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B4. Radical Ecology
Fracking Hazards Obscured in Failure to Disclose Wells – Bloomberg
Seeking to quell environmental concerns about the chemicals it shoots underground to extract oil and natural gas, Apache Corp. (APA) told shareholders in April that it disclosed information about “all the company’s U.S. hydraulic fracturing jobs” on a website last year.
Actually, Apache’s transparency was shot through with cracks. In Texas and Oklahoma, the company reported chemicals it used on only about half its fracked wells via FracFocus.org, a voluntary website that oil and gas companies helped design amid calls for mandatory disclosure.
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Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, talks about regulation of the energy fracking industry. She spoke with Bloomberg’s Benjamin Haas on June 6. (Source: Bloomberg)
Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., has praised the website and called for extending its voluntary approach to disclosure overseas. Photographer: F. Carter Smith/Bloomberg
“FracFocus is just a fig leaf for the industry to be able to say they’re doing something in terms of disclosure,” said U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Energy companies failed to list more than two out of every five fracked wells in eight U.S. states from April 11, 2011, when FracFocus began operating, through the end of last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gaps reveal shortcomings in the voluntary approach to transparency on the site, which has received funding from oil and gas trade groups and $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.
“FracFocus is just a fig leaf for the industry to be able to say they’re doing something in terms of disclosure,” said U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. DeGette, along with Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey, introduced legislation in March 2011 that would require companies to disclose fracking chemicals. The bills haven’t advanced in either the House or Senate.
With FracFocus, “companies that want to disclose can do it but the other ones don’t have to,” DeGette said.
85% FrackedBloomberg compared oil and gas well records from eight states — Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming — against disclosures that companies made for those states on FracFocus. While the state data didn’t reveal whether wells were fractured, regulators in each state said that at least 85 percent of their wells were fracked. The Congressional Research Service puts the national estimate at more than 90 percent.
In the eight states, companies told regulators that 18,158 wells were readied for production or were newly producing from April 11, 2011 through Dec. 31, 2011. They disclosed 8,555 of them on FracFocus. If 85 percent of the total wells were fracked, that means 45 percent of the fracks weren’t disclosed on the website.
Bloomberg’s analysis, covering states that accounted for 64 percent of U.S. gas production in 2010, shows the difficulty of getting a full picture of the industry’s transparency. Because there’s no official national database of fracked wells, Bloomberg chose states that had reliable records on when gas and oil wells started producing or were completed — that is, made ready to flow — and thus were candidates for posting on FracFocus.
No ReportsOil and gas companies have gotten better at listing their fractured wells on the website over time, said Dan Whitten, a spokesman for America’s Natural Gas Alliance, one of two industry groups that help pay operational costs for the website. Some states now require companies to make disclosures on FracFocus, he said.
“ANGA operators are committed to transparency, and support public disclosure of the additives used in the hydraulic fracturing process,” Whitten said in an e-mail. “If you were to look at a complete timeframe of FracFocus, you would see a progressively higher rate of participation.”
Companies participating in the voluntary system agree to disclose information about wells on the website once they have been fractured, which is the start of the completion process. Data from three other leading states — New Mexico, North Dakota and Pennsylvania — are incomplete or don’t list well-completion dates. For Texas, Bloomberg used the date companies submitted completion reports, which are supposed to be filed within 30 days.
Half UnreportedMore than half of new wells went unreported on FracFocus in each of three states: Texas, Oklahoma and Montana. In all, 1,126 companies had at least one well in the analysis period. While it’s possible that some companies didn’t use hydraulic fracturing, the data show that 1,038 of them, or 92 percent, didn’t report any wells on the website.
In hydraulic fracturing, companies blast millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals deep underground to break up rock formations and free oil and gas. The technique has unlocked vast new sources of energy. At the same time, concerns center on the hundreds of chemicals — including known carcinogens — used in the process.
Contamination ConcernsHomeowners in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming have complained that their well water was contaminated with chemicals or methane gas from nearby frack jobs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year linked the method to contaminated drinking water in Pavillion, Wyoming; the agency is now retesting some of those findings. The EPA has little authority to regulate fracking; Congress in 2005 stripped it of most such power.
States have responded in various ways. Pennsylvania officials require that companies disclose chemicals within 60 days after fracking. New York has a moratorium on the practice until its environmental impact can be determined. Vermont has banned it outright. Texas began mandating disclosure of fracking chemicals this year, after officials determined that operators were voluntarily reporting about half their fracked wells to FracFocus, according to the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas wells.
Oil and gas executives say the FracFocus website helps eliminate the need for any new federal oversight that might unify the regulatory approach.
‘Positive Thing’“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” said Cal Cooper, manager of special projects for Apache. “This is a positive thing. It shows industry can get its act together and make things happen in a short amount of time.”
Apache hadn’t reported some wells in Texas that received only minor frack treatments, Cooper said — though he said they should have been disclosed on the site. The company also struggled to get some of its contractors to disclose their chemicals, he said. Both issues have been addressed, he said.
“We certainly expect to post all of our 2012 frack jobs in the U.S. on FracFocus,” he said. The company is updating its 2011 disclosures on the site as well, “and we fully expect to reach our goal of 100 percent disclosure from Jan. 1, 2011,” Cooper said.
Some of the largest oil and gas companies posted more complete data to the site. For example, Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), Europe’s top oil producer, disclosed fracking chemicals for 107 wells in the eight states during the analysis period. The company reported 115 wells to state regulators, records show. Shell reported all its fracked wells to the website, said Kelly Op De Weegh, a Shell spokeswoman, indicating that eight of the wells weren’t fractured.
Chesapeake’s ReportingFor the same period in 2011, Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK), the second-biggest U.S. gas producer, disclosed information on 85 percent of the 1,148 wells listed for it in the eight states. Most of the missing wells were fractured before Feb. 15, 2011, when the company started reporting to FracFocus, said Michael Kehs, a company spokesman.
Chesapeake’s own records show it has withheld FracFocus reports on 10 wells fracked since it began disclosing on the website, Kehs said. In each case, there are unresolved discrepancies in information provided by contractors that did the fracking, he said.
“Chesapeake has reported 99 percent of our wells to FracFocus since the initiative was launched,” Kehs said.
Companies’ ChoiceWhile FracFocus was designed to display all wells fracked in 2011, its voluntary approach allows companies to choose when they want to begin reporting. ConocoPhillips (COP), the largest independent oil and gas producer by market value, decided to report only wells fracked after April 30, 2011, said Davy Kong, a company spokeswoman. That decision left 86 wells from the period Bloomberg examined that were fracked prior to May 2011 unreported, according to data the company provided.
Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), the biggest oil company by market value, didn’t publish 28 percent of the 856 wells listed in records for the eight states. Rex Tillerson, the CEO of the Irving, Texas- based company, has praised the website and called for extending its voluntary approach to disclosure overseas.
Exxon focused on training staff to file the necessary data during the first half of last year, said Jeff Neu, an Exxon spokesman. In the year’s second half, the company reported more than 80 percent of its fracked wells, and it expects to report all of them going forward, he said.
“Today, we have monitoring tools in place that show we are meeting that expectation,” Neu said.
Lowest RatesAmong the largest operators, the companies with the lowest rates of disclosure in the eight states were Midland, Texas- based Concho Resources Inc. (CXO), which reported none of its 160 wells to the website, and SandRidge Energy Inc. (SD), which didn’t disclose 84 percent of its 779 wells. QEP (QEP) Resources Inc. reported 74 of 153 wells listed in state records. Apache was fourth lowest.
Concho executives wanted to wait until various state regulators finalized their own reporting requirements before it began disclosing its chemicals, said Steven H. Pruett, the company’s senior vice president of corporate development. As of February, 2012, when Texas and New Mexico began mandating disclosures, the company has reported all its chemicals on frack jobs, he said.
SandRidge, based in Oklahoma City, began reporting all its frack jobs in Texas to FracFocus on Jan. 1, 2012, and those in Oklahoma and Kansas on March 1, 2012, Kevin White, a spokesman, said in a telephone interview. The company made only a few earlier reports, he said. SandRidge doesn’t drill in other states.
“We’re comfortable that we weren’t doing anything to the environment whether you had filing or not,” he said.
All CompletionsQEP began submitting reports to FracFocus in the third quarter of last year, said Noel Ryan, a spokesman for the Denver-based company. “QEP currently registers all new well completions on this database,” he said.
Continental (CLR) Resources Inc. didn’t report 54 of its 64 wells in the eight-state group. The company didn’t immediately require staffers to list wells on FracFocus, said Mike Cantrell, the Oklahoma City-based company’s vice president for government and regulatory affairs.
Cantrell initially said Continental began disclosing all its wells on Nov. 1, 2011. Data show the company reported only six out of 20 wells it completed in November and December 2011. In a subsequent e-mail, Cantrell said that three of those 20 wells weren’t fracked, and said the company didn’t begin reporting fracks in its south region, which includes Oklahoma, until January 2012.
Missing ThirdOf 22 companies with at least 150 wells in the eight states from April 2011 through December 2011, 11 didn’t disclose a third or more of them on FracFocus, the data show.
“The data is so incomplete, it doesn’t help,” said Shane Davis, research manager for the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club, which supports stronger state and federal regulation of fracking. Davis said he has studied more than 1,000 drilling-related spills in Colorado.
For members of the public, the website can be frustrating. Wendy Leonard wanted to know about wells in her area after she saw one being drilled near her children’s school in Erie, Colorado. She asked state regulators, who referred her to FracFocus, she said.
Found Nothing“And then I’d go home and wouldn’t find anything,” she said. Leonard and her family ended up moving to a town an hour away because of health concerns related to fracking, she said.
FracFocus is operated by two groups: the Groundwater Protection Council, a group of state water officials; and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, an association of states that produce the fuels. The council’s own analysis shows that about half the wells that have been fracked in the U.S. have been reported through the site, said Mike Nickolaus, special projects director for the GWPC.
“Companies can take it or leave it where it’s voluntary, but we see more and more companies using FracFocus to say, ‘This is a good mechanism for us to get our information out there and be transparent,”’ Nickolaus said.
The website’s operational costs, which total “a few hundred thousand dollars” a year for server space and site maintenance, according to Mike Paque, executive director of the GWPC, are paid for partly by America’s Natural Gas Alliance and the American Petroleum Institute, two Washington-based industry groups.
Industry Benefit“We’re unapologetic about the industry cost-sharing on FracFocus because they get a big benefit from the website,” Paque said in a telephone interview. There’s no penalty for failing to participate, he said.
Public money helped create FracFocus. From 2009 to 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy gave grants totaling $3.84 million to the GWPC, records show. About $1.5 million of that sum was used to develop the website, according to Paque. The government plans additional grants for the GWPC totaling $2.12 million through 2014, Energy Department documents show.
Since the website’s inception, seven states, including Texas, Pennsylvania and Colorado, have either allowed or required companies to use FracFocus to fulfill disclosure mandates. The federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees oil and gas rights on 700 million acres — more than four times the size of Texas — is considering adopting FracFocus as the basis for chemical disclosures by companies operating on its land.
Trade SecretsGaps remain on the website even when wells are disclosed. Companies skip naming certain chemicals when they decide that revealing them would give away what they consider trade secrets. Many of the wells that are listed on FracFocus have at least one or two chemicals marked confidential. Others have far more.
Nine undisclosed chemicals were pumped into Marathon Oil Corp. (MRO)’s Cherry Bilsky well in Gonzales County, Texas, between San Antonio and Houston, according to the website. The company also withheld the amounts of eight other chemicals used in the well. The purpose of one product, identified only as “EXP- F1008-10,” is listed as “experimental.”
“Marathon Oil provides the fullest amount of information that has been provided by our suppliers for each fracturing job,” said Lee Warren, a spokeswoman for the company, in an e- mail. Some suppliers consider detailed listings of certain chemicals or specific ratios proprietary, she said.
