There’s the benefit of the exercise, of course, and the savings of a couple dollars worth of gasoline. If we’re ethically minded, we might note that riding the bicycle avoids putting a good amount of pollution into the air, keeps carbon emissions down, and withholds a bit of profit from oil companies engaged in offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

At a more animalistic level, however, there’s the benefit of yummy, yummy ice cream.

This morning’s Ithaca Journal briefly notes that Bicycle Benefits has come to Ithaca. It’s a system in which a person joins by purchasing a five dollar sticker at a participating business. That sticker, which you put on your bike helmet, acts as a coupon entitling you to discounts, as high as 50 percent in some locations. Purity Ice Cream is participating. So is the Ithaca Bakery, Mate Factor, GreenStar, Taste of Thai, Buffalo Street Books, Autumn Leaves… You get the idea.

Today, our Congressman, right wing Blue Dog Mike Arcuri, voted along with every other member of the U.S. House of Representatives to commemorate the 100th birthday of Jacques Cousteau, which will take place three days from now. However, Representative Arcuri has consistently voted against Cousteau’s fundamental values of environmental stewardship over the Earth and its oceans.

Last year, Arcuri voted against legislation to confront climate change. We’ve just lived through the warmest 12-month period ever recorded, but Arcuri decided the time was not right to act. This spring, we’ve seen two weeks of record-low Arctic sea ice, but Arcuri seems more interested in protecting the income of fossil fuel giants than confronting our planet’s dangerous shift in temperature.

Michael Arcuri is now refusing to take strong action to confront the dangers exposed by the enormous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Simple legislation exists to reduce the risk to American coastlines: H.R. 5248, the No New Drilling Act, would take the sensible precaution of restoring the moratorium on expanded offshore drilling that protected this nation’s waters for an entire generation without negative effect. Arcuri won’t sign his name to the bill. He’s content to let it die.

The Cousteau Society promotes the idea of a Bill of Rights for Future Generations. That document asserts that every generation has duty to pass legislation “to prevent irreversible and irreparable harm to life on Earth”.

That duty seems alien to our representative in Washington. Through both active opposition and passive enabling of Big Oil’s agenda of pollution for profit, Congressman Arcuri has ensured that Jacques Cousteau’s vision of a clean planet protected for future generations has not come to pass. Voting in favor of a toothless resolution marking Cousteau’s birthday doesn’t begin to compensate for Arcuri’s record of environmental neglect.

The intensity of feelings that the prospect of natural gas drilling has raised is illustrated by the formation of a new branch of Earth First in our area. “No drilling! No compromise!” is the motto of Finger Lakes Earth First, which refers to its activities as a kind of “defense” of our local ecosystems.

From the logo used by Finger Lakes Earth First, it seems pretty clear that at least some of the group’s “defense” could include monkeywrenching – protest through sabotage.

With something as literally explosive as natural gas, monkeywrenching against natural gas drilling could become dangerous. What are the ethical considerations Earth Firsters ought to take into account in their anti-drilling activities in our area?

But what can we do? We’re in Trumansburg, a thousand miles away from the Gulf of Mexico.

It just so happens that we have a person who’s supposed to be working for us, representing people in Trumansburg in the larger affairs of the United States. That person’s name is Mike Arcuri. He’s our voice in the U.S. House of Representatives.

As a member of the House of Representatives, when there’s a national emergency like the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, Congressman Arcuri has the responsibility to act. He doesn’t have to be the author of legislation dealing with the crisis, but when someone else writes such legislation, he has the responsibility to support the legislation or to support an alternative.

Inaction in these circumstances is inexcusable, but inaction is what we’re getting from Michael Arcuri. There’s a good, simple bill in the House right now. It’s H.R. 5248, the No New Drilling Act. The legislation would do what the title suggests: Put a moratorium on expansion of offshore drilling.

Mike Arcuri is not a supporter of the No New Drilling Act. He hasn’t cosponsored the bill, or any other bill that would help our government deal with the current oil spill disaster or prevent future ones.

If you’d like to see Arcuri take action to move Congress forward in dealing with the Deepwater Horizon disaster, you can call Arcuri’s closest local office at: 315 252-2777 .

The one good thing I can say about the Demolition Derby is that it brings us videos like this one, which serve as a strong reminder that there certainly is enough slack in the U.S. economy to pay for climate change legislation.

No, if you want a clue about the political goings-on with the Ulysses Town Board, you’ll have to go to a report recently assembled by Allen Carstensen. He provides the kind of information about what happens at board meetings that never makes it into the official minutes.

I’ll be discussing many of the items Carstensen has documented in the coming days, but for this evening, I want to focus on one of the most timely issues for our town: The arrival of natural gas drilling in Ulysses.

I’ll risk offending some here in Ulysses by stating that whether a person decides to allow natural gas drilling on their land indicates a great deal about how they feel about their neighbors and their community. The reason is hydraulic fracturing (fracking), the drilling technique that has to be used in the Marcellus Shale, the geological formation underneath our town from which natural gas companies hope to extract their product. Fracking requires the use of large amounts of ground water, taking that water, and mixing it with a secret group of chemicals. That mixture is then pumped into the ground. When the process is over, the drilling company removes as much of the fracking fluid as it can, and then has to dispose of the fluid as toxic waste.

