SPRING 2015
’ NATURE SVOICE
IN THIS ISSUE
CLIMATE RALLY © DREW ANGERER/DAPD/SIPA USA
For the 1.4 million Members and online activists of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
President Vetoes Keystone XL Bill Monarch Butterflies Get Their Day in Court Beyond Keystone XL: The Tar Sands Invasion Making a Killing: California’s Ivory Market Fracking’s Most Wanted Violators
NRDC works to safeguard the earth — its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends.
Victory
BRISTOL BAY SAVED FROM DRILLING Alaska’s Bristol Bay has been put out of reach of oil and gas companies, thanks to executive action by President Obama. About the size of Florida, Bristol Bay is home to the endangered North Pacific right whale and produces 50 percent of the world’s sockeye salmon. The threat of the proposed Pebble Mine, at the bay’s headwaters, still looms over the area, and NRDC continues the fight on that front.
Victory
THUMBS-DOWN ON FOREST FRACKING Thanks in part to pro-conservation messages from more than 30,000 NRDC Members, the U.S. Forest Service has forbidden oil and gas development in the vast majority of George Washington National Forest in Virginia and West Virginia. As a recreational oasis and the source of drinking water for more than four million people, the forest urgently needed — and got — extensive protection from dangerous fracking.
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PLUGGING THE LEAKS The Obama Administration has announced an urgently needed plan to start cutting rampant methane pollution from the nation’s oil and gas operations, with a goal of making as much as a 45 percent reduction over the next ten years. Methane gas, which can leak from wells, tanks, pipelines and other equipment, is a major driver of climate change: Over a 20-year period, each ton packs 87 times the heat-trapping wallop of a ton of carbon dioxide.
C OV E R A RT I C L E
President Vetoes Keystone XL Bill B ig Oil had a game plan: Drive a massive, 2,000-milelong pipeline through the heartland of America and pump 800,000 barrels a day of dirty tar sands crude from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. But if the oil giants thought the Keystone XL pipeline was inevitable, they had another thing coming — namely, the impassioned activism of hundreds of thousands of NRDC Members and countless other Americans who are determined to stop this climate-destroying project. Thanks to the outpouring of intense public opposition, President Obama recently vetoed proposed legislation that would have forced federal approval
of the pipeline. “Five years ago, the oil industry thought Keystone XL would be pumping tar sands crude by now, but instead its flagship pipeline is hanging by a thread,” says Rhea Suh, NRDC’s president. “The time has come for President Obama to reject Keystone XL once and for all and toss the blueprints for this behemoth pipeline into the dustbin of history. It’s clearly not in our nation’s interest or in our planet’s interest.” [As we go to press, the White House has not yet announced a final decision on the pipeline.] The case for killing the pipeline was bolstered when NRDC released new data showing that Keystone XL would dramatically
expand development of tar sands oil, adding millions of tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere and thus driving more climate chaos. Climate scientists are now warning that if we’re going to avoid the most devastating impacts of global warming, between 75 and 86 percent of existing proven fossil fuel reserves needs to stay in the ground, and that includes the Canadian tar sands. “This fight goes beyond Keystone XL,” says Suh. “We’re going to challenge any effort by Big Oil to expand production of this climate-wrecking fossil fuel and transport it to the United States.” [See “Beyond Keystone XL,” inside this issue.]
S P E C I A L R E P O RT
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Monarch Butterflies Get Their Day in Court Every winter monarchs congregate at their Mexico wintering grounds, weighing down the boughs of the fir trees where they rest. For years their numbers have been plummeting due to the destruction of milkweed — their main food supply — by weed killers like Monsanto’s Roundup. This year’s monarch count of 56.5 million was higher than last year’s, but the news is still grim. “The latest count is just a tiny fraction of the one billion monarchs recorded in the late 1990s,” says
Sylvia Fallon, a senior scientist at NRDC. “If we don’t create more milkweed habitat and rein in the overuse of Roundup and other glyphosate herbicides, we are in danger of losing the monarch migration.” NRDC is acting on both of those fronts. We recently took the EPA to federal court for failing to respond to an emergency petition that called for tough new restrictions on glyphosate. We’re also suing to block a nextgeneration weed killer from Dow
Chemical that would escalate the assault on milkweed. And in Illinois, NRDC is partnering with the Tollway Authority to plant milkweed along 286 miles of road, creating a “butterfly highway” for monarchs, which are the state insect. The project could be a model for other states along the butterfly’s migratory route.