Information RequirementsAll operators are required by law to keep detailed product information for each additive, and make it available to first responders and medical providers in cases of emergency, Warren said.
In May, Pennsylvania regulators issued violations after a pit for holding waste fluid from fracked wells in Tioga County leaked into the vicinity of the Rock Run stream and the surrounding landscape. The Responsible Drilling Alliance, an activist group that tried to figure out what was in the fluids, was stymied when it checked FracFocus, said Ralph Kisberg, the group’s cofounder.
That’s because EQT Corp. (EQT), the Pittsburgh-based company that operates the Tioga wells, omitted some information about its chemicals. Of five wells it disclosed in the county, one didn’t include any identification numbers for the chemicals, and four others provided no information about the quantities of chemicals used.
‘PR Effort’“There are mistakes; some of the data is incomplete,” said Kisberg, of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “We see FracFocus as a PR effort to placate people.”
EQT staffers made some errors in manually transferring data into the FracFocus system, said Natalie Cox, the company’s director of communications. After Bloomberg News asked about the incomplete disclosures, EQT fixed the errors, Cox said. The company is committed to fully disclosing its fracking fluids, she said.
States that require companies to disclose on FracFocus are adopting the website’s limitations. In North Dakota, where fracking has turned the state into the biggest U.S. oil- producing state after Texas, regulators mandate disclosure on the website within 60 days of a well’s completion.
“We require whatever FracFocus requires,” said Alison Ritter, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Mineral Resources’ Oil and Gas Division. “Whatever their rules are, those are our rules in terms of reporting.”
Private DatabaseThe website isn’t searchable by chemical, or by date. State regulators who wish to check whether companies are making their required disclosures face a time-consuming task. The website doesn’t make its underlying database available to the public.
Improvements are planned for this autumn that will allow users to search by chemical name, chemical abstract number and date. The groups that maintain the website are talking with industry representatives and state officials about how to give regulators in states that require posting on FracFocus access to the database, said Nickolaus, the GWPC’s special projects director.
It remains unclear whether the database will ever be downloadable for the general public. Nickolaus said that’s “not a specific goal of the system.”
Not releasing the database was a prerequisite that companies insisted on before they’d participate, he said.
To contact the reporters responsible for this story: Benjamin Haas in New York at bhaas7@bloomberg.net Jim Polson in New York at jpolson@bloomberg.net Phil Kuntz in New York at pkuntz1@bloomberg.net Ben Elgin in San Francisco at belgin@bloomberg.net
Fracking Hazards Obscured in Failure to Disclose Wells – Bloomberg.
Fracking Operations Run Roughshod over Pennsylvania Homeowners
On a recent trip to western Pennsylvania, I visited a man who lived along a leafy country road. He showed me around the house he had built for his wife and three sons and said he wanted to raise his family in a quiet rural area. He thought he had the perfect spot until an energy company showed up on his property and said it had the rights to drill for natural gas beneath his land. Although he owned his land and home—and paid taxes on them—he could not protect his property from a drill pad, wells and a pipeline he did not want.
Soon tractor trailers began delivering compressors the size of shipping containers, tanker trucks hauled in fracking chemicals, and workers built an industrial drill pad near his house. The last straw came when the company hired security guards to patrol the area—and stationed them right in the middle of the family’s yard.
There was nothing the man could do to stop them.
Every affected family that I met with in western Pennsylvania said they felt displaced on their own property after natural gas companies muscled their way into backyards and fields. Existing health or environmental safeguards are too weak, and poorly enforced. Instead, gas companies are allowed to run roughshod over homeowners and their communities.
Fracking operation, including wastewater pit, next to corn field. Photo: Melanie Blanding
Pennsylvania is no stranger to fossil fuel development. The first oil discovered in America was found in Oil Creek in 1859, and Standard Oil built its empire on the state’s oil fields. Coal has been mined in the region for decades, and old mine shafts dot the landscape.
Local residents told me they thought natural gas would be the next wave in a familiar tide. Most were used to seeing the occasional “donkey” oil pumps bobbing up and down on a hillside, and figured natural gas operations would have a similar profile.
But once drilling began, they realized that fracking goes way beyond anything they had seen before. Instead of a single donkey, a drill site can be the size of several football fields. Half of it may consist of a huge pit holding water and wastewater. When a well is fracked, operators run compressors 24 hours a day for days. People told me their houses shook the entire time.
Even people who gave energy companies the right to drill on their property are overwhelmed by the scale of industrial development. One man told me, “My dad allowed oil drilling on his land years ago, and he got income from the company. It was just one pump out there. It wasn’t a big deal.” He figured he would follow in his father’s footsteps, but then the massive fracking equipment arrived, and he realized he had been boxed into a corner.
Many oil and gas companies turn out to be careless and furtive neighbors. Homeowners are especially concerned about the chemicals sitting in the giant open wastewater pits called impoundments. Yet the oil and gas industry has resisted every attempt to make companies more transparent, and as a result, too few states require them to disclose the chemicals used in fracking fluids, even in some cases to doctors trying to find out why people may be suffering from medical conditions. Standards for managing and reporting on toxic wastewater are too lax and companies sometimes flout the rules. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that one company worker was dumping fracking wastewater right into a local river.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Researchers at PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center found that of the 4,596 fracking sites operating in Pennsylvania between 2008 and 2011, companies violated environmental laws 3,355 times. Some companies see the meager fines levied against them as a cost of doing business. Homeowners, meanwhile, pay the price in polluted air, contaminated water, and decimated property values.
Strong national standards could help protect residents from reckless companies and ineffective state regulators. Yet Senator Hoeven (R-ND) recently introduced a bill that would make it harder for the federal government to regulate fracking. Big Oil’s giant lobbying association, the American Petroleum Institute, welcomed the bill, but many local residents will not. Americans should be protected from the hazards of fracking no matter what state they call home.
NRDC is helping achieve that. We are fighting to put stronger state and national safeguards in place, and we created the Community Fracking Defense Project to help local communities to define their own fracking ordinances.
Lawmakers may sit in Harrisburg or Washington and say there is no need for environmental standards, but people living next door to leaking wastewater pits and polluting wells know better. It’s time we honor their experience and start holding companies accountable.
Chesapeake Testing ‘Green’ Fracking Fluids in Shale Wells – Bloomberg
SAFE comments: Development of environmentally friendly constituents for “slick water” used in fracking does not eliminate, reduce or otherwise rectify that highly saline and radioactive materials, in addition to volatile chemicals inherent in petroleum harvesting, will still come up with the waste water. No amount of “green” fluid injected into the ground can prevent these constituents from coming back up in the flowback.
Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK), the second- largest U.S. natural gas producer, is testing hydraulic- fracturing fluids composed solely of environmentally-benign components in wells.
Chesapeake plans to develop a 100 percent green mixture of fluids used to fracture gas and oil formations underground, Jody C. Jones, the company’s manager of environmental and regulatory affairs, said today during a gathering of energy-industry executives in Columbus, Ohio.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves using high- pressure jets of water, sand and chemicals to smash fissures into rocks so gas and oil may flow. Current fluid formulations often include hazardous components such as hydrochloric acid or diesel fuel and environmentalists say the practice poses a threat to water supplies. Chesapeake, based in Oklahoma City, is testing various green recipes in several shale formations that Jones declined to identify.
“It’s not quite there yet,” Jones said at the Utica Shale Development & Growth Forum sponsored by IQPC Ltd. “The main concern with testing something like this is you just spent $4 to $6 million to drill a well and taking an untested frack system and shooting it down a well could ruin a reservoir and you’d be throwing away all that money.”
Chesapeake is experimenting with green fracking fluids to minimize threats from surface spills near lakes, creeks and rivers that abut drilling sites, Jones said. Such formulations also would reduce workers’ exposure to potentially harmful substances, he said.
Bacteria SlimeSome of the world’s largest fracking-service providers have been working on ways to offer more environmentally friendly fluids. Halliburton Co. (HAL), the world’s largest fracking company, now offers “CleanStim,” which uses food-safe ingredients to stifle the growth of subterranean bacteria that can form a thick slime and impede oil and gas flow.
Halliburton has also developed a process using ultraviolet light to kill bacteria in the fracking fluid, pairing the technology with a recycling process called “CleanWave” that uses an electrical charge to separate contaminants and clean the water.
Baker Hughes Inc. (BHI), the world’s third-largest provider of fracking services, offers a fluid called “VaporFrac” that replaces almost all of the water used in fracking with nitrogen- based foam.
Chesapeake rose 1.3 percent to $19.54 at the close in New York.
Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM) is the biggest U.S. gas producer.
To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Carroll in Chicago at jcarroll8@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Susan Warren at susanwarren@bloomberg.net
Chesapeake Testing ‘Green’ Fracking Fluids in Shale Wells – Bloomberg.
Oil and Gas Leases: Issues and Considerations
Leases do not include the same information that companies give to their shareholders. Landowners are not told the actual risks associated with hydraulic fracturing. There are ways to challenge a lease if a company was not honest about the risks associated with the processes involved in fracking.
The following document regarding gas leasing practices provides important insight into issues to be considered regarding leasing and what is often omitted in leasing offers. The entire content of “Drilling Doublespeak” can be obtained for download at the following link:
http://static.ewg.org/pdf/Drilling_Doublespeak.pdf
SAFE has been examining leases, and is working toward building this page as one that will help you assess your own lease for language that protects you (issues such as burden of proof , compensation for damages). Please check back on this page as we update this information.
Contact Our Legal Committee
L. Cook
legal@dontfractureillinois.net
SAFE has seen a lease that explained the lessee’s rights as follows:
“with the exclusive right for the purpose of exploring *** and operating for and producing *** and the exclusive right *** to inject water, brine and other fluids into the subsurface strata, as well as any industry enhanced recovery methods.”
Note the use of the relatively innocuous sounding term “other fluids” after “water” and “brine” and also note the use of the term “industry enhanced recovery methods”. The lessor explained to us that they were not told that horizontal high-volume, high-pressure hydraulic fracturing could be used on his property.
If this language was intended to encompass horizontal fracking, it is far from a model of clarity and is misleading.
Royalties
Other lease specify royalties that are calculated “at the wellhead.” This means that no matter what is stated anywhere else in the lease, “at the wellhead” means the company is entitled to take all costs (i.e., any cost it can think of) out of its profits before it calculates any royalties.
Pipelines
Leases typically have paragraphs that sound like care is taken regarding pipelines, e.g., that pipelines will be buried below the plow line in crop fields. Yet those leases do not say that pipelines must be buried in a location that is not a crop field. This means they reserve the right to run a pipe line through your yard if they want to.
Damage Clauses
The “famous” liquified damages clause limits any damages payable to you (for any damages, of any kind, ever) to $5,000. We have even seen damage limits as low as $3,000.
Hold Harmless and Indemnify
Perhaps worse, the “hold harmless and indemnify” clause says no matter what happens, you, the landowner, is liable: for injury, damage to the land, to property or anything else. We have a signed copy of one of those leases. The Johnson County clerk’s office has many, many of these leases filed.
FAQ
Will Not Signing a Lease Prevent Drilling?
Q. I am an owner of an oil/gas lease with Next Energy, LLC. They have sent us a form that requests to change the original lease to allow horizontal drilling. With everything I have read, I have not signed it as yet. Will my not signing (my brother and sister haven’t either) prevent anything?
A. First, we need to know how the mineral rights are owned, before we can answer the question about you and your brother/sister not signing the lease. If they own any of the rights, and none of you have signed the lease, then yes, that can make a difference. The issue is a little complex, but basically it is this: In contract law, an issue has to be “within the contemplation of the parties” when they sign a contract for there to have been a “meeting of the minds.” If there has not been a meeting of the minds, there is a very good argument that a contract is invalid.
