January 19, 2015 | Filed under: News | Posted by: The Daily Freeman 

KINGSTON --  The state Public Service Commission will hold a public information session Feb. 4 about a proposed overhaul of regulations governing electricity production and distribution....

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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

New York Times

By ANTHONY R. INGRAFFEA

Published: July 28, 2013 

Cornell University professor Anthony R. Ingraffea makes the case why gas is not a bridge fuel to anywhere.

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New York Times, August 28, 2012 Op Ed Article by Sean Lennon On the northern tip of Delaware County, N.Y., where the Catskill Mountains curl up into little kitten hills, and Ouleout Creek slithers north into the Susquehanna River, there is a farm my parents bought before I was born. My earliest memories there are of skipping stones with my father and drinking unpasteurized milk. There are bald eagles and majestic pines, honeybees and raspberries. My mother even planted a ring of white birch trees around the property for protection. A few months ago I was asked by a neighbor near our farm to attend a town meeting at the local high school. Some gas companies at the meeting were trying very hard to sell us on a plan to tear through our wilderness and make room for a new pipeline: infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing. Most of the residents at the meeting, many of them organic farmers, were openly defiant. The gas companies didn’t seem to care. They gave us the feeling that whether we liked it or not, they were going to fracture our little town.   For the full article, click here....

EcoWatch 06-28-2012 New York regulators granted natural gas industry representatives exclusive access to shale gas drilling regulations as early as six weeks before they were made public, according to documents obtained by Environmental Working Group (EWG) through requests filed under the New York State Freedom of Information Law. In at least one instance, a representative of Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy Corp., one of the nation’s most powerful drilling companies, used this exclusive access to try to weaken rules restricting discharges of radioactive wastewater... click here to read the full story.  

NPR, May 16, 2012 Jon Hamilton A proposed study of people in northern Pennsylvania could help resolve a national debate about whether the natural gas boom is making people sick. The study would look at detailed health histories on hundreds of thousands of people who live near the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation in which energy companies have already drilled about 5,000 natural gas wells. If the study goes forward, it would be the first large-scale, scientifically rigorous assessment of the health effects of gas production.  Read More.....

New York Times, May 2, 2012 By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Scientists are observing with increasing alarm that some very common hormone-mimicking chemicals can have grotesque effects. A widely used herbicide acts as a female hormone and feminizes male animals in the wild. Thus male frogs can have female organs, and some male fish actually produce eggs. In a Florida lake contaminated by these chemicals, male alligators have tiny penises.  READ MORE.....

New York Times, April 26, 2012 By Clifford Krauss There is a growing chorus of criticism about the risk-taking management style and compensation of Aubrey K. McClendon, Chesapeake Energy’s audacious chairman and chief executive. On Thursday Chesapeake announced that it was phasing out his contentious compensation plan that allowed him to borrow heavily, with loans currently of $846 million, to finance his participation in an unusual compensation plan that allowed him to invest alongside Chesapeake in every well that it drilled, sharing in both the profits and the expenses. READ MORE....

New York Times – April 18, 2012 U.S. Caps Emissions in Drilling for Fuel WASHINGTON — Oil and gas companies will have to capture toxic and climate-altering gases from wells, storage sites and pipelines under new air quality standards issued on Wednesday by the Environmental Protection Agency. The rule is the first federal effort to address serious air pollution associated with the natural gas drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which releases toxic and cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and hexane, as well as methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The standards were proposed last summer in response to complaints from citizens and environmental groups that gases escaping from the 13,000 wells drilled each year by fracking were causing health problems and widespread air pollution….

Texas Drought Cost $2 Billion More than Previously Thought March 21, 2012, Huffington Post HOUSTON -- Agriculture officials say losses from Texas' historic drought are more than $2 billion more than previously thought. The Texas AgriLife Extension Service now estimates crop and livestock losses at $7.62 billion for 2011. The extension service's preliminary estimate of $5.2 billion in August already topped the previous record of $4.1 billion in 2006. Extension service spokesman Blair Fannin gave The Associated Press the data on losses Wednesday before it was publicly released. Texas has a long history of drought. Since 1998, it has cost the state's agriculture industry more than $14 billion. 2011 was the driest year in state history.