If all things were EQUALLY IMPORTANT, I'd be voting DEM:

Please understand that a view labeled "correct" is not necessarily correct for all people, but it would be correct to say that my view is represented by that view. Likewise, a score of less than 100% for one, and the SAME score, for the other, does not represent the two parties holding the same view. Often, for example in the 'legalize pot' column, neither party fully represents my view, but both share some of my views, just not the same ones.

In general, my choice right now is whether I think it's more important that I think the democratic view of hydrofracking, especially in CNY, is completely stupid, or more important if I think the green view of GMOs is completely stupid.

Also, as someone who is mostly an organic gardener, and then met invasive, destructive, evil, Japanese Knotweed, I've got to say that a SANE view on herbicides is important to me. Some plants destroy ecosystems and 'weeding them' doesn't work. One of them grows along most of our highways, and is endangering our wetlands MORE THAN HERBICIDES ARE.

I'm seriously still undecided. If Andrew Cuomo came out in support of a 100% ban on Hydrofracking in the State, even a 1-2 year ban, he'd have my vote.

[Edit: HGS is Huntley Generating Station, the coal plant near me. Pretty much the only way to replace both it and Dunkirk is with a nuclear plant. Sadly, it sits on the Niagara, which is really pretty much tapped as far as hydro goes, unless we are willing to damage the ecosystem.)]

Issue:	Green Party	Democrats
Gay Rights	Correct (100%)	Usually Correct (80%)
Hydrofracking	Correct (100%)	Incorrect (0%)
Ability to affect change	Maybe (50%)	Probably (75%)
NOT part of this Summer’s nonsense in Albany.	Yes (100%)	No, but not 100% responsible (75%)
View of GMO foods	Stupid (0%)	Doesn’t care (75%)
View of Nuclear Power	Stupid (0%)	Usually Correct (80%)
Gives a fart about CNY	Yes (100%)	Not Really (80%)
Gives a fart about WNY	Mostly (90%)	Mostly (90%)
Would try to decomish HGS	Probably (90%)	Unlikely (10%)
Has a plan to replace HGS	No (0%)	No (0%)
Supports Public Option (HC)	Yes (100%)	No (0%)
Farmer’s Rights	Mostly Right, some too restrictive views (75%)	Mostly Right, some overly permissive views (75%)
Anti-pesticide, fertilizers	Too reactionary (50%)	Too permissive (65%)
Education	Correct (100%)	Status Quo (75%)
WIC/Food Stamps Support	Correct (100%)	Generally Correct (95%)
Supportive of Biotech	No (0%)	Generally (75%)
Shares my view on hemp/pot	About 75%	About 75%, but not same 75%
Shares my view on heroin	Yes (100%)	No (0%)
Supports Prison reform	Yes (100%)	Somewhat (85%)
Agrees with me on Death Penalty	Yes (100%)	Yes (100%)
Agrees with me on Life without Parole	No (0%)	Yes (100%)
Police and Fire support	Too restrictive (50%)	Underfunds them(75%)
Women’s employment	Good, but pro-quota (60%)	Status Quo (60%)
Disability support	Yes (100%)	Yes (100%)
Jobs	Talks a good line (75%)	More reasonable (90%)
Ability to destroy that jackass Paladino in polls	No (0%)	Yes (100%)
Reproductive Rights	Correct (100%)	Correct (100%)
Foreign Policy-Defensive	Mostly Wrong (25%)	Mostly Right (95%)
Foreign Policy-Offensive	Mostly Right (90%)	Too hawkish (75%)
Foreign Policy-non-military	Generally Correct (90%)	Status Quo (50%)
Unfair Trade agreements	Mostly Right (90%)	Too Permissive (75%)
	~62% same as me	~69% same as me

My view on Nuclear Power, the other place where I differ from the greens.

I spent a good number of my summers in an around Oswego, NY, and regularly have used Nine Mile Point Nuclear Generating Station for visual navigating while on a boat. (On a clear day, I've also used the mist plume at Niagara Falls.) The first summer camp I went to was located on the other side of the power plant. I've had family work there, and if it had some massive disaster, some dozen members of my extended family would be downwind...when I was growing up, before we all exodused out of Central New York like the rest of the world, it would've been a couple of dozen...maybe even more....