I am assuming that the contract that was originally signed was before horizontal fracking became an issue? If that is the case, then the parties had no way of knowing that the oil and gas company could potentially use fracking on their property, and therefore did not sign a lease with any intention of allowing horizontal fracking to take place. Therefore, there was no meeting of the minds, and if the oil and gas company does not get an amendment signed, and goes ahead with fracking anyway, they run the risk of being taken to court for an injunction forcing them to stop operations after they have already committed serious time and money and materials to the project.
So, NextEnergy is covering their bases and trying to get the amendment signed. Now, I must warn you they may try to bully you into it, by threatening you and saying they have the right to do it anyway, so you might as well sign. DO NOT fall for it. This is a standard tactic. They may also say you might as well sign, because they can drill on your neighbor and steal your gas, so you might as well sign. NOT TRUE. There IS something called forced pooling in Illinois, but if by some chance they get any gas or oil from under you, they have to pay you for it, no matter where they drill. And right now IDNR is not allowing forced pooling anyway, and has not even issued one permit for forced pooling in all this time. I talked to IDNR about this myself. So do not fall for that one either.
Threatened to Sign A Lease
Q. My husband’s family has been presented with leases for their surprise inheritance of indivually-small shares in mineral rights under some property in southern Illinois. Ugh! I’m a member of a grassroots fractivist group in Colorado and am appalled. I thought it was a load of frack-fluid when the landman told my husband that if he didn’t sign the lease, my husband would become like a part owner of the drilling company and would incur expenses of drilling before receiving any royalties.
This sounds crazy, but it’s what the landman told us; he even sent us a copy of a letter to someone owning property in Louisiana (not Illinois) to present the idea. Also, I’ve heard from an attorney in Colorado that it is possible, but he’s not familiar with Illinois laws.
Can you help me with this? Have you heard this before? I haven’t had any luck in looking at the Illinois oil & gas regs.
A Chicago (where I grew up) attorney offered to check into it for $300-$400/hour; I’d have to sell my house to afford that. We’re contemplating the HORRIBLE idea of signing the lease and donating any royalties (expected to be very, very minimal – but even if they were huge) to fractivist organizations, including SAFE. Another HORRIBLE idea is to sell our house and try to hide the money if there’s any profit, rent an apartment, declare bankruptcy, and then sign the lease.
By the way, we’re so impressed with the SAFE newsletter, actions, number of volunteers, etc. Kudos! We wish you the very best – a statewide ban – of course!
A. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard yet. No, you do not become part owner of the drilling company just because you do not sign a lease, and it is legally impossible to “draft” someone into becoming part of any company; no, you do not incur expenses of drilling before receiving any royalties just because you do not sign the lease. Yes, it is a load of frack fluid.
The only grain of truth in it is, if you DO sign a lease expecting to receive royalties, and the lease says your royalty is computed at the well head, they get to deduct all kinds of expenses before computing the royalties.
I would doubt anything the landmen say; I would doubly doubt any copies of letters they say they sent, as this is easily faked; and I would especially doubt anything they say they sent to Louisiana, as Louisiana is under Neopolitan law, unlike the rest of the US, and their laws do not apply to us.
Cabot’s Methodology Links Tainted Water Wells to Gas Fracking – Bloomberg
Halliburton’s Radioactive Frack Rod Found Alongside Texas Highway After Going Missing
Holy frack that was close!
Public relations people and top-level executives at Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oilfield services companies, are likely breathing a sigh of relief after the oilfield services company found a radioactive rod that it lost last month, the Guardian reports. The seven-inch rod of americium-241/beryllium was found alongside a Texas highway some miles away from where it was being used to locate oil and gas deposits eligible for fracking.
Previously, members of the FBI, the Texas National Guard and Halliburton had been searching for the radioactive tool that is classified as a “category 3” source of radiation and could prove fatal if held for an extended period of time. It is the first incident of a lost radioactive tool of its kind in the past five years, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Bloomberg reports.
But radioactive materials sometimes do turn up in unexpected places. In 2010, Italy experienced the worst radiological incident in its history when a shipping container arrived in the port city of Genoa with unsafe levels of radiation, WIRED reports. The source turned out to be a radioactive rod not much larger than a pencil.
Still, concerns over safety violations are nothing new for Halliburton. The conglomerate once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney faced criticism for its role in BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill after reports emerged that it provided faulty cementing in constructing the well. More recently, critics have raised concerns over the effects its fracking fluid has on nearby drinking water, even prompting one executive to publicly drink Halliburton fluid to prove that its ingredients are benign .
Halliburton’s Radioactive Rod Found Alongside Texas Highway After Going Missing.
Italy earthquakes = FRACKING! Two DOZEN people dead in two weeks !! – YouTube
Two DOZEN people killed in since May 20, 2012 (the first large 6.0M+ at this location)…At the epicenter — drilling / pumping / fracking operation .
The days of denying — by so-called ‘professionals’ — are over. Coordinates for this recent 5.8M today (5/29/2012) from USGS:
44.814°N, 11.079°E
USGS stats: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usb000a1mn.php
download google earth for FREE here … http://earth.google.com
At least 15 people dead THIS time (5.8M on 5/29/2012)
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/29/world/europe/italy-earthquake/index.html
7 dead on May 20, 2012:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Emilia_earthquake
Category:
5/29/2012 — Italy earthquakes = FRACKING! Two DOZEN people dead in two weeks !! – YouTube.
#fracking #humaninducedearthquakes #Italy #Earthquakes #frackingandearthquakes
No fracking for ten years – says EU Commissioner for Energy – Local – Leitrim Obse
No fracking for ten years – says EU Commissioner for Energy – Local – Leitrim Observer.
Senator Paschal Mooney with EU Commissioner for Enerfy G�nther Oettinger.
Published on Saturday 29 September 2012 09:00
EU Commissioner for Energy Gúnther Oettinger has informed Drumshanbo Senator Paschal Mooney that no decisions should be taken on hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for ten years.
The Commissioners opinion was in response to a serious of questions from Senator Mooney at a meeting of Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport Energy and Communications which the Commissioner attended during his visit to Ireland last week.
In a series of questions submitted by Senator Mooney to the Commissioner about the EU Commissions Policy on fracking Commissioner Gúnther Oettinger replied that he believed no decisions should be taken until the environmental impact of fracking was established and that could take between five and ten years. He further informed Senator Mooney that he was already in discussions with scientists and those with technical expertise and has opened a dialogue with the Polish Government where fracking has already commenced. The Commissioner revealed that the extraction of shale gas could be chemical free in a number of years which is a major point of controversy and he intended visiting the United States next Spring to see at first-hand how shale gas is extracted.
“I welcome this recognition by EU Energy Commissioner of the sensitivities involved over this controversial process” stated Senator Mooney. “The Commissioner is obviously aware of the adverse environmental impact of current practices associated with the extraction of shale gas. The Commissioner is proceeding cautiously before coming to any conclusions. I am delighted that the person charged with Energy Policy in the European Union is consulting widely with the scientific technical and political community as part of an on-going process and I am now confident that the Energy Commissioner will not rush into a decisions that would harm the environment as a result of the fracking process” concluded the Leitrim Senator.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin MEP and Environment Committee member, Martina Anderson last week voted in the European Parliament against the exploration and extraction of shale gas.
Speaking from Brussels she welcomed the outcome of the vote. “Among the encouraging proposals voted by the Environment Committee are; mandatory environmental impact assessments for fracking projects, the exclusion of EU funding for the shale gas industry and the obligation for fracking companies to declare which chemicals are used in the fracking process.”
“Given the associated risks with the process used to extract shale gas known as hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’, it is baffling that a more robust system of regulation is not already in place. Local communities’ concerns regarding the environment and public health must outweigh any commercial and monetary incentives for large gas companies.”
“The very real and dangerous risks of water contamination and noise pollution from fracking have the potential to seriously damage both agriculture and tourism – two very important sectors of Ireland’s economy. Even before exploration of the gas begins an Environmental Impact Assessment should be an absolute necessity. There is too much at stake to continue with these risks.”
“Indeed, at a time when we are quickly heading towards a point-of-no-return with climate change and the environment, it seems that we’re missing the bigger picture. With an agreed upon need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is essential that we move away from the business-as-usual use of fossil fuels and towards renewable energies and a greener, safer and more sustainable economy.”
#FrackingChemicals #EuropeanUnionNoFracking #FrackingMoratorium #banfracking #media #EU #FrackingintheEuropeanUnion #moratorium
Pennsylvania State Representative Jesse White calls for probe of Dept of Environmental Protection wa
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has created incomplete lab reports and used them to dismiss complaints that Marcellus Shale gas development operations have contaminated residential water supplies and made people sick, according to court documents and other sources.
As a result, state Rep. Jesse White, D-Cecil, today called on state and federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the DEP for “alleged misconduct and fraud” described in sworn depositions in a civil case currently in Washington County Common Pleas Court.
“This is beyond outrageous,” Mr. White said in a press release. “Anyone who relied on the DEP for the truth about whether their water has been impacted by drilling activities has apparently been intentionally deprived of critical health and safety information by their own government.”
The DEP quickly responded Mr. White’s statements in an email to the Post-Gazette.
Department spokesman Kevin Sunday said the DEP’s testing lab received a “glowing” review last year in a peer review by the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
He added, “Jesse White is ideologically opposed to responsible drilling regulations which is evidenced by, among other things, his vote against Act 13,” a state law that regulates Marcellus Shale drilling and gas production.
“The battery of analyses we order during investigations are thorough and give us the results we need to make sound determinations, which we fully stand behind,” Mr. Sunday said.
“DEP takes very seriously instances where we do determine gas migration has occurred from drilling — this administration issued the largest single civil penalty in the history of the state’s oil and gas program last year for such a case.”
Mr. White’s call for an investigation came after the release of two depositions of DEP employees, one of whom, Taru Upadhyay, the division director of DEP’s Bureau of Laboratories, said the department’s lab reports to property owners didn’t contain a full array of contaminants found by the lab’s testing.
Mr. White said there’s no excuse for withholding some of the water test results because they could hold the key to residents’ water supply problems.
“If these allegations are true, there needs to be a thorough and objective investigation to determine if someone belongs in a jail cell,” he said.
In her deposition, Ms. Upadhyay said the department’s oil and gas division directed the lab to generate water test reports to homeowners that omitted the full menu of findings for heavy metals, including lithium, cobalt, chromium, boron and titanium, some of which are human carcinogens, as well as volatile organic compounds that are associated with hydraulic fracturing fluids.
Those metals are Marcellus Shale markers, found in the shale layer a mile or more underground in Pennsylvania. They are released by hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” of the shale and can be carried by flowback fluids to the surface.
Finding them and certain volatile organic compounds in the water test results would link contamination of groundwater to gas well drilling and fracking operations, said John Smith, an attorney with Smith Butz, a firm representing eight people in the Washington County case against Range Resources and 12 of its subcontractors. Their case contends that they face serious health problems and increased cancer risk due to exposure to toxic chemicals in their air and well water near Range’s Yeager drill site in Amwell.
“Despite these significant health consequences, the DEP purposely never considered information concerning all of these metals in each of the plaintiffs’ water supplies before making any of its determinations and purposely failed to alert the plaintiffs to their presence,” said Mr. Smith in a court filing Wednesday.
Kendra Smith, another Smith Butz attorney, today sent a 10-page letter to DEP Secretary Michael Krancer about the incomplete test results and requested a review of the practice. She sent copies of the letter to state Attorney General Linda Kelly; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region III; David Hickton, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania; and five state legislators.
According to the deposition transcript, Ms. Upadhyay said the DEP’s state laboratory tests water samples for a full battery of contaminants, but at the direction of the department’s Office of Oil and Gas Management, limits the number of contaminants reported to the oil and gas division and the property owner.
