N.Y. court: Towns can ban fracking - Washington Times

“We hold that [existing state oil and gas law] does not preempt, either expressly or impliedly, a municipality’s power to enact a local zoning ordinance banning all activities related to the exploration for, and the production or storage of, natural gas and petroleum within its borders,” said the courts in their decision to allow towns to ban fracking.

With what the Washington Times describes as a "key victory for environmentalists," there is finally some ability to mitigate the reach of hydraulic fracturing.

This complicates Gov. Cuomo's pending decision on the effects of fracking, and certainly delivers some much deserved power into the hands of the land owners.

See the full source article at N.Y. court: Towns can ban fracking - Washington Times

Getting Your Friends on Board with Sustainability

I just read the following post on Twitter from Practically Green:

How to get your employees engaged in sustainability? ow.ly/ka0mV Practically Green provides a fun, user-friendly platform!
— Practically Green (@practicallygrn) April 17, 2013

I clicked on the link, taking me to their homepage.

My first thought of "Building better people"
 may be a little too vague and dystopian.

It was interesting stuff. The idea reportedly started as "LEED® for people". A very cool idea in my opinion, and I also suspect that there is a super-catchy slogan hiding in there somewhere.

However, there is another topic the tweet alluded to which I think we can all take a moment to consider:

How do we, as people, make environmental goals known, thought well of, and taken up?

There aren't exactly a lot of people who would disagree with the idea that making sure that we have enough resources to survive for as long and as well as possible is a bad idea.

That being said, there is some challenge in getting the population as a whole to shift over to 100% sustainable practices overnight. While having no impact on the environment is certainly possible, efforts like these may be seen by somebody "not-yet-interested" as too big of a transition to simply drop everything and do it.

Impossibly awesome?

To a non-environmentalist, it may look like far too much to do, and like it's far too difficult to start now. But you and I know very well that it's too big of an issue to do nothing about. So we have a bit of a problem.

The solution for that would be to do the little things first.

Say that you have a friend who doesn't have any focus on any environmental issues. Not that this person hasn't heard of them, or that they oppose them. He/she just doesn't pay much attention. What would be a good way to show that friend something that he could understand?

This is the most fun we've had scrolling
in years. Seriously.

You start by finding something that he/she can understand without too much effort. Like that burning hatred of junkmail. Or reducing his water footprint by eating chicken instead of beef, or other easy little water saving tips like not leaving the water running while shaving or brushing one's teeth. Something like using a reusable bag for grocery shopping.

Really ANY of the myriad ways that most of you environmental advocates already know about will do for the purposes of enlightening friends on environmental issues. It's not much work, and it'll give that friend a little bit of the idea that something can be done.

Now, it may have come to your attention that the things just referred to all have to do with conservation and efficiency, and not necessarily sustainability.

Well, here's the beauty of it! Outside of what you actually did to buy time for the environment as a whole, these little things have a profound effect. You've convinced somebody that they can, as an individual, actually DO something to help the environment.

From here, we can  start upping the gradient and moving towards all of the cool, exciting sustainability projects like fuel and farming, as well as helping make sustainable culture more accessible.

So you can quickly use efficiency as an introduction to sustainability at a very grassroots and personal level.

Pretty cool, right?

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Here's to some good times!

Why Natural Gas?

Natural Gas is an interesting thing.

It’s a mixture of carbon and hydrogen. The sources of natural gas are primarily underground, produced by decaying plants and animals buried deep underground. In other words, it’s a fossil fuel.

PublicDomainPictures.net

 Natural Gas is widely used in the United States, with over 65,900,000 residential, 5,300,000 commercial, and 189,000 industrial consumers using natural gas in 2011. In fact, natural gas accounts for about 25.5% of all energy use in the United States in 2011.  It heats your home, cooks your food, and even fuels the occasional city bus. Not only that, but it burns cleaner than other fossil fuels like oil and coal.

Wylio.com

                However, it is still a fossil fuel, and perhaps that is one of the largest problems with the stuff. It’s not renewable. With this fact, as well as its widespread use, we have a problem. It’s the same problem as with other non-renewables. Namely, “What do we do when we can’t drill for gas anymore?”

This leads to some questionable drilling practices to procure more (still non-renewable) gas, causing more than a few protests and awareness groups.

If you didn't have an opportunity to click on any of the last few links, the ugly result of all of this is the much-debated fracking. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” for short, is a method of procuring natural gas from shale located deep underground by shooting a mix of chemicals underground to break it apart and free the natural gas within. This water-intensive, potentially hazardous, and wildly debated issue is still raging, especially in NYC. But this isn't a blog post about fracking.

The question remains to be addressed of “Why Natural Gas?” We know what’s wrong about fracking, but what is right about natural gas? Well, for starters, there are tons of different uses for natural gas, and plenty of different reasons to love it. Here are some of our favorites:

·         Cooking with natural gas keeps your kitchen cooler and gives you better control over your food’s temperature.

·         Natural gas burns cleaner than coal and oil.

·         If you’re into this sort of thing, the gas we use in the US is largely domestic, as opposed to the largely imported fuel oil and coal.

·         We can make a switch over to renewable hydrogen pretty painless using existing natural gas pipelines.

·         Hythane Co. LLC produces a mix of hydrogen and natural gas for an overall excellent fuel source.

·         Last but not least, biogas is very cool.

So we've got plenty of perfectly sane reasons to use natural gas. We've even got some ways to use existing infrastructure for hydrogen, and to make natural gas itself partially or wholly renewable.

 Let’s be ethical about our extraction, switch coal and oil for natural gas and renewables, and transition towards 100% renewable fuel sources as effectively as possible. That way, we’ll all come out of this ahead.