...We drove past the Limerick Generating Station almost every day when we lived in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, if it had had a massive disaster, we would've been downwind. In my moving around in the past 15 years, we've lived within 20 miles of a nuclear power plant pretty much the whole time.

The entire time I have lived within sight of these and other plants, I have never worried about radioactivity leaking out and damaging me. In part, because I knew I had a shot thyroid, and that's where radioactivity would get first and in part because I know enough about how a plant operates in the United States, and enough about actual disasters like Chernobyl, to not be afraid of getting nuked. I looked at it prosaically...I'd rather have electricity than not have electricity, and the teeny tiny risk from a nuclear power plant was enough to be able to flick on a light and have light.

Now, I live 2 miles from one of New York's few remaining big coal power plants and for the first time, I'm worried about radioactive leaks. We pass, several times a day, underneath the parked train cars filled with coal, in their slow but inexorable march towards the plant to be burned and produce the side effect of fly-ash, which is known to carry into the environment around the plant 100 times the amount of radiation leaked as a part of making an equivalent of energy by nuclear power.

By burning the very slightly radioactive coal in increasingly large amounts, the radioactive material is concentrated, and released into the environment. Huntley Generating Station has been dumping this radioactive fly-ash into the area around it since 1926, six years after my house was built. While it is compliant with current laws, it is considered one of New York' major point sources for air pollution, dumping more than 150lbs of mercury into the air in 2005, and 3,301,283 tons of CO2 in 2006, the last two years for which I could find that data. I am fortunate enough to live upwind of it, and it has a large smokestack, so the majority of that ash falls away from here, but it's in the air as dust, and I'm breathing it in.

I never had the type of lung disease I faced this June before I moved here, but I tend to think that neither Huntley nor serial polluter Tonawanda Coke is responsible, but I'm scared. I'm scared of what I'm breathing. I'm scared of what my Mom is breathing in coal country, since she moved to West Virgina. I'm scared of what that coal is doing to my country and, frankly, to me.

Uranium and other radioactive elements in our soil are there. They aren't not there. This may sound silly, but many people who oppose nuclear energy seem to think that if we don't mine uranium it somehow does not exist. They think it does not sit there, emitting radioactivity, but instead we somehow magically turn it on. They don't realize that if you shut down a uranium mine, you still get radon gas and other problems. They don't realize that the radon gas in people's houses is a result of a naturally occurring product..they imagine that radioactivity is something we somehow manufacture and then use, not a naturally occurring hazard that we should be controlling.

Depending on what statistics you believe, the United States has enough uranium at current mining levels to fuel the country for at least one hundred years. This is excluding the uranium mined 'accidentally' as a side effect of mining other things, this is excluding the uranium we can extract from sea water...and I'm only excluding that because people who are anti-nuclear power like to discount the 'uranium from seawater' science. This is also excluding the 'downblending' of weapon's grade uranium-a product the United States takes off the hands of countries who ask us to, because we'd rather we had it than terrorists did-withthings like depleted uranium, a product we use for ammunition, boat building and, perhaps surprisingly to some people, shielding in radiographic materials, like x-ray 'cameras' and medical irradiators.

We take in the weapons grade uranium, and we should not stop doing so. When we 'downblend' it, it becomes beyond the range of use for most terroristic applications...the only exception being a 'dirty bomb.' Hell, I could assemble a small dirty bomb in under an a day with stuff within the city limits of Buffalo, as could almost anyone else who has worked in a hospital and passed basic chemistry...no terrorist is going to go to the effort to steal downblended uranium for a dirty bomb (which is about releasing a small amount of radioactivity over a large area and scaring the bejeezus out of people, not about killing people with radiation. Killing a lot of people with radiation actually takes work...work I'm happy to not do, thank you very much.)

Downblended uranium from dismantling weapons is again, something that is there. If we stopped mining uranium, and if we had none in this country (neither of which is going to happen) we'd still have to store this stuff, protect it, etc, etc.

