By Simon Davis-Cohen In early January, a federal judge ordered the nonprofit law firm Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to pay $52,000 to an oil and gas exploration company for defending a rural Pennsylvania township’s ban on underground injections of fracking waste. This sanction comes at the request of Pennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE) […]
By Kristen Lombardi and Jamie Smith Hopkins They landed, one after another, in 2015: plans for nearly a dozen interstate pipelines to move natural gas beneath rivers, mountains and people’s yards. Like spokes on a wheel, they’d spread from Appalachia to markets in every direction. Together these new and expanded pipelines—comprising 2,500 miles of steel […]
By Andy Rowell Soon British consumers will be cooking and heating their homes with American fracked gas for the first time. But there is growing evidence that fracked U.S. gas—and the infrastructure being built to supply it—has a huge ecological, social and personal impact back in the U.S., which British consumers may not know about. […]
An order of Catholic nuns and the grassroots coalition Lancaster Against Pipelines have built an open-air chapel in Columbia, Pennsylvania along the proposed route of the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline to stall construction of the $3 billion project. The St. Louis-headquartered Adorers of the Blood of Christ own a strip of land in Pennsylvania where the […]
By Itai Vardi A recent intensification in protests against Williams Partners’ planned Atlantic Sunrise pipeline in Pennsylvania prompted a state senator to propose legislation aimed at limiting demonstrations. Last month, Pennsylvania Sen. Scott Martin (R-Norman) announced his intention to introduce legislation that would pass the costs of law enforcement responding to protests onto the demonstrators. […]
As the Trump administration moves full speed ahead on boosting the oil and fossil fuel industry, opposition to increased pipeline construction is cropping up in different communities around the country. McClatchy highlights how the government and energy companies’ use of eminent domain to build pipelines through private property is turning rural voters in Trump country […]
A new report from Food & Water Watch documents how a Scottish energy billionaire’s dangerous plan to ship gas liquids across the Atlantic is linked to a controversial pipeline currently under construction across Pennsylvania. The report, The Trans-Atlantic Plastics Pipeline, tracks how the fracking boom in the U.S. has spawned a resurgence in petrochemical and […]
A federal judge has reversed last year’s unanimous jury decision that awarded $4.2 million to two Dimock, Pennsylvania families who claimed that Cabot Oil & Gas Corp contaminated their water supply during fracking operations near their homes. In a ruling released on Friday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Martin Carlson said the amount of the jury’s award […]
A report prepared by Key-Log Economics for the Sierra Club and Appalachian Mountain Advocates was released Monday, detailing what it calls the true costs of the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline. The proposed fracked gas pipeline was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on its former chair’s final day—just before the commission lost its quorum. […]