Save California from Fracking
Trump's Bureau of Land Management wants to open up public lands in nine California counties to fracking and oil and gas extraction.
Please submit your public comments via the BLM website by June 10, 2019
We cannot allow the pristine and, in some cases, environmentally sensitive public lands in California to be destroyed to satiate the greed of Trump's cronies!
Sample
(It is best to personalize your response! Copy / pasted comments or overly similar comments may be grouped together and not counted separately. Add any personal experience you, your family or friends would have from fracking You may also create your own comments using information from the references below):
Here are some suggested comments. Some of these comments have been adapted from the comprehensive letter from California’s environmental and natural resources agencies responding to the BLM’s initial notice of intent related to the lease sales of federal lands in California, which you can read here.
Opening up new public lands to fracking and other fossil fuel extraction methods is contrary to California’s commitment to building a sustainable future without reliance on fossil fuels.
California has a statutory target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, and a plan to reduce petroleum consumption by 45 percent by 2030 to meet this target.
We need environmentally and economically sound energy strategies focused on the development of renewable energy sources.
Why despoil our environment to extract a resource we have decided to move away from?
Fracking involves the use of toxic and poorly understood chemicals.
These toxic chemicals get into the groundwater, especially in California, where fracking operations are dangerously shallow.
Our communities, waterways, wildlife, and outdoor economy will all be put at risk.
Let’s not open our beautiful public lands to fracking and drilling.
Let’s not sacrifice our health, wildlife and climate to profit the oil and gas industry.
In a state where water is so precious — to agriculture, human populations, and wildlife — clean water is worth more than oil.
Personalize your response!
Context
On April 27, 2019, Trump’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released a draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) intended to open up public lands and mineral estates in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Kern, and six other California counties to oil companies. Some of the targeted parcels are owned by the BLM; in other cases, BLM owns the underlying mineral rights. After a 45-day public comment period, the EIS will be finalized, and BLM can auction off the drilling rights to these parcels for as little as $2.00 per acre.
The parcels on the chopping block include some of the wildest and most pristine areas along the Central Coast and Central Valley – lands in and around national parks, national monuments, and national forests, as well as state and local parks and preserves. Many are in areas of critical environmental concern. Neighboring cities, schools and farms will also be impacted.
Background
Fracking is an extreme oil extraction process that involves injecting chemicals and fluids at high pressure underground to access oil or natural gas. Environmentalists are concerned that fracking can contaminate groundwater and increase the risk of seismic activity. The public lands in question here sit over groundwater that supplies neighboring areas with water for agricultural and human uses. In addition, geologic conditions and hydraulic fracturing practices in California makes fracking particularly hazardous – fracking in this state occurs at unusually shallow depths, which heightens concerns about groundwater contamination and other environmental impacts.
The draft EIS is the latest step in Trump’s efforts to eliminate environmental protections and facilitate fracking on federally controlled lands. As you may recall, one of the administration’s first actions after the inauguration was to rescind Obama-era fracking regulations. As Senator Kamala Harris put it:
"Under this administration, California’s beautiful public lands and its outdoor economy are under direct threat, and we must stand up against this active effort to chip away at vital environmental protections."
The proposed action would end a five year moratorium on leasing federal land to oil companies in California. No federal lands in the state have been subject to such leases since 2013, when a federal judge found that the BLM violated environmental laws by issuing oil leases in Monterey County without fully considering the environmental impact of fracking.
The supplemental EIS is the result of a lawsuit filed in the US District Court, Central District of California by Earthjustice, representing the Center for Biological Diversity and Los Padres ForestWatch, challenging BLM’s California oil leasing plan. In 2016, the judge found that BLM ignored the impacts of fracking in its original environmental studies and, in 2017, BLM agreed to produce a supplemental EIS analyzing the potential environmental effects of fracking.
You can find more information from the Los Padres ForestWatch.
References:
https://indivisibleeb.org/2019/05/01/save-california-from-fracking/