Many people who object to nuclear power seem to think that if we closed nuclear plants tomorrow, we would not need new storage facilities. Again, this is wrong. Nuclear power plants, weapons labs, biopharmaceutical disposal facilities and other places already have stockpiles of nuclear waste that we're supposed to be taking care of, in accordance with international law, and the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act (and people who think Yucca Mountain is off of the table need to know that because of NWPA, it's really not...and I have some objections to Yucca Mountain, personally.)

We already have to build nuclear waste storage facilities. We need to build these storage facilities whether we continue having nuclear power or not. Uranium is, again, something that IS there in our environment...it's not not there. As we expand, covering more and more land in the United States, we're going to find more houses being built on top of naturally occurring radioactive materials. These materials will have to be dealt with, or we may end up having to remove the contaminated soil, building materials, etc., of places built atop 'unknown' sources of radioactivity. These contaminated soils, etc., may have to be disposed of as radioactive waste. (This depends on the type of radioactive compounds found naturally on site.)

The radioactive waste problem becomes, again, a choice between point source pollution and non-point source pollution. Do we want the radiation where it is capable of being monitored, and gods, we hope, being stored properly, by an agency with federal oversight that is allowed to be visited by journalists and people doing research? Radiation detection equipment is not that expensive...it's not like they could HIDE it if it was leaking when we knew the heck where it was.

Or, do we prefer the other option, which is hundreds of private companies, with not enough people overseeing them, storing smaller amounts of radioactive compounds in methods which are not considered long term (in geologic time) in dozens of spots, in every state? Does anyone really believe that this is acceptable? Does anyone think that their state or their local government even knows where all the radioactivity in their state goes? Or heck, where it is naturally? Does anyone think the non-point source pollution solution to nuclear waste is the right one? That we just store it EVERYWHERE, and hope it doesn't leak anywhere?

I don't think so.

So, the nuclear waste argument against nuclear energy is largely invalid. We already have to dispose of waste, and you've probably heard this accurate statistic: "All the spent fuel produced to date by all commercial nuclear power plants in the US would cover a football field to the depth of about one meter."

When you add in reprocessing, as used in other countries, you can actually reduce the size of that small amount of waste even further.

It is somewhat audacious to say it, but the nuclear waste argument against nuclear power is largely a nonsensical smokescreen. If we went over to 100% nuclear power (which I do not agree with, I think nuclear power should replace coal, oil, and fossil gas plants, and that, where possible, we use methane recapture/biogas, etc., and I think we need to improve incinerator technology for waste-to-energy, as we are currently still needing to find a place for our trash, again, which is not going to stop happening, and the current technology is a joke) we'd still only be adding a fraction of material to the waste we already need to take care of properly.

So the major NIMBY arguments about nuclear power are done so from a point of view of ignorance...people think that there isn't already nuclear waste in their area (there probably is, from hospitals, universities, natural sources, industry, etc.) or they think that a nuclear reactor sincerely endangers them, despite the fact that you're more likely to die from an airplane falling on your house than a nuclear accident, and that the majority of possible nuclear accidents in modern facilities when operated properly aren't life threatening, and probably expose you to less radiation that your dentist does in a year.

Even if there was a massive nuclear disaster at a plant, it would be a limited area, a limited scope, and, frankly, work on radioprotective drugs is extensive in this country, it's something I've worked with myself. It would probably be as terrible, and as destructive, as the BP oil disaster, but unlike the BP oil disaster, we have federal agencies in charge of cleaning up nuclear 'spills.' By the way, it is STUPID that we do not have a federal agency in charge of cleaning up oilspills... when stupid company spills, you'd send in the federal agency to clean it up, then bill the company. If the company does not want to pay, you seize their assets within your country. We could even take an existing organization (I'm looking at you, ARG) and train them to handle both kinds of spills. Heck, with some of the industrial waste in this country there probably is a slurry somewhere of oil and radioactive stuff, and your well-trained nuclear clean-up guys probably already know how to handle an oilspill.

You treat such organizations like you treat firefighters-when they aren't cleaning up the spills, they are training, and the good ones might even be working on solutions to problems that haven't happened yet.