In a second deposition filed in the case, John Carson, a DEP water quality specialist, said a special lab code for Marcellus Shale water contamination complaints is used statewide. He also said the department failed to provide its water quality specialists with training to help them interpret the lab reports and identify contaminants that could signal Marcellus Shale-related impacts.
A Post-Gazette review of DEP water quality reports generated under the department’s “942 Suite Code” found that those reports didn’t disclose all of the contaminants found in well water samples. The water complaints in these cases were dismissed because the abbreviated reports did not support the property owner complaints in Amwell, Washington County, the Woodlands area in Butler County, and Dimock in Susquehanna County.
Ms. Upadhyay’s statements came in response to questions from Ms. Smith and are contained in a 336-page transcript of her deposition taken Sept. 26 for an Environmental Hearing Board case. The case, brought by Loren Kiskadden of Amwell, alleges that DEP’s investigation of his well-contamination complaint was inaccurate and incomplete.
The depositions were filed as supporting documents in the related Washington County Court case. In that case, four homeowners, including Mr. Kiskadden, who live near the Yeager well site, allege their private water supplies were contaminated and they suffered a variety of health problems.
Range, owner of the Yeager well site, has denied any responsibility for any contamination from its operations, which included three wells, a 13 million-gallon impoundment and a drill cuttings pit.
By Don Hopey / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
First Published November 1, 2012 6:17 pm
State representative calls for probe of DEP water testing reports – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
#ContaminatedWater #MarcellusShalerelatedimpacts #Pennsylvania #PennsylvaniaDepartmentofEnvironmentalProtection #DEPwaterqualityreports #DEP #MarcellusShale #misconductandfraud
Big storms and fracking: what’s at stake?
Here in Washington, D.C. the winds are fast, furious, and loud as we await the brunt of Hurricane Sandy. Winds have been clocked up to 90 mph as the storm hits land with the lowest pressure ever recorded in the northeast. Images of a crane dangling off a Manhattan skyscraper are as scary as the reports that flooding will occur as far north as Vermont and New Hampshire.
West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio are all expected to be hit by the storm. What could it mean for fracking sites in the Marcellus shale?
One of the greatest risks at these sites are spills and what is called “stormwater runoff.”
Under the Clean Water Act, there is something called the Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) rule which includes requirements for oil spill prevention, preparedness, and response to prevent oil discharges to navigable waters and adjoining shorelines. The rule requires specific facilities to prepare, amend, and implement spill prevention plans. Sounds like a no-brainer. But in Fiscal Year 2011, EPA officials visited 120 sites oil and gas development sites and found 105 were out of compliance– 87.5%. (Note: these do not have to be oil production sites. For example, natural gas pads may have enough fuel for drill rigs stored on site to trigger this requirement.)
Almost every single oil and gas site inspected lacked a mandatory spill prevention plan meant to protect our rivers and streams. This is an unacceptable flouting of our environmental laws.
In addition to a spill prevention plan, oil and gas companies should have something called a Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan. During a rainstorm, flowing water can pick up pollutants along the way, including toxic materials like fracking chemicals or fracking waste. Most companies are required by the Clean Water Act to get a stormwater permit by submitting a Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan outlining precautions the company will take to avoid illegal discharge of pollutants and impacts to nearby rivers and streams. Ensuring prevention of stormwater run-off is not rocket science. It requires simple measures such as sufficient berms and containment systems. But the oil and gas industry is exempt from having to get a permit, which means regulators do not have to approve a pollution prevention plan–or even see if a company really has one for each site.
This is all increasingly terrifying as Sandy bears down on the Marcellus region, where there are many open pits filled with fracking and related waste. Because the oil and gas industry is also exempt from our hazardous waste laws, no one knows exactly how dangerous the waste at any particular site might be, but we know it can be very toxic and also radioactive. NRDC opposes storing of fracking and production waste in these open air pits, but it is still allowed.
What does a flooded wellpad look like? Here is a photo of a flooded wellpad in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, after Tropical Storm Lee in September, 2011:
Photo credit: Carol French, used with permission.
And here is a photo of how dangerously close millions of gallons of potentially toxic fracking waste can be to homes, in this case in Washington County, Pennsylvania:
Photo credit: Robert Donnan, used with permission.
NRDC opposes having dangerous fracking waste stored so close to people’s homes. Hurricane Sandy is terrifying for many reasons. For people living next to fracking waste sites, one of them is that the storm may flood these sites and cause toxic substances to flow onto their land, their home, or their farm. It is well past due for the toxic waste loophole for the oil and gas industry to be closed.
Big storms and fracking: what’s at stake? | Amy Mall’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC.
#StormWaterPollutionPreventionPlan #frackingwaste #HurricaneSandy #Control #flooding #stormwaterrunoff #Bigstormsandfracking #easternOhio #Pennsylvania #SpillPrevention #andCountermeasureSPCCrule #WestVirginia
Iran’s teachers movement perseveres against all odds
This article Iran’s teachers movement perseveres against all odds was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Sunlight filtered through the trees separating the headquarters of the Plan and Budget Organization in Tehran as 300 teachers gathered outside to protest on Sept. 6. Their demands were simple: salaries that keep pace with inflation, fair pay scales and improved health and welfare services.
They knew they were taking an enormous risk.
For years, educators across Iran have taken to the streets to demand fair wages, better working conditions, the release of detained teachers, the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free education for all children and to peaceful assembly and association. For years, they have faced arrests, enforced disappearances, prosecutions on national security charges, dismissals, imprisonment and solitary confinement.
Teachers and teachers’ union activists played a prominent role in the January 2026 uprising, when people across the country called for freedom and an end to the Islamic Republic system of government. In response, they were heavily targeted. By July, at least 60 had been arrested, prosecuted or imprisoned. At least 14 have been killed. Still, against all odds, Iranian teachers have kept their movement alive.
#newsletter-block_387f3a103743ec0e312d1a128efa656e { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_387f3a103743ec0e312d1a128efa656e #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterThe Iranian teachers’ movement is not organized through a single union. Local and provincial teachers’ associations operate across the country, while an umbrella network called the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, or CCITTA, links many of them. The structure allows teachers to organize locally while coordinating actions across the country.
Some of these actions, like protests and public statements, are impossible to miss. Others are less confrontational and more relational: debating movement priorities, supporting imprisoned colleagues and their families, building solidarity with other social movements, or simply getting together to hike or read or watch a film. Together, they knit together a movement that has proven resilient against virtually every form of repression, from internet shutdowns to detentions and killings, while continuing to press its demands.
‘A continuation of my responsibility as a teacher’Mohammad Habibi became a teacher in 2003. For him, it was never just a job; it felt like a social responsibility. But he soon realized that quality education for students could not be fully achieved without protecting teachers’ rights. So he joined the Iranian Teachers’ Trade Association and later took on several roles within the CCITTA. He is currently its spokesperson.
“My trade union activism wasn’t separate from teaching,” he said. “I saw it as a continuation of my responsibility as a teacher. Teachers have a duty that goes beyond teaching textbooks. They must defend the right to education, student dignity, educational justice and freedom of thought.”
Like Habibi, the nine teachers interviewed for this story described demands that encompass both their own rights and those of their students. They want salaries and pensions that reflect the real cost of living, job security, meaningful participation in education policy, freedom of expression and association, and the release of their imprisoned colleagues.
But they’re also calling for free, high-quality and equitable public education for all children, regardless of ethnicity or gender, while opposing the privatization and commercialization of education.
For Esmaeil Abdi, the former general secretary of the Tehran Teachers’ Trade Association, who spent nearly nine years in prison for his activism, the fight against privatization is inseparable from the fight for equality. “If education becomes a commodity whose quality depends on a family’s economic ability, social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next,” he said.
Teachers also advocate for every child’s right to receive education in their mother tongue alongside Persian, arguing that Iran’s linguistic and cultural diversity should be reflected in its schools.
Over the years, the movement has won concessions on some of these demands, like pension increases, the implementation of the Teacher Ranking Law (specifying pay tiers) and corresponding salary increases, and a voice in the management of their retirement fund. However, even when policies change, implementation may be incomplete.
“But the significance of this experience lies not only in the material results of these demands,” said Eskandar “Soran” Lotfi, a Kurdish teachers’ union activist and former CCITTA spokesperson. “It also shows that sustained and organized protests by teachers have succeeded in bringing issues that the government initially refused to accept into the sphere of public policymaking and decision-making.”
Abdi shared a similar view: “Despite repression, the teachers’ movement has succeeded in keeping issues such as free public education, teachers’ rights and educational inequality at the center of public debate.”
While maintaining its organizational independence, the movement has built solidarity with workers, students and women’s rights activists. This has happened despite what Laeya Mohammadi, a teacher activist using a pseudonym for fear of reprisal, describes as the “government’s attempts to divide teachers from other movements, including by claiming teachers hold a higher social status than [other groups], like workers.”
Much as they would later take part in the January 2026 protests, teachers participated in the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, in which hundreds of thousands protested the repressive government after the morality police killed 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Four years later, that struggle still shapes the aspirations of teachers like Habibi, who hopes for a future in which female teachers and students are no longer compelled to obey the country’s veiling law and instead have full autonomy over choices as personal as what they wear.
Previous CoverageTeachers’ broader social commitments have also surfaced when their students are at risk. Beginning in late 2022, girls across Iran began reporting illnesses after suspected poisonings at schools, with cases eventually spreading across many cities and provinces. As the incidents continued amid conflicting official explanations and growing concern over students’ safety, the CCITTA called nationwide protests in March 2023. Teachers and parents demonstrated across the country. In some locations, security forces teargassed and arrested protesters.
Shadi Taban, a teacher who spoke under a pseudonym, was among those who participated. For her, the issue reflected a principle reaching well beyond teachers’ own working conditions.
“Our red line is the students,” she said.
That red line was crossed during the January 2026 uprisings when the government killed more than 200 schoolchildren. Teachers took it upon themselves to protest their students’ deaths and honor their memories through the “Empty Desks” campaign. Despite widespread internet shutdowns and the difficulty of accessing information, Iranian teachers were able to collect and share the names, photographs and stories of around 240 children who had lost their lives.
Abdi believes that this record-building could one day help establish truth, accountability and redress for the state-committed abuses. “We see this as an important part of a future process of transitional justice,” he said.
After the U.S. military struck a school in Minab in February 2026, killing 150 people, including 120 children, teachers launched another documentation campaign. Titled “Abandoned Backpacks,” it symbolized the children who never returned to school.
But the significance of the campaigns transcends symbolism. “For us, these were also efforts aimed at seeking justice, preserving collective memory and defending children’s right to life and education,” Lotfi said.
Social organizing and consensus-buildingOne of the movement’s most fundamental structural challenges is that independent trade unions lack legal recognition in Iran. According to Lotfi, this creates obstacles before organizing even begins. Teachers cannot openly and formally recruit members or build a stable financial structure through membership dues to support research, education and organizing. Meetings and assemblies often occur only in private spaces.
The movement is therefore forced into a permanent contradiction: Much of its organizational work must happen informally, even as its demands are voiced publicly.
When those demands do become public, their spread encounters another barrier.
Pirouz Nami, who established the Teachers’ Trade Association of Khuzestan in 2012, said state-affiliated media often suppress teachers’ actual demands while portraying their activism as the product of foreign manipulation or hostile forces. “Within Iran, if any newspaper attempts to report the truth, it faces closure or prosecution,” Mohammadi explained. International coverage, Nami added, can create a different problem: sporadic attention that captures individual protests or arrests but misses the movement’s longer-term structures, relationships and organizing work.
In the face of such expansive challenges, teachers have developed an equally expansive repertoire of strategies. But those strategies remain peaceful, despite the repression and violence they are met with.
“One cannot seek freedom, justice and human dignity through methods that violate those very values,” said Habibi, who has himself been arrested and beaten for protesting.