Here’s what we learn from Allen Carstensen’s report: At the last Town Board meeting, Ulysses Supervisor Doug Austic admitted that he has signed a lease with a natural gas drilling company, allowing them to perform fracking on his property.

Connect the dots to an old story: Doug Austic spent much of this decade trying to push through approval for Water District 5, a plan to construct water pipes snaking across the countryside throughout Ulysses – and to Doug Austic’s own property.

At the time, Supervisor Austic said that he was promoting Water District 5, because he hated the idea that some landowners in Ulysses might have poor drinking water. However, Austic has personally agreed to take part in a drilling project that involves taking huge amounts of our Ulysses water, mixing it with a bunch of secret chemicals that make it into toxic waste, and pumping it back into the ground.

It’s hoped that this fracking fluid isn’t spilled, doesn’t leak into groundwater, and doesn’t cause problems in some other way. It’s hoped that the fracking process doesn’t cause earthquakes or lead a neighbor’s house to explode. But, hey, no one can say for sure what will happen. We’ll just cross our fingers. Maybe it will all turn out fine.

Property owners like Doug Austic may see some profit – or they may just see drilling company trucks running roughshod over their land without a penny of income. However, these property owners have neighbors who aren’t choosing to go along with the natural gas drilling plans. Those neighbors most certainly won’t be seeing any profit, but their homes and land will be put at risk.

So, it’s not very gentle of me to say this, but I don’t think it’s a very neighborly thing for someone to sign a for-profit lease to allow drilling companies to go prospecting for natural gas on one’s land, when the likely impacts on one’s neighbors are still unknown. For the Supervisor of our Town to engage in such behavior seems particularly disappointing, especially when that Supervisor has been pushing a gigantic water program his neighbors would pay for, which just so happens to lead straight to his own personal profit.

In Mr. Austic’s favor is the fact that he signed the drilling lease on his land 15 years ago, not as a part of the recent push for drilling here. Some will say that 15 years ago, the environmental impacts of natural gas drilling weren’t known. Isn’t that still a problem, though? Should we enter into any kind of radical exploitation of our properties before we understand what the impacts will be?

“Dear Friends and Neighbors:

You may have heard about the prospect of drilling for natural gas in Tompkins County. In fact, you have a very good chance of living on or near land that has already been leased to gas companies since close to half of the County has already signed up.

Many of us heat our homes with natural gas because it is generally considered to be the “cleanest” fossil fuel available and will doubtlessly be a mainstay of the American energy generation system for the next several decades as we make the slow shift to more renewable and sensible sources. Is it ethically and morally defensible to heat your house with natural gas and fight to prevent companies from drilling in your neighbor’s adjacent fields?

You bet it is. It’s okay to be a NIMBY on this issue. There are trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath American soil. Currently natural gas prices are at multi-year lows because supply is so plentiful. We are NOT in a natural gas crisis in this country. There is no earthly reason to drill for natural gas in Tompkins County except greed. But we are inviting a health crisis in Tompkins county and other residential and agricultural areas where natural gas companies are gobbling up land leases if we don’t attempt to regulate natural gas drilling now!

WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?
Halliburton and other energy companies have developed a means of siphoning natural gas from the Marcellus shale which lies under much of New York State and northeastern Pennsylvania with a technique called hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking). This involves drilling wells into the shale (six to eight thousand feet below the surface of the earth) and forcing a poisonous mixture of water and unknown chemicals under pressure into the holes to force out the gas. The wells are drilled vertically but can run horizontally for miles beneath our homes, our wells, our water supplies, our children…well you get the picture. What is so bad about fracking fluid? Nobody knows except Halliburton and other gas drillers because they claim the fluid they use is proprietary and patent protected. More than a 1000 documented incidents of water contamination have occurred in New Mexico, Ohio, Alabama and other places where fracking fluid has been inserted into the water supplies of local communities. Recent information from Texas which is riddled with hydrofracked wells suggests that the technique may precipitate earthquakes. People and animals have died as a result of exposure to hydrofracking fluid but the extent of the danger is unknown at the moment. And even when a drilling process is proceeding as it should, the activity involved in working each well involves delivery of millions of gallons of water weekly and constant and deafening drilling and pumping of fracking fluid as long as the well is active. Would you want one in your backyard or across the street? And where would natural gas companies get these untold millions of gallons of water? From OUR water supplies and Lake Cayuga itself.