Given the low chance of an accident, the lack of CO2 emissions, the lack of requirement for materials from other countries, the low volume of waste, the fact that we already need to build facilities to handle waste, our country's ability to handle such waste pretty well historically, the fact that the need for electricity isn't going away and the fact that people who understand nuclear energy generally aren't unduly concerned about it, I believe investment in more nuclear power is a good thing.

Solar, for example, ain't gonna work for Syracuse, with a mean number of 205 cloudy days per year (that's clouds 56% of the time, and not mentioning that whole thing about how the sun's not visible at night.) Every time we build a new windfarm, someone bitches about the noise, how they feel they wreck the view, how they damage bird migrations (and there may be something to this last one, although the science seems contradictory) and more. (I personally find windfarms beautiful, and we intend to put both solar panels and the largest roof-mounted turbine our city allows on our property in the next 10 years.)

But a combination of solar, wind, geothermal where possible, hydropower where possible and nuclear is a combination we can live with, and, in fact, it can get even better....

Right now, we use uranium (and to a lesser degree, plutonium) in nuclear reactors, but it is possible to make more efficient reactors that use Thorium. Thorium nuclear reactors may be safer, have less dangerous waste, require far less dangerous fuel and most importantly, it's an element we're swimming in on this planet, and it's not particularly dangerous to mine (not more so than any other metal, at the least.)

Here's the wired article on thorium that many people got excited about last year. I even know a couple of scientists who will cry out 'thorium' every time you say nuclear energy...but they're kind of weird.

It is possible, hell, probable, that we could convert new and existing nuclear power plants to thorium reactors in the future. It's not possible, however, to convert new or old COAL plants to thorium.

We're not going to stop needing electricity anytime soon. We pretty much have a choice of nuclear with solar, hydro, biogas and wind or coal and fossil gas. People who make it impossible to build nuclear in their communities pretty much guarantee a coal plant in the community next door, dropping radioactive waste into their lungs. That's a crap choice, and until the green party accepts that nuclear is one of the best choices in a choice we HAVE TO MAKE, whether we want to or not, I can't fully stand behind the green party.

We can't NOT build power plants because we don't like any of the ones available to us. We need more power plants, period. Putting off the decision because we don't like anything we have now is why 100 year old damned inefficient coal plants are still in use...opposing new nuclear is supporting old coal, and that's a fact, Jack.

The problem with most anti-GMO foods movements

I promised I'd explain my position on GMO foods, and here I go. I'll try to keep the science to a minimum...

#1. The vast majority of political parties and politicians who are 'anti-GMO' have defined GMO in such a way that almost all food is from a GMO.

This leads to a complete dilution of the debate about transgenic foods, for example. Nearly every vegetable you eat has been selectively bred for the traits you want in that. While that selective breeding was not done in a lab, it should not matter to you if it was. If your problem is with 'transgenic foods,' then you should word your opposition to it in those terms.

To give you an example of why it's bad to have wishy-washy definitions of GMO, let me tell you about "white wax," my favorite kind of tomato to grow...

White wax is a small, juicy, fairly low acid white tomato. It ranges in color from yellow to white, and has a sweet flavor which is very strongly 'tomato' flavored. Since many other white tomatoes are nearly flavorless, this is an heirloom variety my family really likes for both color and flavor. It also has exhibited a great deal of cold tolerance, and I have some ripening outside right now, despite going down to 38 degrees a few days ago.

I haven't studied the genome of white wax, but based on the flavor, color and a knowledge of genetics, I'd say that the tomato has had the genes for pigments like lycopene knocked out (which is what happens to bring you yellow tomatoes) and it has the genes for yellow pigments mostly knocked out... it may also be that it has a gene that suppresses the pigments, but most of the lack-of-pigment mutations you have in fruits are about something being missing, not something being suppressed.

Lets assume, for a moment, that we KNOW that my tomato is made in nature by knocking out two genes.

The way many anti-GMO laws and regulations are worded, if a laboratory created my tomato by knocking out two genes in the lab, my tomato-an heirloom with a hundred year old history-would suddenly be a "GMO" which it is...it was GMed with selective breeding. The tomato created in the lab, which could be identical to mine, would be required to be grown as if it might pass its knock-out alleles to its neighbors..it would be regulated, and the presence of that knocked-out gene would be 'proof' that people were growing GMOs. Suddenly, everyone growing this fairly popular heirloom would be violating the law.