“Teachers have a duty that goes beyond teaching textbooks,” says Mohammad Habibi, teacher and Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations spokesperson. (Education International)Teachers organize strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins and letter-writing campaigns; issue joint statements; document rights violations; and use social media to raise public awareness. One teacher, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, recalled more theatrical actions he had participated in. In one, teachers collectively burned payslips; in another, they built a coffin for the education system and carried it through the streets in a mock funeral procession.
The decision to take action at all is one that’s shaped collectively before anyone takes to the streets.
Several teachers described decision-making within the CCITTA as a democratic process built around discussion, consensus and majority voting. Lotfi said consensus is woven into organizing from the earliest stage. Before a demand becomes a slogan, teachers discuss, analyze and write about it. Workshops and longer discussion sessions may follow, with supporters and opponents debating the idea.
“This transforms a demand from a simple slogan into an issue that teachers … can collectively defend,” Lotfi said.
Opposition to the privatization and commodification of education, for example, was not always universally shared. But as Iran’s once all-public education system gradually shifted toward greater private-sector involvement, a small group of teacher activists began arguing that privatization was undermining the constitutional guarantee of free public education. They discussed the consequences of this trend through written materials, meetings and debate. Over time, the idea gained broader support. Today, opposition to privatization, as well as advocacy for free, public and equitable education, have become some of the movement’s central priorities. In fact, according to Habibi, “It is because of teachers’ protests that the privatization of public education has proceeded much more slowly than successive governments would have liked.”
Alongside the demonstrations and strikes visible to the public and the state, teachers continually work to strengthen relationships within the movement. “Even activities that don’t seem directly related to our demands form a part of social organizing,” Lotfi said. Teachers meet online and in person. They organize hiking groups, walking groups, cultural programs and social gatherings. That work, Abdi said, helps build a movement that “doesn’t depend on one individual and preserves and reproduces its capacity to act, even under pressure.”
The trust created through those relationships can become crucial when repression strikes.
Solidarity with detained teachersIn May 2022, Lotfi was arrested when returning to his hometown, Marivan, ahead of a planned Teachers’ Day protest there.
“My tenant had informed my family beforehand about what was happening,” he recalled. “The security forces had surrounded my home. But I went back anyway because I had spent years working to create joint action, and didn’t want to miss that moment. I was arrested almost immediately after entering the city.”
State television later portrayed him negatively, including allegations that he had ties to “hostile countries,” which he says are unfounded. Authorities pointed to a friendly meeting between Lotfi and two French teacher trade unionists as evidence of those supposed connections.
His detention activated the networks he had spent years building.
Dozens of teachers demonstrated outside education offices and other government institutions. Teachers circulated statements and written appeals demanding his release. When Lotfi began a hunger strike to protest his detention and pressure to confess to ties with the French citizens, dozens of teachers began solidarity hunger strikes of their own. He was finally released on bail in August 2022, but was rearrested in October, during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
The wave of support he received was not unique to him.
Several teachers described a similar response whenever a colleague is detained or imprisoned: Associations issue public statements, raise awareness through social media and news outlets, and organize gatherings outside education offices and courthouses to pressure authorities for their colleagues’ release. Teachers also provide financial and emotional assistance to detainees’ families and try to secure legal support. The movement does not act alone. Habibi said volunteer lawyers, journalists and civil society activists have repeatedly stood alongside teachers, despite the consequences that solidarity can carry.
At the same time, teachers aligned with state authorities participate in what Lotfi described as mechanisms of control and repression. “They might spread rumors about activists, like portraying them as affiliated with foreign governments,” he said. The result can be fear and mistrust, discouraging even sympathetic teachers from publicly supporting detained colleagues.
For detained teachers, repression spills into the lives of their loved ones, who are left to absorb its emotional and material costs.
A teacher who requested anonymity because he is out on bail pending trial, described his wife being arrested alongside him this past spring, amid a broader crackdown on teachers’ union activists.
“Both my wife and I were beaten,” he said. “They blindfolded and handcuffed me and put me in a vehicle.”
During the two months he spent in detention, he said, a judicial officer threatened to reopen what he called “Glass Room No. 100.” The teacher described it as a place where protesters were raped with glass bottles — a form of sexual torture Amnesty International has independently documented against other detainees in Iran.
Like the other teachers interviewed, Nami endured years of threatening phone calls, surveillance at work and in the classroom, pay cuts, arrests, torture, solitary confinement and ultimately job dismissal. Watching his family endure the consequences alongside him, he said, doubled the weight. During Nami’s detentions, his wife had to manage the household and care for their eldest son, who has a severe physical disability, entirely on her own, while also living with rheumatism and diabetes.
Mohammadi testified about her detention experience to the women’s committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. She told them that when the Ministry of Intelligence summoned her, she went without informing her family. Security agents nevertheless tracked her children through her phone, causing them severe distress. After her arrest, authorities threatened her family against reporting her imprisonment to the media.
“But on a social level, going to prison under this regime no longer carries a social stigma,” she said. “On the contrary, people wear it as a badge of honor, proud to have stood up against the state.”
Building strength under wartime conditionsChallenges intensify during internet shutdowns and periods of war, like Iran is experiencing now. Habibi said teachers struggle to communicate, share information and coordinate activities; even maintaining contact with the families of imprisoned colleagues becomes difficult.
The danger extends to communication devices themselves. Lotfi said authorities sometimes seize activists’ phones and computers during arrests and searches and later use information stored on them in judicial proceedings, making secure communication a constant concern.
Even under these conditions, public action has not disappeared entirely.
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DonateThe Sept. 6 protest was one of the movement’s most recent public demonstrations, unfolding amid a broader wave of protests across the country that included actions by railway workers, nurses, unemployed youth and retirees over grievances like unpaid wages and the mishandling of pension funds.
But wartime conditions, intense repression and the imprisonment of many active organizers have forced teachers to retreat from frequent street demonstrations.
“We are trying to preserve our relationships and collective spirit through lower-risk activities happening across the country, such as group walks, hiking trips, film screenings, book discussions, and educational and cultural gatherings,” Habibi said.
One such lower-risk activity is a screening of “When We Fight” (a documentary about the 2019 Los Angeles teachers’ strike), planned for World Teachers’ Day on Oct. 5, possibly followed by a virtual conversation between Iranian teachers and American educators featured in the film about organizing strategies and shared experiences.
The CCITTA continues to provide financial support to imprisoned teachers, who currently number 15 by Habibi’s count, although resources have been strained by the uptick in arrests since January 2026 and payments have become smaller. The fund cannot take international donations, due to the government’s sensitivity to connections outside the country, so it is financed by voluntary donations from teachers, who risk having their bank accounts frozen in retaliation. “Still, each time this happens, a new account is created, and teachers begin making donations again,” Habibi said.
The CCITTA is also continuing its Empty Desks project. And as schools reopen, teachers, including Taban, are campaigning for the reinstatement of colleagues who were dismissed for their protest activity. In late September, teachers, parents and civil society activists launched a petition demanding the reinstatement of all dismissed teachers, rallying in particular around Kurdish teacher-activists Majid Karimi and Ghias Nemati. The two had briefly returned to their classrooms after a higher administrative body overturned earlier decisions barring them from service, only for education authorities to impose new penalties that again removed them from teaching.
“Although our methods might change because of the circumstances, our commitment to defending teachers’ rights, public education and civil society remains unchanged,” Habibi said.
This article Iran’s teachers movement perseveres against all odds was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
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How the war in Sudan is teaching society to govern without the state
This article How the war in Sudan is teaching society to govern without the state was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
What if one of the most consequential political effects of Sudan’s war is not simply that the state collapsed, but that millions of people were forced to discover what society could organize without it?
In Sudan, that discovery did not begin with a political declaration. In many places, it began with food.
Khalid, a young man who had been involved in Sudan’s resistance committees during the revolution, was among those who remained in his city after many residents fled. Some of those who left already knew him and the other young people who stayed. They had organized things together before the war. Years of working together had created a kind of trust that would become critical once the institutions around them disappeared.
The displaced suggested that they start a community kitchen, or takiyya (a Sudanese community kitchen where volunteers prepare and distribute free meals), to feed those who remained.
The first donations came through WhatsApp groups. Sudanese living outside the city transferred money through Bankak (a mobile banking service that allows users to transfer money and make payments electronically). Khalid bought sacks of broad beans, oil and charcoal. He went to mosques to recruit volunteers, while others used Facebook and WhatsApp to invite young people to join.
They cooked and distributed food every day. Then the work expanded.
#newsletter-block_2175199e07360378f01f34cb6dd511b8 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_2175199e07360378f01f34cb6dd511b8 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterSome families could not safely leave their homes. Women and girls faced particular risks moving through the streets, while elderly people often could not walk to the kitchen. Khalid and other volunteers began collecting their requests, buying what they needed and delivering it to their homes.
Relatives abroad would transfer money into the volunteers’ accounts. The volunteers would withdraw it as cash and deliver it to the families.
No institution had appointed Khalid to do any of this. There was no formal organizational chart, no contracts defining responsibilities, no salaries and no legal agreement governing the network.
But that did not mean there was no organization. People knew who could do what.
Responsibilities were distributed according to professional skills, geographic proximity, availability and urgency. Older volunteers carried particular authority because they had accumulated experience; younger volunteers learned from them.
The arrangement was informal. But it was not unorganized.
Emergency Response Rooms (locally organized civilian networks that coordinate emergency food, health care, evacuation and other essential services) and other civilian networks in Sudan are often described in humanitarian language: communities feeding communities, transporting medicine, evacuating the wounded and filling gaps left by the collapse of public services and the difficulty of international organizations reaching people.
That description is accurate, but it does not tell the whole story.
The more consequential question is: What did people learn while doing all of this?
They learned how to mobilize resources without an institution behind them. How to decide which needs were most urgent. How to match people to tasks. How to negotiate movement through territories controlled by different armed actors. How to manage disagreements without allowing them to destroy the network. How to move money and information across front lines. And how to transfer knowledge to someone else before the person who possessed it was killed, arrested or forced to flee.
Survival became a school of organization. But this school did not begin from nothing.
Before the warSudan already had traditions of collective action, including nafeer (a Sudanese tradition of collective voluntary labor in which people mobilize together around a shared need). The resistance committees (decentralized, neighborhood-based civilian groups that became a major force in Sudan’s 2018–19 revolution) that emerged during the revolution also developed forms of neighborhood-level organization based on trust, horizontal coordination and collective action.
Previous CoverageAfter the revolution, parts of this infrastructure evolved into Change and Services Committees (local community bodies that organized basic services and neighborhood affairs), which in different areas organized aspects of everyday life, from bakeries and cooking gas to other local services. These were organized bodies. In some places, they had defined responsibilities, documents and official stamps. Their members accumulated practical knowledge about managing the affairs of their communities.
So when war came, civilians did not begin from zero.
There was already an infrastructure that had learned how to turn political trust into everyday administration.
The experience of Gezira State reveals something even more striking.
When the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, a powerful paramilitary force that the U.N. and U.S. found has committed acts of genocide, took control of Gezira on Dec. 18, 2023, local government effectively disappeared from areas under their control. Less than a month later, on Jan. 16, 2024, the governor of Gezira issued Decision No. 1 of 2024, dissolving all Change and Services Committees in villages, neighborhoods, rural settlements, markets and industrial areas.
The decision did more than dissolve them. It instructed local executive officials to inventory and take possession of the committees’ fixed and movable assets, documents, property and official stamps, and to freeze their bank accounts until new caretaker committees could be formed.
There was something revealing about that detail: Even the stamps were part of the authority the state wanted to reclaim.
But the committees that the governor had ordered dissolved were still on the ground, while the authority issuing the order was absent.
The committees’ response, in essence, was a simple question: If you have dissolved us, come into the state you left and take the stamps from us.
