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Blog: Celts Oppose Fracking While Dragon Ships Bring U.S. Fracked Gas

By Andy Gheorghiu

In a historic vote at the beginning of this year, Ireland opted in favour of a law that will make the green island the world’s first country to fully divest from fossil fuels. This goes even further than the decision by the 2015 decision of Norwegian parliament to divest the country’s sovereign wealth fund from dozens of coal-related investments.

And it’s not the only clear movement of the Celtic Tiger towards a much needed post-fossil future. On October 27, a bill calling for a fracking ban passed its first hurdle in the Irish House of Representatives (Dáil Éireann). In the meantime, Irish officials have also decided to undertake a public consultation on the provisions of this bill together with the Joint Research Programme on the Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on the Environment and Human Health, led by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency.

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How the EU Is Supporting European Dependence on Gas

By Frida Kieninger

On 17 February, the EU Commission published the outcome of the call for funding under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), a financing tool with the aim of supporting “the development of high performing, sustainable and efficiently interconnected trans-European networks in the fields of transport, energy and digital services.” We had a deeper look into the funding instrument’s impact on energy infrastructure and found that the CEF fails to ensure efficient, and even more so, sustainable interconnections.

Since its creation in 2014, the CEF has provided €1billion to support gas projects, while electricity projects received only around €532million. These numbers are contrary to the declared CEF objectives of allocating the majority of its funds to electricity projects, and the EU-Commission’s own perceived need for Europe to invest further €140billion in electricity and “only” €70billion in gas infrastructure

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Fracking, Health and Regulations: What the EU-Commission is (NOT!) doing about it – Part II

By Andy Gheorghiu and Frida Kieninger

(Part I)

DG Environment from the EU-Commission seems to have its hands bound and is largely unable to protect Europeans from health hazards caused by fracking. There are a few initiatives such as the Human Biomonitoring Initiative (HBM4EU) or the EU platform for chemical monitoring data (IPChem), but these are far from leading to binding legislation aimed specifically at unconventional gas production.

However, the Commission just recently published a review concerning the effectiveness of its non-binding “Recommendation on shale gas and fracking,” which was adopted on January 22, 2014.

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Fracking, Health and Regulations: What the EU-Commission is (NOT!) doing about it – Part I

By Andy Gheorghiu and Frida Kieninger

In November 2016, the EU-Commission organized a “workshop on public health impacts and risks resulting from oil and gas extraction.” Behind this title are mainly questions around fracking and a hesitant attempt by the Environment Directorate General (DG ENV) – historically the most supporting part of the Commission concerning environmental issues – to find out more about its impacts on public health.

Scientists from the U.S. and Europe, as well as industry representatives and NGOs, had their say at the workshop. While the public health impacts of oil and gas extraction though fracking in the U.S. have been analyzed in several studies, most were sponsored by the oil and gas industry and are seriously biased towards its interests. Nonetheless, there is an enormous amount of evidence that fracking negatively affects public health, as confirmed and acknowledged by this compendium of scientific, medical and media findings.

However, authorities still think that there is a lack of data. This is mainly due to the public’s dependency on industry to obtain information about fracking chemicals, injection mixtures, amounts, and due to the absence of much needed baseline studies, measuring indicators before hydrocarbon production.

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Rick Perry, Gas Exporter-In-Chief?

By Peter Hart (reposted from Food & Water Watch)

In 2011, former Texas governor Rick Perry counted the Department of Energy among the government agencies he would eliminate as president—until he famously couldn’t remember the department’s name during a Republican debate.

Naturally, the very same Rick Perry was tapped by the Trump administration to run the Energy Department. And according to the New York Times, Perry accepted the job thinking that it had quite a bit to do with oil and gas drilling. While that would have been especially convenient to his corporate backers, Perry has by now discovered that most of the Department of Energy’s work concerns nuclear weapons and government scientific research facilities.

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2017 – Food & Water Europe Is Ready To Stand Its Ground

By Andy Gheorghiu, Frida Kieninger, David Sánchez

Many people said 2016 was a bad year. And there were many reasons: the result of the US elections, Brexit, or the high toll of environmental activists that were killed for standing for their communities around the globe. We don’t know what 2017 will look like, but we are sure that we want to be ready for some of the challenges we will find for our food, our water, our climate and our democracy. Together, we need to make 2017 a better year. And united we will have the power to do so!

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