While it would be stupid to imagine people being busted for growing "GMOs" just for growing heirlooms bred for specific traits, AS MANY GMO REGULATIONS ARE *CURRENTLY* WORDED, it is a possibility.

#2. Non-Transgenic GMO foods *can* reduce over-reliance on 2-3 varieties, which causes monoculture.

The reason we get monoculture is, in part, that large agribusinesses have spent fifty or more years developing a few varieties of crops, using selective breeding techniques to shift the genetic make-up of their produce...you end up with, for example, a crop that will tolerate light frost, resist Round-up, be stable on the shelf and be an ideal shipping size for movement overseas. Since the company can spend decades on a plant with these qualities, it is typical for a company to want to sell this seed as far and as wide as possible...so they market it in New York as "frost resistant" and in Florida as "Round-up ready" and in Guam as "ideal for shipping overseas!"

Using faster laboratory techniques to manipulate the genetic make-up of varieties of crops you can work with only one trait at a time, creating microvarieties of crops for each niche...this allows farmers to have the option, for example, of buying more varieties that are NOT "Round-up ready," for example. Being able to make 100 niche crops in a year by selecting specific genes in the lab is cheaper for the company than taking 20 years to selectively breed...and selective breeding is not magically safer than using laboratory techniques to manipulate desired traits...Africanized Bees, for example, weren't manipulated in a lab, it was a case of imported bees from one continent being released on another.

#3. Most people's problems with GMO foods have a lot more to do with transgenic foods, and should be stated in THOSE TERMS.

Transgenic foods are those foods which have genes in them from other organisms. These are the 'frankenfoods' that so very many people are afraid of. Currently, in Europe, Cisgenic foods (foods made by laboratory methods but which COULD be bred outside the lab, in a much longer process) and transgenic foods are considered identical under the law, even though cisgenic foods and selectively bred foods are identical, genetically.

If I cross two tomato plants in the lab, to make a third, and I cross two tomato plants in my garden to make a third, the plant in my garden is the one more likely to have traits I can't control, because it is exposed to pollen from the neighbors, plus other plants, animals and diseases...I cannot replicate, exactly, the conditions in my garden from year to year, but I can replicate the conditions in a my lab....

It is the HEIGHT of stupidity to be prejudiced against the mechanism used to breed a tomato. Under the current European laws, if applied outside of plants, a human being made from in-vitro fertilization would be 'different' from a human being made the old fashioned way. The very idea is ludicrous.

#4. If any of us could knock out or add a gene and prevent another 'potato famine,' we'd be asses to not do it.

Only heartless bastards want to see people die. If we have to spend 20-30 years selectively breeding corn, for example, to be grown in arid places in North Africa, but could instead spend 2-3 years selectively crossing strains in the lab, that's decades of death we're preventing. Especially when you consider that every cross of varieties of the same plant has the potential to result in a lethal strain (a strain where the seeds don't grow at all) or a sterile 'hybrid' strain (a strain where the seeds produce, but where their seeds don't grow, or don't fruit.) When you have limited outdoor space to selectively breed, as opposed to growing things via tissue culture, for example, a couple of lethals or sterile hybrids could derail your research by years...and the way current selective breeders tend to prevent this is to get as much genetic information on their crops as they can, using laboratory methods to map the genetic material of their new strains...


#5. Many plants we currently grow by 100-year old versions of cloning and tissue culture, including potatoes and bananas, could be outlawed by poorly-worded anti-GMO laws.

Bananas are grown by dividing a rhizome, just like you and I might divide our irises, and you can use tissue culture to divide a rhizome into more parts than you can 'naturally' do. Hostas, Irises and many other plants in your garden often started in a tissue-culture lab, and expecting people to know which plants started in a lab and which were divided in so-called 'natural' ways is ridiculous...the only way to know this once the plant is established is to keep a paper trail on every plant.

The reason a paper trail is the only way to know the difference between an established tissue-culture plant and a 'natural clone' is because you can't tell the difference genetically... because there is not one.