Six days later, on Jan. 22, the Fifth Infantry Division command of the Rapid Support Forces issued its own decision, stating that it was “renewing confidence” in the Change and Services Committees and instructing them to continue performing their duties toward citizens across the state’s localities, neighborhoods and villages.
The contradiction could hardly have been clearer.
The state, absent from the territory, ordered the civilian bodies operating there to disappear. The armed force that controlled the territory found itself facing an existing civilian infrastructure performing functions that military control alone could not perform.
An armed force can enter a city and declare control within hours. It does not automatically know who needs medicine, who has the key to the bakery, who can operate a water station, which families need assistance, or who can safely move between neighborhoods.
Here it becomes apparent that controlling territory militarily is not the same as possessing the knowledge required to govern life within it.
Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'zaU5mtOdQf1mhobwA4j_LQ',sig:'VxQnB47bDJYqts1PrW0UhW7XNKr83M37HFr1WoV4nME=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'1147425480',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});The Change and Services Committees were not just a humanitarian response that emerged when the war began. Before the war, they had already accumulated experience organizing everyday services. What looked during the war like the sudden emergence of civilian networks was, in many places, a shift from one function to another: from organizing bread, gas and local services during the revolutionary period to organizing food, water, medicine and evacuation during war.
The infrastructure did not disappear when the state did. The mission changed.
The experience of a group of water engineers led by a man named Bakri illustrates the difference.
At the beginning of the war, the group tried to keep existing water stations operating. But as the fighting continued, fuel and spare parts became harder to obtain, while insecurity made maintaining centralized infrastructure increasingly difficult. So they improvised.
They organized ways to bring water directly from the Nile, sometimes using donkey carts carrying large barrels. They located wells that had been abandoned for years and organized their reopening. When some families could not collect water themselves, volunteers delivered it to them.
Teachers did something similar. A group led by Saif began operating schools at limited capacity after the war dragged on and children’s behavior became increasingly aggressive and distressed.
They were not trying to restore a normal academic year or guarantee promotion from one grade to another.
They were creating child-friendly spaces where children could learn, play and recover some sense of routine, while reducing the educational and psychological damage of prolonged war.
The same pattern appeared in medicine, evacuation and information.
Volunteers who had never received formal emergency-response training learned how to respond to airstrikes and artillery fire, how to protect women and children, how to organize safe departures, and how to move patients whose required treatment was unavailable in conflict areas.
Some became known to armed groups because their work required repeated negotiation with them. Sometimes that familiarity helped them pass checkpoints or move patients with fewer risks.
When neutrality becomes suspicionBut that knowledge created another danger. The more successfully civilian networks kept life going, the harder it became for armed actors to regard them as non-political.
In one town in Gezira, a group of young women working in medicine faced precisely this dilemma after the RSF took control and the hospital closed. They managed to enter the hospital and remove laboratory equipment, medicines and other essential supplies. They then began treating patients in secret.
They feared being forced to treat RSF fighters. But they also feared what would happen if the army returned and interpreted that treatment as evidence of collaboration with the RSF.
They continued working secretly for months. Eventually they were discovered and arrested, before being released after it became clear that they did not represent a political or military threat.
Their experience reveals a central contradiction of civilian life during war: You can decide to serve everyone. You cannot decide how an armed actor will interpret that service.
A surgeon I interviewed in Gezira lived through the same contradiction in a more brutal form. She was trying to keep medical care available to civilians. She treated everyone, including wounded RSF fighters.
According to her account to me, RSF members assaulted her inside the hospital after one of the fighters she had operated on died. Her 13-year-old daughter was then sexually assaulted.
She did not tell me what happened simply as a personal story. She was warning me to leave.
I was in Gezira myself during this period. I was among those working to keep hospitals functioning and civilian services going. I saw how quickly humanitarian work could be viewed as politically motivated.
Volunteers gather for the opening of a mental health hospital in the RSF-controlled capital city of Gezira State. (Eglal Hamid Abdulgadir)This is where the language of humanitarian neutrality reaches its limits. In a war in which each side seeks not only to control territory but also to define the meaning of every action within it, even neutrality can acquire political meaning.
The problem is deeper than civilians being trapped between two armed forces. The war itself can appropriate the meaning of civilian action.
A doctor treats a wounded person because the person is sick. A fighter sees assistance to the enemy.
A network moves a family because the family is in danger. An armed actor sees suspicious movement.
The space between humanitarian action and political action becomes so narrow that separating the two can become almost impossible.
Knowledge that survivesAnd yet the networks continued to grow.
New volunteers joined. Donations from Sudanese abroad continued. International organizations provided limited support in some areas. In parts of Gezira, volunteers running medical facilities sometimes coordinated with Médecins Sans Frontières.
But the most important development was less visible. The networks began reproducing knowledge. The older generation knew they might not survive. Volunteers were being killed, arrested and displaced. So those with experience began teaching younger people what they knew.
This was more than training. It was a relationship of respect, mentorship and apprenticeship. And the reason was practical and brutal: If one person died, their knowledge should not die with them.
This changed the nature of the networks. A volunteer who distributes food to a neighborhood is practicing mutual aid.
But a network that can replace that volunteer, transfer the knowledge required to continue the work and survive the disappearance of its original organizers is demonstrating something closer to institutional capacity.
It is not an institution. But it is a capacity.
That distinction matters because we usually recognize institutions through their visible forms: offices, regulations, budgets, job titles, salaries and chains of command.
But perhaps institutions begin before all of those things. They begin when knowledge becomes transferable. When responsibilities can be redistributed. When a collective practice can survive the disappearance of the person who started it. When people know what to do without waiting for someone to tell them.
This is also why it is difficult to describe these networks simply as temporary substitutes filling a vacuum until the state returns.
The vacuum itself changed the society inside it.
People who entered the war knowing how to organize a neighborhood learned how to manage networks stretched across displacement, fear and military control.
The volunteer who began by distributing food learned, over time, how to manage money, information, risk and relationships with armed actors.
The doctor who opened a hospital door had to think about security, neutrality and evacuation, not only medicine.
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DonateEven disagreements within networks became part of the learning: how to disagree without breaking the network, and how to place people’s immediate safety above personal conflict.
The war was not building institutions in the conventional sense. It was building people who knew how to create organization under pressure.
The limits of resilienceBut the answer cannot be romantic. These networks cannot replace the state.
They can distribute food and medicine, restore access to water, organize emergency medical care and create educational spaces. They cannot indefinitely operate a national electricity grid, maintain complex pharmaceutical supply chains or guarantee public safety.
Nor are they equal.
Some neighborhoods have doctors, engineers and strong diaspora networks. Others have far fewer resources. Funding can run out. Volunteers can burn out. International support can bring bureaucratic requirements that alter the character of informal work.
These networks are therefore not proof that the state is unnecessary. They are proof that state capacity and social capacity are not the same thing. And that distinction becomes even more important when military control changes.
In areas retaken by the army, some volunteers fled. Others were arrested or killed after being accused of collaborating with the RSF. Sometimes the basis for suspicion was simply that they had continued providing services while the RSF controlled the area.
The same act that had once been an act of survival could acquire an entirely different political meaning when the person at the checkpoint changed.
Yet the practices themselves did not necessarily disappear.
The takiyyas continued, often under different people. The faces changed because the people who had built the networks had been killed, imprisoned or displaced. But the practice survived.
This may be the most politically revealing fact about Sudan’s civilian networks during the war.
The war did not simply create a vacuum where the state had been. It forced people to learn what could be organized inside that vacuum.
They learned from those they trusted. They learned how to distribute scarce resources. They learned how to negotiate with armed actors without becoming armed themselves. They learned how to make collective decisions without formal authority. They learned how to teach someone else before they disappeared.
And perhaps they learned something more important than any service they provided: The capacity to organize collective life does not always come from the center.
For decades, the state was treated as the basic infrastructure that made public life possible.
The war shattered that assumption in places where the state could no longer provide food, water, health care, education or security.
People did not respond because they had decided to build an alternative political system. They responded because someone had to cook. Someone had to find water. Someone had to treat the wounded. Someone had to get children off the streets. Someone had to negotiate passage.
But repeated acts of necessity accumulated into something larger than necessity. They accumulated political knowledge.
And this is why rebuilding Sudan after the war cannot simply mean restoring the institutions that stopped working.
Previous CoverageSudan will need public institutions capable of functioning. No volunteer network can replace the state indefinitely, and asking it to do so would only turn another form of resilience into another form of abandonment.
But rebuilding the state without recognizing what society learned in its absence would be another kind of failure.
The question is not whether takiyyas should become ministries, or whether Emergency Response Rooms should become permanent government agencies.
The question is whether the people who learned to organize life without formal authority will be treated merely as beneficiaries of reconstruction — or as people who acquired something the postwar state urgently needs.
Because the most important legacy of these networks may not be the meals they served, the wells they reopened or the patients they treated. It may be the knowledge that accumulated among them: That authority can be exercised without office. That responsibility can be distributed without bureaucracy. That trust can function as infrastructure. That institutions can disappear without the capacity of society to act disappearing with them.
The people who built these networks were not trying to design a new political system. They were trying to survive.
But wars can produce political knowledge without anyone intending to produce it.
And perhaps the central question facing Sudan after the war is not simply whether the state can return to the places from which it disappeared.
It is whether it can return without pretending that the society waiting for it is the same society that existed before it left.
Perhaps the task after the war is not to return society to the state that existed before the war, but to rebuild the state around the knowledge that society was forced to produce when the state was gone.
This article How the war in Sudan is teaching society to govern without the state was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
ProPublica’s New Project
The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated: How Drillers Offload Costly Cleanup Onto the Public
Oil executive Tom Ragsdale walked away from his old wells, making the pollution left behind the state of New Mexico’s problem. His tactics, however, are ubiquitous in the industry.
by Mark Olalde, illustrations by Peter Arkle, special to ProPublica
Co-published with Capital & Main
December 30, 2024, 5:00 am
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
In December 1990, officials in the federal agency tasked with regulating offshore oil and gas drilling received a memo with a dire warning: America faced a ticking time bomb of environmental liability from unplugged oil and gas wells, wrote the agency’s chief of staff. Those wells and their costly cleanup obligations were being concentrated in the hands of cash-strapped drillers at the same time as production was shrinking. (The document, unearthed by public interest watchdog organization Documented, was shared with ProPublica and Capital & Main.)
More than three decades later, little action has been taken to heed that warning, and the time bomb is threatening to explode.
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SAFE’s Long-Running Challenge to Illinois Fracking Rules Heads Back to Court December 7
9/24/2026
For more than a decade, Southern Illinoisans Against Fracturing Our Environment (SAFE) has challenged the process by which Illinois adopted regulations governing high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing.
That fight is still going.
On Monday, December 7, 2026, at 9:00 a.m., attorney, Pat Handlin and Vito Mastrangelo, representing SAFE and the other plaintiffs are scheduled to appear before Judge Foster at the Madison County Courthouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, for hearings on two motions seeking dismissal of our complaint.
This is an important moment in a case that stretches all the way back to 2014—and we would like our supporters, allies, and friends to be there.
IDNR Fracking Hearing in Chicago. How Did We Get Here?Illinois enacted the Hydraulic Fracturing Regulatory Act in 2013. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) was then responsible for developing the administrative rules that would govern high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing in the state.
Thousands of Illinois residents participated in that rulemaking process. According to the current complaint, IDNR received approximately 38,000 public comments totaling more than 43,000 pages before the rules were finalized.
SAFE was part of that public process. Our organization had already been educating Southern Illinois residents about fracking, the proposed law, and the regulations being developed under it. SAFE’s role in public education concerning the Hydraulic Fracturing Regulatory Act and IDNR’s regulations is described in the current complaint.
