Take a bow big oil

Virginia is an important state in this year’s elections. On the presidential side, both President Obama and Governor Romney desperately want to carry the state. Virginia is also home to one of the nation’s most closely watched senate race as two former governors Kaine and Allen vie for the open seat.

Because Virginia is receiving so much political attention, numerous candidates for office are pandering, err, talking to voters on the campaign trail. In Virginia, energy issues are beginning to dominate the political sphere. Within that sphere, big oil is making its mark.

Continue reading

Why George Will is Wrong

By July 8th 2012, Colorado was experiencing its most intense wildfire in state history. By July 8th, nearly everyone in the Mid-Atlantic learned the meaning of a new word – “Derecho”, a sudden, powerful windstorm that cut off power to millions of people and killed more than 20 in the region. By July 8th, farmers in the heartland and throughout other parts of the country had come to grips with shrinking yields (and shrinking profits) caused by a punishing drought and extremely high temperatures.

On July 8th, during ABC’s Sunday public affairs show, in response to a discussion about rising temperatures and climate change, political columnist George Will said the reasons for the recent heat wave is because of one word: “summer”. “What’s so unusual about this?”, he pondered. Mr. Will, your ignorance is astounding.

 

Continue reading

Stop the Frack Attack Rally: A Success

This post was written by CCAN summer intern Rachel Conrad.

As I fully submerged myself in a refreshingly cool fountain at the end of the Stop the Frack Attack rally, drowning out the chants of, “Whose water? Our water! Whose water? Our water!” I (and I imagine hundreds of other people) re-affirmed the importance of organizing and spreading information about the tremendous injustices that are being committed against our planet and its inhabitants through fossil fuel extraction. 

Continue reading

Ten Years of Real Change

Chesapeake Climate Action Network has reached its tenth birthday and a lot of progress has been accomplished in this past decade. There have been moratoriums on offshore drilling and the birth of a booming offshore wind economy. Coal plants have been shut down and pipelines have been delayed. We look forward to leading the charge in these crucial next ten years of progress.

 

Continue reading

“Stories of the Harmed” in Williamsport

This past Sunday I was in Williamsport for the Tour de Frack event at the Desert Rose Cafe.  Below is a great blog cross posted from Climate Howard: http://climatehoward.wordpress.com/  a blog written by Elisabeth Hoffman in Howard County.

 

Here’s how testing companies determine if your water has been contaminated by fracking. First, they don’t step foot on the property.  The drilling company provides all the information, such as about the geology of the area, and then the testing company decides whether the  water was likely to have been contaminated by fracking. In the case of families from Connoquenessing Township in Butler County, north of Pittsburgh, the testing company determined that the drillers could not have contaminated the water because the drilling operation was downhill from the wells. Based on that report, the state determined the water safe to drink. And the driller stopped providing substitute water. 

This is the procedure Jason Bell (pictured here, photo by Ruth Alice White) described when he visited Williamsport in western Maryland Sunday afternoon at a stop along Tour de FRACK’s 400-mile bike trek to Washington, DC, for the Stop the Frack Attack protest July 28. He carries with him 6 gallons of brown, murky, “safe-to-drink water” from tap water near a fracking site in Connoquenessing Township, PA.

Continue reading

Why I'm Fighting Fracking

This blog post was written by Michael Greenberg who is one of CCAN’s summer interns. He’s been working hard to get the word out about the Stop the Frack Attack rally happening on the 28th! 

“If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.” 
― Paul Hawken

Author and activist Paul Hawken, who was speaking about the world’s future in general, could well have been describing the corrupt and dangerous practice of fracking and the movement that has arisen in order to protect our civilization from its dangers.

Continue reading

Artists Against Fracking

Check out this awesome video of Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon on Jimmy Fallon singing “Don’t Frack My Mother.”  They went on to announce a new initiative “Artists Against Fracking.”  It is a really cool website with lots of information about fracking and a long list of artists fighting against it. 

 

More and more people are joining the fight against fracking: don’t forget about the huge Stop the Frack Attack Rally happening on the 28th!   

Continue reading

In Storm-Battered Virginia, CCAN Interns Work Towards a Greener Future

 

*Cross-posted from We Are Powershift.org*

Virginia students are at it once again! This summer, CCAN’s internship program has expanded to college campuses, and interns are working on the campaign to expose Dominion-Virginia Power all over the state. They are working on a variety of things, including gathering petitions, writing letters to the editor, and building networks of CCAN activities in their communities and on their campuses. The students are excited, because this is the first chance some have had to finally take action on saving the climate. Indeed, this excitement becomes especially relevant when you look at their results. In the last week of June alone, the on-campus team collected over 200 petition signatures asking Dominion to fulfill its clean energy commitments with real, Virginia-made renewable energy.

Continue reading