______________________________

There is a "third hand" point of view on GMOs. On the one hand, we have people who are opposed to all GMOs, even when their opposition is from a point of view of stupidity. On the other hand, we have people who think that everything we want to do should be allowed, without regulation....

The "third hand" point of view on GMOs, the one the Green Party does not espouse, is that laboratory methods which duplicate 'natural' ones but do so with more speed and with more capacity for control should be considered in the same light as the 'natural' plants, and that there is a difference between so-called cisgenic plants and transgenic ones, and that the public fear of one should not be allowed to prevent research into the other.

The anti-science, dare I say it, Creationist-Sounding, point of view on GMOs that is espoused by the Green Party is a position of fear and ignorance, in which laboratories are scary places where evil people plot to do terrible things, or stupid people sit atop disasters waiting to happen. It is a point of view that says we can't know what we're doing, because science is hard, and at the same time proposes that old techniques of selective breeding are somehow better and more natural when they are often slower and more wasteful, and frankly, are responsible for the documented 'green disasters' we've had in the world, like Africanized Bees.

To believe that the only other side to the GMO debate is unregulated evil scientists cackling manically is dishonest, disheartening and frankly, insulting.

Could you cite a source for that? Another reason why we need a scientist party.

Could you imagine if the claims of nutbars like Carl Paladino were responded to with a request for citations?
I don't mean just in the xkcd way, below, I mean in debates. For real. Don't use a statistic unless you took statistics.

Hydrofracking on a Sponge...And that is why we need a science party.

Lately I've been indulging in a little mental fantasy about my ideal political party. In part, this stems from the fact that I may actually cross party lines and vote Green in my state's gubernatorial election. Basically, my choice right now is someone who will not come out in favor of a COMPLETE ban on Hydrofracking in the CNY and NYC watersheds, and does not take a strong stance towards a public health care option-Andrew Cuomo, or someone who is on the 'OMG, nukyular is scary' side of Nuclear Energy, and who is on the 'OMG, Science is hard,' side of GMO foods-Howie Hawkins.

Now, I'm leaning about 55-45 in favor of Hawkins...if you read that as 'not a huge support,' you're right...depending on what views I'm thinking about, my support waxes and wanes, and I really am undecided. There are some things that can swing me fully towards Cuomo...if he came out strongly against Hydrofracking in the next few days he'd have my vote. This issue, and the related issue of compulsory integration, directly affects the water I grew up drinking (from Skaneateles Lake) , the water my grandmother and dozens of my cousins drink (carried up the Oswego River) the water my inlaws drink (from 2 village wells 40ft deep in the SAME BEDROCK they want to frack less than a mile away) and, to a degree, the water I drink now, which comes from Lake Erie. I'm going to discuss the OMG all broccoli is a GMO food and why Nuclear energy is not a bad thing later, but let me stick with the hydrofracking for now...

So, why should we care in Buffalo and Western New York for what is largely a CNY issue? If you don't care about another potential Love Canal, on a much larger scale, then think about this: Our own water in Erie and Lake Ontario would be affected because if the Central New York watershed was contaminated, the only answer is pipeline from Erie and/or Ontario. Since one empties into the other (over that big loud waterfall over there) draining the water from one is essentially draining water from the other, although at least Ontario is fed by the whole system, and contains a lot more, so it might not be as bad a scenario...However, one science fiction doomsday scenario we've passed legislation to prevent is the arid states taking our precious water, never realizing that stupidity could damage the aquifers and rivers of Central New York, making the (much shorter, and therefore much more viable) pipelines to CNY a possibility. (To give an example, Syracuse would need about a 40 mile pipeline to tap Ontario near Oswego, but currently uses one that's about 25 miles to tap Skaneateles Lake, so we're not talking about things beyond the ability of engineering...IRCC, the pipeline from Skaneatles to Syracuse is also >100 years old, so we're not talking about anything beyond the realm of OLD engineering.)