But SAFE and other participants believed there were serious problems with the way the rulemaking process had been conducted.
Among other things, the plaintiffs allege that IDNR failed to follow mandatory procedures established by Illinois law and that those failures deprived Illinois citizens of their right to participate fully in the development of the regulations.
One example involves something fundamental to public participation: notice of public hearings.
The current complaint states that five public hearings were held during the rulemaking process—in Chicago, Ina, Effingham, Decatur and Carbondale. The plaintiffs allege that none received the 20 days of notice they contend was required under the applicable administrative rule. According to the complaint, Chicago received 11 days’ notice, Ina 18 days, Decatur 11 days, Carbondale 13 days, and the rescheduled Effingham hearing received no notice in the Illinois Register.
The plaintiffs contend that these and other problems impaired the public’s ability to review, understand and respond meaningfully to the proposed rules.
For SAFE, public participation in decisions that can affect our land, water and communities is not a technicality. It matters.
There is another principle underlying SAFE’s long involvement in this fight.
Article XI of the Illinois Constitution is devoted specifically to the environment. Section 1 declares it the public policy of Illinois to “provide and maintain a healthful environment for the benefit of this and future generations.” Section 2 goes further:
“Each person has the right to a healthful environment.”
The Constitution also provides that people may enforce that right against governmental or private parties through appropriate legal proceedings, subject to reasonable limitations established by law.
That constitutional commitment has particular meaning to an organization like SAFE.
We believe decisions involving activities with the potential to affect our water, air, land and communities deserve rigorous scrutiny, sound science and meaningful public participation.
Those principles helped motivate people to become involved when Illinois was developing its fracking regulations. They continue to matter today.
INDR hearing at Rend Lake. SAFE Went to Court in 2014On November 10, 2014, SAFE and individual plaintiffs filed the original lawsuit challenging the rulemaking process.
Four days later, on November 14, IDNR filed the high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing rules with the Illinois Secretary of State, at which point the rules became effective.
The lawsuit has continued, in various forms, ever since.
Today the plaintiffs include SAFE and seven individuals: Marie Smith, Mark Donham, Vito Mastrangelo, Sam Stearns, Tabitha Tripp, Nathan Czuba and Annette McMichael.
Many of those individual plaintiffs are Southern Illinois landowners or mineral-rights owners.
For the people who have carried this case forward, the stakes are personal. This is about protecting the land, water and communities we call home—and ensuring that ordinary citizens have a meaningful voice when government decisions may affect their environment.
It’s about the places where people live.
Video from IDNR Effingham Hearings:
More Than a Decade Later, the World Has Changed
There is something else worth remembering as this case returns to court.
Illinois’s fracking regulations were written more than a decade ago.
Since then, scientific knowledge about oil and gas development, induced seismicity and climate change has continued to grow.
The relationship between oil and gas operations and induced seismicity—earthquakes triggered by human activity—is now well established. The U.S. Geological Survey says hydraulic fracturing itself can induce earthquakes and has been linked to larger earthquakes, although wastewater disposal associated with oil and gas production is responsible for most induced earthquakes in the central United States.
That distinction is important. So is the larger lesson: activities involving the injection of fluids underground can, under certain geological conditions, cause faults to slip and produce earthquakes.
At the same time, the realities of a changing climate have become increasingly difficult to ignore.
Here in Illinois, we have witnessed extraordinary severe weather. The Illinois State Climatologist reports that as of July 1, 2026, Illinois had already recorded 173 tornadoes, breaking the previous full-year state record of 142 set in 2024. At that point, Illinois had recorded twice as many tornadoes as the next-most-active state in the nation. Illinois has now experienced more than 100 tornadoes in four consecutive years; before 2023, that threshold had been crossed only four times since 1950.
Tornado activity is influenced by many factors, and those statistics alone do not establish that climate change caused Illinois’s recent tornado outbreaks.
But the broader climate question cannot be ignored when considering the future of fossil-fuel development.
The environmental and scientific context in which we are having this conversation today is not the same as it was when Illinois’s fracking rules were adopted in 2014.
For SAFE, that makes the principles underlying this fight no less relevant—and perhaps more important.
How carefully should government act when making decisions that can affect the environment?
What opportunity should the public have to participate in those decisions?
And what does Illinois’s constitutional promise of a healthful environment mean in practice?
Those are questions worth asking even after twelve years.
What Is SAFE Asking the Court to Do?
The Fourth Amended Complaint seeks declaratory judgment and permanent injunctive relief.
For example, under one of the remaining claims, the plaintiffs ask the court to find that IDNR failed to comply with required rulemaking procedures and that plaintiffs’ rights to participate fully in the rulemaking process were violated. They ask the court to declare the HFRA rulemaking invalid, prohibit IDNR from implementing or using those rules, and direct the defendants to publish notice that the rulemaking has been invalidated. The complaint also seeks reasonable litigation expenses, including attorney fees as provided by Illinois law.
In other words, this case is not simply an argument over whether someone is “for” or “against” fracking.
It raises a fundamental question about government accountability:
When an Illinois agency creates rules governing an activity with potentially significant consequences for communities, landowners and the environment, must the agency follow the public rulemaking procedures required by law?
SAFE and the other plaintiffs believe that question matters—not only for fracking, but for meaningful public participation in government decision-making.
At the most recent case management conference, the court rescheduled hearings on two motions seeking dismissal of the plaintiffs’ complaint.
Those hearings are now scheduled for:
Monday, December 7, 2026
9:00 a.m.
Madison County Courthouse
Edwardsville, Illinois
The attorneys are expected to appear in person.
We are also checking on whether a Zoom option will be available for members of the public who cannot attend in person. We will update this page as soon as we know more.
The public is welcome to attend the hearing.
And SAFE would very much like to see supporters there.
Stand With SAFE on December 7Court cases can feel distant from everyday life. They take years. They involve motions, briefs, hearings and procedural questions that rarely make headlines.
But behind all of that paperwork are people.
For more than a decade, individual plaintiffs, attorneys, SAFE volunteers and supporters have continued showing up because we believe Southern Illinois’ land, water and communities are worth protecting—and because the public deserves a meaningful voice in decisions that affect them.
On December 7, we’re asking you to show up with us.
You do not have to be a plaintiff. You do not have to be a lawyer. You don’t have to understand every count in a 66-page complaint.
You can simply be there.
A strong public presence in the courtroom is one way to demonstrate that, after all these years, people are still paying attention.
If you would like to attend but need assistance getting to Edwardsville, please contact SAFE at info@dontfractureillinois.org. We don’t want transportation or distance to prevent someone who wants to stand with us from participating.
We will share additional information about the hearing, transportation coordination and possible remote access as it becomes available. Sign up here to get on the email list.
Demonstration in front of Bradley’s office. Help SAFE Keep GoingThere is another way you can help.
Please consider making a donation to SAFE.
SAFE is a small, grassroots organization. We don’t have a separate legal fund or a large institutional budget behind this work. Donations go to SAFE’s general operating account and support the organization and the work necessary to continue our mission—including public education, outreach, organizing and our continuing efforts to protect Southern Illinois from the impacts of fracking and oil and gas development.
Long-running work like this requires more than attorneys appearing in a courtroom. It requires communicating with the public, maintaining records and research, reaching supporters, keeping people informed, organizing participation and making sure that Southern Illinois voices continue to be heard.
A contribution of any size helps SAFE continue that work.
At the final IDNR hearing, we packed the SIU-C ballroom with standing room only and celebrated our 38,000 comments submitted in opposition. More Than a Decade—and We’re Still HereWhen this lawsuit was first filed in November 2014, no one could have known that we would still be talking about it more than a decade later.
But some fights take time.
SAFE has spent years educating the public about fracking and oil and gas development, advocating for Southern Illinois communities, and insisting that the people who live here deserve a meaningful voice in decisions affecting their homes, property, water and environment.
On December 7, another chapter of that work will unfold in a Madison County courtroom.
We hope you’ll stand with us.
Attend the hearing. Share this story. Support SAFE. Donate if you can. And help us remind Illinois that Southern Illinois is still paying attention.
Interested in attending the hearing, please contact us at info@dontfractureillinois.org
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What the climate movement can learn from organized labor
This article What the climate movement can learn from organized labor was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Climate activists engaged in nonviolent direct action are used to the rinse and repeat of arrest: handcuffs, short trip to jail, a misdemeanor charge and then release to friends for a post-action pizza dinner. Show up at court a few weeks later for a brief arraignment and wait for the case to be dismissed. Low drama.
That’s changed under Trump. From the Declare Emergency activists charged with felonies (for applying washable paint to the protective case around a Degas sculpture) to the Extinction Rebellion activists under investigation by an FBI terrorism task force (for undisclosed reasons), activists can no longer depend on walking away unscathed from direct actions. Multiple states have passed anti-protest laws since Trump was elected, increasing penalties imposed on activists. Grassroots action has a higher cost now.
Simultaneously, with the gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act and its attendant tax credits for clean energy investment, the federal path to climate action is blocked. And local wins, while important, cannot surmount the incredible rollbacks happening at the federal level, as Sunrise Movement Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay recently pointed out.
Indeed, the U.S. climate movement is in deep trouble. If all that weren’t enough, the climate crisis is no longer top of mind for many on the left, especially with the rising authoritarian threat and the focus on affordability. With civil disobedience demanding greater risk, traditional policy advocacy for climate action at the federal level closed off and public attention turned elsewhere, what tactics do we in the climate movement have left?
What’s left is deep engagement with the labor movement — its members and its tactics.
#newsletter-block_1f9fb5d10fbd8e8cdfe976d159a2e4ed { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_1f9fb5d10fbd8e8cdfe976d159a2e4ed #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterOrganized labor has a broad base, a track record of major wins and the power to shut down the economy. And make no mistake: Economic leverage is a necessary ingredient in the struggle to bring down companies as profitable as those in the fossil fuel industry.
Climate activists have relied heavily on tactics of protest and persuasion (see Gene Sharp’s categories), underinvesting in tactics of economic noncooperation. While the environmental movement has a history of consumer boycotts, there have been fewer instances of work stoppages or rent strikes. The climate groups that do engage in symbolic work and school stoppages (most famously, Fridays for the Future), have mostly been confined to students and are largely to make a political statement rather than a strategic attempt to gain concrete concessions from a specific target.
Strategically aligning workers with a rapid energy transition not only broadens the coalition needed to win durable policy victories, but builds power with a movement versed in strikes, walkouts, slowdowns and other forms of economic disruption. (Not to mention a bevy of tools like community benefit agreements and co-enforcement to promote follow-through on corporate environmental promises.)
Labor-climate alliances go back decades (see Blue Green Alliance, Climate Jobs National Resource Center and Labor Network for Sustainability), and unions have long advocated for a just transition that supports workers employed in polluting industries. But in the current political environment, we need these relationships to be stronger than ever.
One major opportunity for the climate movement is the May Day Strong coalition, which brings labor and community groups together to organize mass strikes and make big demands for systemic change. The coalition’s demands don’t yet include climate, but the climate movement can still organize with them to learn nonparticipation tactics and build solidarity toward a broad base that sees climate, anti-authoritarianism and affordability as one united fight.
Lessons from laborThink about the situation at your job. Workplaces are pretty authoritarian: the leader doesn’t care much for the input of the people on the shop floor, and what the leader says goes. If someone gets hurt, let the government step in to help them. As unions teach us, for a group of workers to extract real concessions from a profit-maximizing boss requires building enough power among workers to shut the workplace down (or at least threaten to do so).
The same dynamic is true of the fossil fuel regime and the general public. The fact is that fossil fuel companies operate with little accountability to the public they endanger through their greed, harming the many for the enrichment of the few. By thinking of them as essentially authoritarian, we can focus on how to weaken their pillars of support so as to bring about their collapse (per Gene Sharp). In the face of fossil fuel oligarchs who operate without checks and balances, a worker-inclusive climate movement capable of strategic noncooperation offers the most viable path to transformative change in the current political landscape.
