Portside

Progressives who supported Clinton in the primary should use their leverage to ensure Clinton makes good on her vow to stop TPP and keep other promises she made on the campaign trail to win progressive votes. Bernie supporters will have your back, but it's up to you to lead on this one. It's serious -and - it can't wait until after the inauguration. From the perspective of progressives who supported Bernie in the primary, this election is a shotgun wedding.

Sanders aides say that the biggest issue—and the one where they may have the most leverage—is opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation trade deal that President Obama supports. But Sanders will fight for a battery of other policies, from a fracking ban to a $15 minimum wage.

Grant Township Supervisor Stacy Long explained, “We’re tired of being told by corporations and our so-called environmental regulatory agencies that we can’t stop this injection well! This isn’t a game. We’re being threatened by a corporation with a history of permit violations, and that corporation wants to dump toxic frack wastewater into our Township.”

The report, Fracking by the Numbers: the Damage to Our Water, Land and Climate from a Decade of Dirty Drilling, was published Thursday and analyzes data released by government and industry sources over the past ten years.

Since NY has banned fracking, a lot of people are working to try and develop clean energy at the state, county, and local levels. These efforts together are known as “fractivism 2.0.” “They’re trying to prevent the country and the planet from digging their own graves by committing ourselves to another 50 or 100 years of burning fossil fuels.”

The natural gas pipeline has been fiercely opposed by local residents of the Berkshires, a region renowned for its natural beauty. The nearly $5 billion pipeline project would run through Ashfield, Conway, Shelburne, Deerfield, Montague, Erving, Northfield, and Warwick, The Recorder reported, where "there are wetlands, rivers, springs, farms and forests."

Last year was the second-warmest on record in the continental United States. December was a U.S. record-breaker for heat and also precipitation. 2015 will prove to be the hottest year on record globally. Give Earth a few million years and it'll do fine. If climate change does its worst, life, in some fashion, will undoubtedly survive and someday once again flourish, but the environment will cease to exist in any time span that is meaningful to us.

Still, Gu said, there were two fairly large quakes in the area in January 2015, one of which had a magnitude of 4.4. He wasn't able to confirm that they were caused by fracking, but said it is "highly probable." The energy regulator said at the time that the 4.4 magnitude quake was likely caused by hydraulic fracturing.

Fracking is a relatively expensive process—about ten times more costly than the $5 to $6 per barrel cost of drilling oil from conventional wells in Saudi Arabia. By letting the price of oil drop, OPEC, in which Saudi Arabia is the key partner, has been applying financial pressure on the fracking industry.

Analogously, we universally refer to gas drilled conventionally or fracked as "natural." True, gas found in deep rock and soil formations and biologically formed from dead animal and plant matter, is natural. Once drilled, transported, and combusted for heat and electricity, though, it is un-natural, even anti-natural, for reasons explored here.