AREN’T THERE FEDERAL AND LOCAL LAWS PROTECTING OUR WATER SUPPLIES?
Yes, the Safe Drinking Water Act is a Federal mandate designed to do just what its name implies, namely insure safe drinking water for Americans. But in 2005 working with a Bush administration friendly to their goals the natural gas industry succeeded in exempting hydrofracking operations from governance by the Safe Drinking Water Act. But wait! Just because the Federal government has abdicated its responsibility to protect our water supplies, what about our State and Local governments and agencies? Unfortunately after defanging the Federal mandate incredibly the gas industry was also successful in pushing through NY State Environmental Conservation Law Article 23 which in effect prevents local town and county governments from regulating gas drilling activity within their jurisdictions. And as for the DEC that presumably protects New York State citizens from activities hazardous to health and/or the environment…well, the DEC is the agency that hands out gas drilling permits to gas companies and in fact has opened up some State forests to this activity…so far.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Look into the mirror! It is up to each of us to get concerned, involved and active NOW if there is any hope at all of stemming this developing environmental tragedy. At this writing, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce is considering a bill that would repeal the exemption that gas drilling currently enjoys from the Safe Drinking Water Act. If you care about this problem, please write to the officials on this Committee and urge them to recommend the legislation for Congressional deliberation. And towards that end, please write to your New York State Congressional representations and our Senators and to the State DEC. Some sample letters and relevant addresses follow. Please help us win this battle for our families and the lifestyle we enjoy in what is currently a fairly placid rural environment. If hydrofracking is allowed in Tompkins County that will certainly change!

Thank you,

Ken Zeserson and Judy Abrams on behalf of
Concerned Citizens of Ulysses (CCU)

Upon reading an analysis of the cost of the legislation by political site FiveThirtyEight, I find out this morning that Arcuri’s statements were even more off base. It seems that the average household expense from the legislation in New York State would be much lower than the national average: 19 cents a day – an amount easily offset by replacing an inefficient lightbulb. New York’s expense would be the second lowest in the United States, behind only Florida.

If New York’s energy expenses would be increased at a lower rate than any other state than Florida, wouldn’t that make our state more attractive to businesses and individuals looking to relocate? Once again, Mike Arcuri doesn’t seem to have been able to think things through. He’s thrown away for both environmental and economic improvement for our region.

Congressman Arcuri made the following argument in defense of his opposition to the Obama-backed climate legislation: “We all know that New York state already has some of the highest electricity rates in the country, and if those rates were to dramatically increase as a result of this legislation, it would almost certainly cost jobs in Upstate New York and discourage new businesses from locating here.”

To anyone with a scrap of critical thinking skills, this argument is plain nonsense. A national bill that creates a national cap-and-trade system won’t discriminate against Upstate New York unless industries here decide to continue to pollute the atmosphere. That’s not a regime under which new businesses would be discouraged from locating in our region.

Besides that, our expenses won’t be significantly affected by the American Clean Energy and Security Act, if it passes the Senate. That’s not my opinion. It’s the judgment of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which has calculated that the American American will only have an increase in expenses of 48 cents per day resulting from the legislation. Furthermore, that judgment does not take into account the increasing economic burden created by climate change.

Michael Arcuri’s claims just don’t match the facts. Either Arcuri isn’t aware of the facts, or he doesn’t care about them, and doesn’t think that we’ll be able to tell the difference. Whichever is the case, Arcuri’s actions in opposition of the American Clean Energy and Security Act demonstrate that he is unsuited to the responsibilities of representing our district in the U.S. House of Representatives. He has repeatedly voted against the progressive values of our community, and merits a progressive challenge for the 2010 election, either from within the Democratic Party, or from without.

Along the rest of the street, there wasn’t a blinking thing – only porch lights turned on, for security.

Part of the process of natural gas drilling is something called fracking (hydraulic fracturing). Fracking forces a fluid into bedrock at high pressure, opening up cracks in the rock and allowing natural gas to escape. What that fluid is, however, no one really knows – except for the people at Halliburton who make the fluid. Independent analysis of areas where fracking fluid is believed to have spilled have found some very toxic chemicals, but currently, Halliburton enjoys a special legislative loophole that allows it to ignore environmental laws, and keep the contents of fracking fluid a secret.

In the House and Senate, the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act of 2009 seeks to close this loophole, requiring the disclosure of the toxic chemicals in fracking fluid to people living near proposed natural gas drilling sites.

The good news is that Michael Arcuri, who represents Trumansburg in the U.S. House of Representatives, has cosponsored the legislation, giving it his public support. The bad news is that appointed U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has declined to do so. That’s particularly disappointing, given that one of Kirsten Gillibrand’s political strengths was supposed to have been that she is able to represent the interests of people living in Upstate New York.

If Gillibrand continues to ignore the growing concerns of people living atop the Marcellus Shale, she may find herself surprised in 2010 by some upstate resistance to her effort to gain the Democratic Party nomination for New York’s junior U.S. Senate seat.

Natural gas industry lobbyists say that there’s no reason to think that there’s ever any risks associated with fracking. People who live near wells where fracking has occurred complain of damaging changes in water pressure, as well as a nasty oily film in the water they drink. Then there’s the case of a couple in Ohio, living on the Marcellus Shale, whose house exploded because of natural gas leaking out of their drinking well after fracking was done near their home.

Right now, Halliburton (yes, that Halliburton) claims an exemption from laws that would otherwise require the company to report the toxic chemicals found in the fluids used in the fracking process. U.S. Representative Diana DeGette plans to introduce a bill to Congress that would close that loophole.

The natural gas under Ulysses isn’t going anywhere. Will residents be willing to wait to sign leases until a new law provides them with more information about the substances that they, and their neighbors, may have to deal with?