CLIMATE RALLY © DREW ANGERER/DAPD/SIPA USA; MONARCH BUTTERFLY © LISA THORNBERG/GETTYIMAGES.COM
G O O D N EWS
CA M PA I G N U P DAT E
BEYOND KEYSTONE XL
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hether President filled with flammable crude, ain Obama opts to rolling through major cities unt o M PROPOSED a ns i n e r T l approve or reject like Los Angeles, Seattle and e P ip ker Tan the Keystone XL pipeline, that Albany, New York.” Tripling il Ra pivotal decision will mark only the production of tar sands Seattle the opening round in a much oil would be an unmitigated Portland larger battle. Big Oil remains disaster for our climate as well. stubbornly determined to triple Extracting tar sands crude production of tar sands crude generates three times as much over the next two decades, carbon pollution as extracting and it has laid out a sweeping conventional petroleum. plan to flood the United States The invasion would originate with up to six million barrels in the landlocked tar sands of a day of the climate-wrecking Alberta. From there, thousands oil. If allowed to proceed, this of miles of new or expanded San Francisco tar sands invasion will subject pipelines would snake to countless American communities the east and west, as well as to extraordinary risk, imperil through the Great Lakes region, our natural heritage from New terminating in massive transfer Los Angeles England to California and The U.S. Coast Guard does not have shackle us to one of the world’s any equipment appropriate for dirtiest fuels for cleaning up a major tar sands spill. decades to come. “The sheer reach of their plans is staggering, facilities where the crude would but the projects are far from be offloaded for moving south inevitable if we fight them one by by land and sea to U.S. ports MOUNTAINS OF WASTE one as we have with Keystone,” and refineries. Tar sands crude More tar sands oil means more says Danielle Droitsch, director is particularly dangerous to refining waste — lots of it. Toxic petroleum coke is already piling of NRDC’s Canada Project. transport. Pipelines pumping up near homes in southeast “We’re talking about a sprawling it have spilled significantly Chicago at a terminal owned by network of pipelines, a dramatic more crude than the nation’s the Koch brothers. With a nearby refinery ramping up its tar sands increase in tanker traffic up and conventional oil pipelines, processing, 6,000 tons of waste down our East and West Coasts and because tar sands crude are being produced every day. and mile-long trains of tank cars [Continued on next page.]
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Entire trains — 80 to 120 tank cars in all, stretching up to a mile long — would be filled with highly flammable tar sands crude, posing a catastrophic risk in the event of an accident. If Big Oil gets its way, new crude-by-rail terminals will bring tar sands trains rolling through Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Albany, New York.
Photo: A train carrying crude oil from North Dakota derailed and exploded in West Virginia, 2015.
DANGEROUS CARGO
An armada of supertankers would imperil coastlines from San Francisco Bay to the Chesapeake. Tanker traffic out of British Columbia would jump from 60 ships per year to 1,000. Oil-laden barges would ply scenic waterways like the Great Lakes, the Columbia River and New York’s Hudson.
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A sprawling web of new or expanded pipelines snaking from Alberta — some larger than Keystone XL — would carry millions more barrels of tar sands crude every day, feeding tankers, barges and railcars that would move it south.
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NRDC Fights to Block Next Wave of Tar Sands Invasion W
Keystone XL was only the beginning. Big Oil has a bigger plan to triple the production of climate-wrecking tar sands oil in Canada and send torrents of it gushing into America — as much as six million barrels a day. That’s nearly enough oil to fill up the Empire State Building — every single day.
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nrdc.org/tarsandsinvasion
Making a Killing: California’s Illegal Ivory Market California is one of the largest markets for ivory in the United States, and a new report commissioned by NRDC reveals that much of that ivory likely comes from recently killed elephants. Following in the footsteps of New York and New Jersey, California lawmakers have proposed a ban on most ivory sales in the state. Currently, it is legal to buy and sell ivory that was imported into California before 1977, but it’s extremely difficult to date elephant tusk ivory, so sellers often make it look older by giving it stains and cracks. NRDC’s report shows that up to 90 percent of the ivory for sale in Los Angeles is probably illegal under current law.
Big Oil Takes Aim at the Atlantic and Arctic
Wolves Win in Court; Fight Moves to Congress
Only five years after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, the Obama Administration is preparing to expose hundreds of miles of the Atlantic and Arctic coastlines to dangerous offshore oil and gas drilling. An oil spill in either of these regions could cause unimaginable damage to beaches, coastal communities, fisheries and wildlife — including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. NRDC is challenging the plan, and tens of thousands of our Members have already sent messages of opposition.
Last fall, a federal court ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the law by stripping Wyoming’s wolves of protection under the Endangered Species Act, a big win for NRDC and our partners. In December, another court restored federal protections to the Great Lakes population of wolves. Now, wolf foes in Congress are threatening to circumvent these rulings and turn wolf management over to the states. NRDC is fighting for a nationwide recovery plan that would help protect the future of wolves in the Lower 48.
