[Durham INC] FW: Thursday legislative update: fracking bill up

[Pat Carstensen]

The highlights are mine.  Talk about the foxes managing the henhouse.

> Date: Thu, 31 May 2012 15:22:10 -0400
> From: molly.diggins at sierraclub.org
> Subject: Thursday legislative update: fracking bill up
> To: NC-CONS-FORUM at LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG
> 
> A Proposed Committee Substitute (PCS)  introduced in the Senate
> Commerce Committee today made some improvements to the original
> language of  a Senate measure that addresses “fracking,” but still
> falls far short of what is needed to protect the public interest.
> 
> The revised version of S. 820 introduced by Sen. Rucho (R-Mecklenburg)
> provides consumer protections which were completely absent in the
> original version of the bill. It also requires an intentional vote of
> the legislature to allow permitting for fracking.
> 
> But major points of concern remain for North Carolinians.
> 
> Key concerns about the new version of the bill include:
> 
> Local communities explicitly lose the ability to control where and how
> fracking occurs;
> Key decisions about fracking regulations will be made by an
> industry-dominated commission of legislative appointees;
> Requiring all regulations to be adopted by 2014 even if the studies
> are not completed;
> Uncertainty about what decisions the Environmental Management
> Commission would retain and which the newly constituted Mining
> Commission would make;
> Ignoring DENR's recommendation of additional study of NC's unique
> geology, perhaps one of the most important prerequisites to determine
> if fracking can be done safely; and,
> Creating a massive new workload for DENR but does not contain funding
> for new positions. Further, revenue fees from permit fees would not
> come in for years.
> 
> 
> The bill was not voted on in committee today. The vote will come next
> Tuesday, June 5-- fortuitously, our fracking lobby day.
> 
> In other "can things get any stranger" news, Mitt Romney today came
> out in support of GOP efforts to allow fracking in NC.
> http://projects.newsobserver.com/under_the_dome/romney_campaign_backs_gop_legislative_effort_on_fracking
> 
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> To unsubscribe from the NC-CONS-FORUM list, send any message to:
> NC-CONS-FORUM-signoff-request at LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG
> 
> Check out our Listserv Lists support site for more information:
> http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/faq.asp
> 
> To view the Sierra Club List Terms & Conditions, see:
>  http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/terms.asp
 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://rtpnet.org/pipermail/inc-list/attachments/20120531/f4db62da/attachment.html>