A golf course water withdrawal sufficient to frack a well every 8 days gets an environmental pass by the New York DEC, which has sat 5 years on fracking.

The amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” is often raised as an objection to the process and reason to subject it to rigorous regulation by such agencies as the states, the EPA and contrived special purpose agencies such as the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC). Knowledgeable folks know the actual amount of…

Governor Andrew Cuomo has well earned the “Hamlet on the Hudson” title inherited from his father; indecisive in all but one thing – his determination to avoid decision. But, perhaps another playwright captured the scene even better in “Waiting for Godot.”

In the political psychodrama that is the natural gas debate in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has owned the role of Hamlet and played it to the hilt. His soliloquies of silence have kept audiences guessing and confounded the…

Realville is a place all too few energy dreamers seem to have visited. They mistake heavily subsidized energy as a practical alternative on a large scale to real energy. Wind has its place but…

I recently read that Tammy Reiss of Unadilla took a biking trip through wind country in Lewis County, NY. She talked to friendly, well paid employees of the Iberdrola wind farm complex and observed tidy farmsteads existing in harmony with a local energy source. She contrasted that with fossil…

The battle for upstate New York over natural gas is highly personal, as pro-gas activist Vic Furman demonstrates by telling his own story. He offers a unique insider perspective on how the struggle has evolved and what’s at stake.

What if you lost your wife suddenly to a quick and deadly cancer? What if, as a nurse, she was making the majority of the household income even though you worked for a Fortune-500 company like IBM? Then, what if, less then two years from the day she died and…

The efforts of anti-gas activists to impose their special interest agendas on others and thwart natural gas development in upstate New York are pathetic replays of the e-mail scams we all receive from time to time.

Most of us have received one of those e-mails trying to lure us with the promise of wealth left by an unknown relative who has passed away in some third world country. The letter tells of a great fortune awaiting us, if we’ll only help. The scam depends on us believing in…

The Hallowich case in southwestern Pennsylvania keeps producing headlines for our fractivist friends but they always turn out to be little more than smoke and mirrors when one digs into the facts and circumstances.

Google “Hallowich Children” and you’ll get 2,140 responses mostly consisting of wildly misleading headlines such as “Big Oil Places A Gag Order On 2 Children” but few, if any, of the articles provide access to the actual transcript from which come the quotes and references…

A company appropriately called Lush Cosmetics is funding an anti-fracking campaign in the UK, all the while blithely ignoring the fact its products are hydrocarbon based. Its US operations also help the Rockefeller family fund 350.org.

Our good friend Nick Grealy of No Hot Air has a phenomenally good story regarding the funding of fractivist activity in the UK by a company that prides itself on being attached to every imaginable cause but markets products made from the stuff it…

Fractivists are busy doing a touchdown dance with the release of a PowerPoint presentation supposedly revealing suppressed data showing contamination in Dimock, but the document is attributed to no one and isn’t even dated, to say nothing of the fact it is little more than speculation based on very limited and isolated data.

Apparently the Los Angeles Times has a friend in the radically left DeSmogBlog and so has shared the famed, single…

 Recently , I talked to our land man for about an hour-I was a little surprised that he had that much time to talk. My mother is still living and is the real owner until she passes it on to my brother, sister and to myself. With her will and the language in the oil/gas lease this will happen with-out probate which is how we want it. This original agreement was made on April 16TH 1897 . Since then the oil/gas laws have changed and our contract with HG ENERGY LLC has improved since they…

New Jersey is making out like a bandit on natural gas, achieving consumer savings equal to a 22% state income tax cut – savings that dwarf the gains to oil and gas companies and landowners.

Who benefits most by fracking? If you listened to the natural gas opposition or “fractivists” you’d have to conclude it’s those greedy landowners and even greedier oil and gas companies but that’s not the case. No, the greatest beneficiaries of fracking technology are urban consumers of natural…

Washington County, Pennsylvania resident Janice Gibbs tells how her State Representative, Jesse White, has frustrated natural gas development and energy independence in her home community.

My name is Janice Gibbs I live in Cecil Township, Washington County , Pennsylvania. There are five generations of my family who have resided in Cecil Township. They have been farmers and landowners; people who love the land and all its beauty . I like to think of myself as…

The DRBC is an incompetent agency. That much is clear from the way it has handled FOIA requests from NWPOA, the latest example being its attempt to prove it gives no special consideration to the Delaware Riverkeeper by employing evidence documenting that it does.

A player on the Detroit Red Wings’ hockey team accidentally swiped the puck into the Red Wings’ own net during the first game of a 1996 playoff series with the Colorado Avalanche, scoring what is known as an “own goal.” The…

What has the DRBC been doing for the last two years? Well, it’s been studying fractivist literature, including a collection of materials from an individual who learned about fracking at a church pot-luck.  Simply outrageous!

The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) scheduled a vote on its proposed regulations governing natural gas drilling for September 21, 2011, cancelled and rescheduled twice and then ran for the hills never to be heard from again.  The…

Andrew Cuomo has finally noticed no one, including him, has paid any real attention to the needs of upstate New York, but his actions and lack of actions tells us nothing has really changed.

Governor Cuomo declares he is finally going to focus on improving the upstate economy, saying, “There has been no upstate focus…downstate dominates the legislature, because that’s where the people are.” We know, Governor; we’re the wan tail attached to that Great Dane, New York City. Whenever they…