RIGHT WHALES © FLORIDA FISH AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATION COMMISSION, TAKEN UNDER NOAA RESEARCH PERMIT #15488/FLICKR.COM; ELEPHANTS © EARTH TOUCH/FLICKR.COM; WOLF © HOLLY KUCHERA/ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
[Continued from previous page.] contains a witch’s brew of petrochemicals, spills in oceans, lakes or rivers cannot be cleaned up with conventional oil spill technology. In fact, the U.S. Coast Guard does not have any equipment appropriate for cleaning up a major tar sands spill. Even as NRDC has worked to generate an enormous public outcry against Keystone XL, we’ve been challenging an array of other disastrous tar sands projects from coast to coast, partnering with grassroots organizations, particular in economically depressed communities that are often already coping with a legacy of industrial abuse. We continue to lead the fight — in court when necessary — to block approval of crude-by-rail terminals, which are pivotal to the tar sands invasion of California, Oregon, Washington and New York. We’re opposing the proposed expansion of the Alberta Clipper pipeline — which would feed 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day into the Great Lakes region — as well as a push to send tar sands oil flowing through ExxonMobil’s aging Portland–Montreal pipeline, across New England to tankers waiting on the Maine coast. And we’re attacking plans for a facility in Albany, where tar sands oil could be loaded onto barges and sent down the scenic Hudson River, passing New York City on its way to New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “When we got the truth out to the public about the threats posed by the Keystone XL, millions of Americans turned against it,” says Droitsch. “And as more people discover the dangers of Big Oil’s tar sands binge, we’re confident they’ll join NRDC in standing strong against this broader tar sands invasion as well.”
N R D C VO I C E S
An NRDC investigation into the oil and gas industry has fingered Shell and ExxonMobil as two of the top fracking violators in Colorado, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The companies on the “most wanted” list have been charged by environmental authorities with a wide range of serious violations, including spills, illegal air pollution,
FRACKING © TONYBYNUM.COM
Photo: A fracking operation in Montana.
drinking water contamination and failure to conduct safety tests. The report, released in March by NRDC and the FracTracker Alliance, shines a harsh spotlight on a dangerous industry shrouded in secrecy and underscores the difficulty of gaining access
health effects of fracking. “The risks are not limited to what’s in our drinking water; oil and gas operations are also poisoning the air we breathe,” says NRDC senior scientist
Miriam Rotkin-Ellman. A new analysis by NRDC pinpoints five major health threats from fracking-related air pollution, including respiratory problems, nervous system impacts, birth defects, blood disorders and cancer. “These findings raise serious concerns,” says RotkinEllman, “not just for workers and families living nearby but for entire regions with heavy oil and gas activity.” NRDC is working to rein in runaway fracking from the grassroots up. Last December we helped score a huge victory in New York when Governor Andrew Cuomo banned fracking in the state because of the lack of scientific evidence that it can be done safely. Right now, we are fighting for moratoriums on fracking where possible, such as in California and Maryland, while advocating for tough standards where fracking is already occurring. Meanwhile, NRDC attorneys have come to the defense of a fracking ban in Denton, Texas, and are empowering citizens in other states who want to restrict fracking in their communities. Nationally, NRDC Members are petitioning President Obama to take five urgently needed steps to rein in fracking, including protecting our air, water and public lands.
Climate Breakthrough: China Will Cap Coal Consumption By Barbara Finamore, senior attorney and Asia director
Hard on the heels of the historic U.S.–China Joint Announcement on Climate Change last November, in which China pledged for the first time to cap its CO2 emissions by 2030, China’s State Council has announced a cap on national coal consumption by 2020. This is another major breakthrough for our climate and for China’s people, since coal is the largest contributor to CO2 emissions as well as to China’s dangerous air pollution. This latest
announcement came just after a workshop that NRDC organized in Beijing, which previewed analysis from our work with more than 20 leading Chinese stakeholders to develop a comprehensive road map and policy package for implementing a national coal cap. Recently issued Chinese government data indicate that the nation’s coal consumption actually fell by 2.9 percent in 2014 — the first time this has happened in this century, and a momentous landmark that points to the growing impact of China’s energy efficiency and renewables policies. In addition to becoming more concerned about air pollution, China is one of the countries most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. Putting a lid on coal is the single most important step it can take to reduce its CO2 MORE
Photo: Boy wears a mask against air pollution in Beijing.
emissions, and its plan to limit such emissions from power plants echoes President Obama’s own Clean Power Plan, which also targets existing power plants. This is important news for critics who have claimed that President Obama’s climate agreement with China is onesided. NRDC is now working with Chinese partners to develop recommendations for mandatory and enforceable targets that will help ensure that China achieves its goal of capping coal by 2020.
nrdc.org/switchboard
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Fracking’s Most Wanted Violators
to information on fracking operations. Public records on violations are easily accessible in just three out of the 36 states where such operations occur. “You’d want to know if the company operating in your backyard is a responsible corporate citizen or a serial violator. But as it stands now, it’s nearly impossible to uncover a company’s track record,” says Amy Mall, an NRDC senior policy analyst and coauthor of the report. The public’s need to know is more urgent than ever as a growing body of evidence points to the serious and far-reaching
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