Is it Safe to Be Cautious About Marcellus Shale Development?
David Mandelbaum of GT's Philadelphia office is a thoughtful and provocative commentator. His first in a planned monthly series of environmental law columns for The Legal Intelligencer and Pennsylvania Law Weekly © appeared on July 6, and is titled "Drill, Baby, Drill?" (See 33 Pa. L. Weekly 655.) In his column, David raises questions we've explored on this Blog in some depth: Is going slow or imposing a moratorium for new energy resources like unconventional natural gas actually a good idea? Does application of the "precautionary principle" make sense when the existing energy infrastructure relying primarily on coal and oil may be less sustainable environmentally or geopolitically? His answers might surprise you. Read the column here.
The proposed TDS regulations remind me of the limits for Chlorine imposed upon the City of York back in the 1980's. The effluent from York's sewage plant required a chlorine level which was lower than the chlorine level for water sent to area houses and taps by the York Water Company. In other words, if a fresh water pipe ruptured and spilled through the plant and into the receiving body, the City could have been cited for polluting the creek.
It would seem that the same logic would hold in the TDS case. Could fresh public tap water at a drilling site be considered to have illegally high levels of TDS and therefore not be allowed to be dumped into a stream?
Mr. Woodmansee makes a point. The tap water would have to be mixed with the produced water from the well and it would have to have a high enough TDS. But, the point is well taken and highlights the issue.
The precautionary principle is a dead end, a point well proven in Vaclav Klaus's book "blue Planet in Green Shackles." It yields paralysis by assigning equal values to all variables and a refusal to confront the need for priorities. The word balance doesn't exist in the world of radical environmentalism today. They have made human beings the problem when it is the well-being of humans that should be the objective. This is what is at the heart of so many controversies. We need to completely reject the precautionary principle. As difficult as the concept is to explain in academic terms, it is inherently understood by the public when simply explained as a matter of life being about risks and tradeoffs. That's the way forward.
On July 13, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council published recommendations regarding Marcellus Shale development in what the authors characterize as an outgrowth of the PEC Marcellus Shale Policy Conference in early May. http://www.pecpa.org/files/downloads/Developing_the_Marcellus_Shale.pdf. It is fair to say that the views expressed are the views of the authors, and they do not claim to be recording a consensus of the participants; I was one of the participants, and there was no consensus. Without addressing the details of the proposals, I think it is also fair to say that the authors agree with the need to be careful, but not cautious, about Marcellus development. They want to regulate differently and more stringently, but also more quickly.
I am disappointed that benefits of natural gas and of economic development seem to receive truncated treatment by PEC, and indeed by most environmental commentators. There is a lot of good that can be done with this resource. If we don't talk about it, we won't develop policies that will do that good.