Pillars to target might include shareholders, frontline workers, the regulatory landscape, physical infrastructure and institutional investors. Some of this can be done in direct partnership with unions and workers (which I’ll explore more in another piece). Concentrating on a specific choke point like port logistics or oil refining can paralyze supply chains, amplifying our impact. Sectoral strikes within these industries are also powerful, making building common cause with their workers paramount. Strikes by public-sector workers like teachers also carry a heavy punch (though they are only legal in about a dozen states and typically only when a contract has expired).
Identifying the demand, as well as the target, is key to such acts of noncooperation. Strikes targeting companies can include demands for corporate investment in public infrastructure, on-the-job retraining, environmental audits or electrification of the supply chain. Strikes by municipal workers can include demands to divest pensions from fossil fuel companies, electrify public transit, retrofit publicly owned properties, pass heat safety mandates or clarify protocols for workers responding to climate disasters. Some of this is already happening through existing climate-labor alliances. Winning more campaigns like these would weaken the fossil fuel regime’s pillars of support by targeting the physical infrastructure, financial systems and legal regulations that enable it to continue wrecking the planet.
In addition to weakening the pillars of support, other indicators of a campaign’s success include increasing popular engagement and enhancing the capacity of the movement to escalate further (by bringing in more organizers, developing replicable tactics, etc.). The tactic of economic noncooperation can deliver all three.
But if we are serious about making a real dent in emissions, we need to target the federal government. The fossil fuel industry is so profitable and so powerful that it will likely require a major policy intervention to curb its rapacious behavior. The Inflation Reduction Act was a step in the right direction, but our movement was unprepared to exert the leverage needed to protect it from an unfriendly administration. That kind of leverage comes from bringing the economy to a standstill.
Almost all of us are workers (and customers, renters, borrowers, etc.), and all of us rely on a functioning planet to live. So what would happen if we simultaneously stopped? Didn’t show up at work for a few days, and didn’t buy anything? This would take massive preparation and coordination of course, but the impact would grind the economy to a halt. No bus drivers, no teachers, no bank tellers, nothing being built or sold. This is what is known as a social strike –— a mass action by an entire population.
Carbon emissions might briefly drop, but the impact of a strike reaches beyond a single day. The United Auto Workers’ use of the “rolling strike” to win big concessions from the nation’s three largest automakers shows the power a movement wields when it can credibly threaten to strike anywhere, at any time, in enormous numbers. Just as runaway capitalism caused the climate crisis, it has also constructed an economy that would be hobbled by mass work stoppages and consumer boycotts.
This is a tall order, to be sure. Even the labor movement’s use of work stoppages has declined over the past 40 to 50 years due to national policy change, employer opposition campaigns, the collapse of union membership and deindustrialization. But recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in unions, increased organizing and heightened class consciousness — suggesting a renewed opening for organizing workers and showcasing their power.
Previous CoverageAnd the climate movement has turned out en masse in the past; by some estimates, the 2014 People’s Climate March turned out 400,000 people. Imagine the number that will turn out after a historic El Niño cycle and four years of federal incompetence. Now imagine if that number of people — rather than flying to New York City and marching — all stayed home for a week. No shopping, no selling, no driving, no working.
Social strikes are rare and tough to pull off, but we saw a stirring example of their power in Minnesota this year. Roughly 25 percent of voters in the state either participated in the day-long strike or had a loved one who did.
For community members and workers across industries to participate in a nationwide social strike would take years of organizing. That’s why we need to start planning now.
The power of relationshipsTo engage broader swaths of the population, we need to build a bigger tent. Here the labor movement provides valuable wisdom. A helpful distinction that organizers often make is between our base and our allies. Our base shares our values but not necessarily every demand, while our allies share a specific demand but not necessarily all our values.
The climate movement’s base is made up of environmental activists, while our allies come from a wide variety of backgrounds including faith communities, student groups, human rights activists, lawyers, Indigenous groups, politicians, scientists, renewable energy companies and more. Anyone may have kids in public schools that are struggling with rising utility costs; they may rent an apartment in a complex with crumbling infrastructure; they may be part of a religious community that emphasizes responsibility for creation; they may be active with a political party that values outdoor recreation and fiscal responsibility.
These identities and memberships are valuable when we recognize that we do not need to agree on every issue in order to share some common self-interest and cooperate on a specific campaign. What enables us to continue to take coordinated action with our allies is a commitment to continued relationship building rather than shutting each other down for divergencies in viewpoints. Here climate can take a page from Saul Alinsky, who advocated for sidestepping ideological landmines and focusing on concrete issues that make a difference to real peoples’ lives.
In the current political climate, organizing based on shared self-interest is the only way forward. Families are struggling to pay the bills, and calls to deprioritize climate messaging in favor of an affordability frame are mounting. (Even Democrats are engaged in “climate hushing.”) We need a coalition broad enough to fight for both a living wage and a livable planet. Relational organizing based in self-interest is the way to build that. In his book “People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal,” Marshall Ganz explains that “relationships grow out of the realization of mutual benefit, the creation of shared value, and the commitment to a shared future.” Organizing to save our planet checks all three boxes.
In a labor campaign, relational organizing relies on the identification of organic leaders, training the leaders to recruit other workers, the workers agreeing on issues and then engaging in increasingly challenging structure tests — smaller actions that build organization and faith in each other. The bonds built between the workers through these tests are the basis for future organizing. In her book “No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age,” Jane McAlevey spoke to the interaction between risky actions and building strong relationships. “[F]or workers to win substantial gains, the strike weapon is essential. … Transformational experiences come through high-risk collective action,” she wrote. Those transformational experiences tighten the bonds holding the group together and facilitate political education.
Previous CoverageRelationship building is also important for climate groups. Organizations like the Sunrise Movement or Fridays for the Future rely heavily on peer-to-peer organizing and one-on-one conversations. Incoming activists are given real responsibilities and opportunities to guide campaigns. And campaigns against specific pipelines or other pieces of fossil fuel infrastructure tap into preexisting community networks (like neighborhood groups, Indigenous communities and faith congregations), growing stronger by building alignment around a common demand.
What the climate movement needs now is to expand those networks to include communities that we may not see as natural partners. These diverse coalitions are prominent in local struggles against data centers that engage disparate groups such as farmers, parents, IT professionals, local businesses, sports clubs and more. We need to make sure they include workers across sectors, too.
The fulcrumThe ramp-up to May Day 2028 offers a prime opportunity for the climate movement to build powerful relationships with labor groups, while at the same time engaging in structure tests toward a social strike making climate demands upon the federal government.
After the United Auto Workers, or UAW, won their successful September 2023 sit-down strike (winning wage increases, job security and the inclusion of electric vehicle plants into existing contracts), they began building for more. The union called for locals across different sectors and unions to strategically align their contracts to expire on April 30, 2028, so workers can strike on May Day, the international worker’s day (rather than run the risk of an unauthorized “wildcat” strike). When different unions align their contracts in this way, they have more leverage than if one union acted alone. The May Day 2028 demands are not yet set, and the UAW’s goal is broad: “to create a crisis for the billionaire class to win more for all of us.”
Given low union density, even 2028 contract alignments by the UAW (and possibly the American Federation of Teachers and other unions) would have limited impact without community support. Even if some workers couldn’t walk off the job in a general strike (such as those covered by a current contract, precariously employed or unable to afford taking time off), they could still participate by not buying anything, calling in sick, engaging in a slowdown, working to rule, showing up to picket lines or rallies while off work, supporting striking workers with donations or sharing strike demands on social media.
That’s the idea behind May Day Strong — a labor-community coalition that deploys economic noncooperation to demand taxing the rich, protecting the vote, reining in ICE and expanding democracy. May Day Strong explicitly organizes community members who do not belong to unions, thereby building a broader community-labor coalition. On May Day 2026, they coordinated one of the most widespread May 1 actions in U.S. history. Right now, they’re focused on solidarity schools and local actions, like support for an Indiana community that lost power during a series of storms due to the local utility company’s alleged malfeasance. Ultimately, they are ramping up to a nationwide action on May Day 2028.
Demonstrators with May Day Strong march into downtown Chicago under the banner “Workers Over Billionaires” on May 1, 2026. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)The coalition includes many climate groups, like Climate Defenders, Extinction Rebellion, the Climate Museum, the Sunrise Movement, and more. But the coalition’s affordability agenda contains not a single mention of climate change. Given the presence of climate organizations in the coalition, that could change, depending on the power that climate-focused coalition members bring to the table.
Regardless, May Day Strong represents an opportunity for the climate movement to engage in deep relationship building, both with union and nonunion workers, and to build strike-ready capacity. It offers a chance for the climate movement to stand in solidarity with unions and with working people, in a show of good faith. If the climate movement shows up for organized labor in 2028 — and the year and a half of organizing that precedes it — strong relationships will be built.
That means participating in structure tests so the strike muscle is strong and practiced when the time comes to use it. Climate activists should commit to deeper engagement with May Day Strong, attending trainings, turning out for May Day and Labor Day actions and advocating for the inclusion of climate demands in the platform. Climate activists should also show up for workers anywhere they are on the picket line, finding common cause against the billionaire elite who threaten us all.
None of this is to suggest that the climate movement should stop organizing for local climate policies. Local decarbonization and climate resiliency remain key battlegrounds. But in the face of overt hostility to national climate policies that encourage job growth while protecting our planet, we must also expand our tactics.
Noncooperation has been underleveraged in the climate movement, and we now have a chance to learn the tactic from organized labor while expanding our base. The time is ripe for these efforts. Broad coalitions are being built to oppose the authoritarian takeover, but the climate movement has found itself on the periphery. Despite the urgency of threats to our democracy, we cannot overlook the escalating threat to our planet. Engaging more deeply with May Day Strong allows the climate movement to drive home how the pillaging of our planet goes hand in hand with efforts to squash dissent and dismantle democracy. The climate movement cannot afford to wait until other threats are resolved. When the next “natural” disaster inevitably comes, the climate movement needs to be strike ready.
Where we go from hereBy using May Day 2028 as a structure test, the climate movement can build capacity for a later date of climate noncooperation. Possible demands might include asking the president to declare a climate emergency or pass an executive order reinstating certain Inflation Reduction Act provisions. The important thing is to make a clear demand that can feasibly be granted by the specific target; in Minnesota, it was simple: “ICE out.”
Significantly, this tactic could be effective regardless of the party in power. The concepts of the pillars of support and Erica Chenoweth’s rule of 3.5 percent (the principle that movements have historically succeeded when they engage 3.5 percent of the population in sustained nonviolent action), both come from the literature on civil resistance to authoritarianism, so they do not depend on a functioning democracy. Furthermore, both parties rely on the economy functioning normally and would face significant public pressure if essential workers like teachers and janitors stayed home. Economic noncooperation — including, but not limited to strikes — has the benefit of being legal (for workers not covered by a contract with a no-strike clause). And if the climate movement keeps showing up for our allies in labor, we signal to all presidential candidates in 2028 that we will not be hushed.
#support-block_f4f7ba37fc8a10dc7965345ec11d7b7a { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support UsWaging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!
DonateEven in this time of movement winter, climate activists don’t have the luxury of despair. With heightened danger from climate chaos and increased political hostility towards climate activists, the stakes have never been higher for our movement and our planet.
But there is opportunity here, too.
With the upsurge of interest in unions, increased organizing, the narrative focus on affordability, historic polarization and heightened class consciousness, the public is ready to be organized as never before. By organizing workers across sectors and engaging in economic noncooperation, we weaken the political and financial pillars of support for the fossil fuel regime, thereby hastening its eventual collapse. That moment can’t come soon enough.
This article What the climate movement can learn from organized labor was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
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