southwestern Pennsylvania, once known for their grassy woodlands, red barns, and one-stoplight villages, bristle with new landmarks these days: drilling rigs, dark green condensate tanks, fields of iron conduits lumped with hissing valves, and long, flat rectangles carved into hilltops like overgrown swimming pools, brimming with umber wastewater. Tall metal methane flaring stacks periodically fill the night with fiery glares and jet engine roars. Roadbeds of crushed rock, guarded by No Trespassing signs, lie like fresh sutures across hayfields, deer trails, and backyards, admitting fleets of tanker trucks to the wellheads of America's latest energy revolution.
This is the new face of Washington County, the leading edge of the nation's breakneck shale gas boom. Natural gas boosters, President Barack Obama among them, have lauded it as a must-have, 100-year supply of clean, cheap energy that we cannot afford to pass up.
But unlocking half-billion-year-old hydrocarbon deposits carries a price, and not everyone shares in the bonanza. For every new shale well, 4 million to 8 million gallons of water, laced with potentially poisonous chemicals, are pumped into the ground under explosive pressure--a violent geological assault. And once unleashed, the gas requires a vast industrial architecture to be processed and moved from the wells to the world. Imagine the pipes, compressors, ponds, pits, refineries, and meters each shale well in Pennsylvania demands, planted next to horse farms, cornfields, houses, and schools. Then multiply by 5,000.
"It's changed everything, all right," says Pam Judy, a resident of Carmichaels, in neighboring Greene County. Her now-unsellable dream home sits 780 feet downwind of three enormous gas compressors, which appeared in 2009. "It sounds like helicopters in the backyard," she says. "The fumes make me dizzy. My children get headaches and nosebleeds. Some opportunity...."
Read more in "Fractured Lives" in the new issue of Sierra Magazine. I traveled to Pennsylvania and Ohio to investigate the health and environmental impact of fracking, and learned that the so-called 100-year supply of clean energy is really only proven to be 11 years worth of gas -- and that it's being extracted in such an extreme and wasteful manner that its greenhouse gas footprint exceeds that of coal.
One of the better kept secrets of this election season can be found here in California, where voters will decide whether or not America throws in the towel on global warming and energy independence. And no, I'm not referring to the unprecedented amounts of hot air being pumped into the atmosphere by the most expensive yet least informative gubernatorial campaign in history (though you can read my profile of Jerry Brown for a little background.)
It's California's Proposition 23 that's the sleeper star of these elections. The goal of this oil industry-backed ballot measure is to kill Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature achievement, the 4-year-old Global Warming Solutions Act and its mandate to reduce the state's carbon emissions by 2020 by 33%.
The tragedy is that the law has in the past four years created, not killed, green tech jobs (which have increased 5.5% during the recession while overall employment fell), and attracted billions in new investments in renewable energy, mostly in the form of big solar projects in the sun-drenched Mojave Desert. Since 2005, California has attracted more renewable energy investments than all other states combined, which are expected to result in a $20 billion, 112,000-job boost to the state economy by 2020, according to a University of California study. Conversely, the study finds that passage of Prop 23 will cost the state up to $80 billion and a half million jobs from rising fossil-fuel energy prices over the next ten years.
So the future of green energy and carbon reduction in America is, for the most part, in California voters' hands. Stay tuned.
POST-ELECTION UPDATE - The voters rejected Proposition 23 handily, 61% to 39%, a clear mandate for California to continue ramping up renewable energy and reining in carbon emissions. Now the next looming question is whether Congress will renew critical investment and tax incentives that have encouraged California's solar boom.
I've been enjoying writing for Sierra Magazine this year. My latest pieces reveal some promising university research on alternative energy and transportation, from cow-powered cars to microbes that produce biofuel while absorbing carbon (an ultimate win-win).
I also survey our worst energy energy flops, from cold fusion to corn ethanol, along with a couple other surprising failures. Read all about it here.