I am not anti-drilling in general. I'm not against using our natural resources to the best of their ability. In fact, I'm one of those few, freaky people who would like to see a stronger use of on-shore rotary drilling techniques to get to offshore oil, provided the oil removed is replaced with a substance of similar or higher density to prevent subsidence, which we don't do in most places..basically, we should not drill deeper than we can go to cap a well. Rather than drill straight down to pockets of oil under the sea, we should use a long straw...to drink your milkshake. We can actually drink the milkshake of some nice, protected places without damaging them, but it takes science, and science is teh scarry.

Fracking in places where the water is both very pure and very mobile is a very bad idea. Most places where hydrologic fracturing have been used historically have been places where the water is a very easy to understand cycle...when there is no rain, there is no water, because the shallow lakes and rivers are fed by two sources- rain and long rivers that bring the water from elsewhere. While the rain can't be controlled (and this is why acid rain, or other rain-brought pollutants are bad, mmkay) the rivers, if they became strongly polluted, can be rerouted, dammed, moved into concrete lined channels, etc., etc., and this is what we see happen in areas where the soil has become badly polluted from industry.

The ability to reroute, cap, dam and line rivers has saved hundreds of municipalities from losing access to water completely. It is because where water is not particularly mobile, contaminated land can be treated as Point-Source Pollution.

In Central New York, the natural gas that hydrofracking is aimed at is in spiderweb like-pockets deep in the shale...as is a great deal of groundwater. This groundwater is fed by snow and rain, which falls in amounts unimaginable to many people in the US, for example, my Mom's hometown gets 2.8 times the amount of snow Buffalo does...then percolates slowly through its own little spiderweb channels and into tens of thousands of creeks, streams, rivers, pools, swamps, marshes and the like. There are also pristine 'prehistoric aquifers,' in the area, large underwater lakes with no connection to the outer world...lakes which are ridiculously important in terms of evolutionary biology...

This area, much of it part of something called the Oswego River/Finger Lakes watershed and most of the rest of it part of the Mohawk River watershed have just under 13,000 miles of streams and creeks in an area of about 8000 square miles. 325 of those square miles are completely covered with water in the forms of lakes, reservoirs, etc. Things like small ponds, springs, etc, are not considered in this calculation...it's WET.

When I was growing up in Syracuse there were three unnamed creeks within a 3 block radius of my house. One of my schoolmates, who came from the southwest, once asked the name of one of these creeks, and was laughed at by the people with her. The creeks were less than 3ft across, mostly dried up in August and were not in parks...of course they didn't have names....there are hundreds of thousands of such creeks in Central New York.

I'm giving all this data because I want you to imagine a sponge. Imagine, for some weird moment, that you are dying of thirst, and there is a sponge literally filled with water...your only water. There is also a spill of vinegar on your countertop. You need to clean this vinegar up, and you're holding this sponge....

Do you set your only source of water down in that pool of vinegar?

No, you don't, because a sponge is made up of thousands of little channels that carry liquids all over the sponge... and vinegar in part of the sponge can quickly travel elsewhere in the sponge.

New York State, and CNY in particular, is a very water laden sponge. You can do a dye test to make sure that contaminated water from your operation doesn't go into anywhere monitored, but the moment you fracture the shale in an area you're opening up dozens of new little channels, which have not been dye tested. When you pump in something under pressure, again, you're breaking up the rock, reaching new channels that, again, haven't been dye tested. On top of that, above the bedrock sits water logged clay soil that has a nasty habit of NOT STAYING IN PLACE...

The picture above is of a landslide in the Tully Valley in 1993 next to Bare Mountain...that's B*A*R*E, as in naked, you know, like when the side of the mountain keeps falling off! The Tully Valley has an interesting history relevant to the Hydrofracking debate, in that it was a center for something called Solution Salt Mining, and in the nineteenth century, the city of Tully was literally surrounded by salt wells.

Solution salt mining works like this: You pump freshwater into an area where there is a salt deposit. Such areas are common in Central New York, in part because of the whole sponge thing I described. You pump in the fresh water, pump out the salt water, and dry it in sheds via boiling or evaporation to get salt. You can also throw in some potatoes, but that's a Syracuse thing.

This works great as long as the brine stays where it is supposed to go. When you lose control of the brine you end up with things like the brackish water in Ley Creek, Onondaga Creek and Ninemile Creek. In addition, although it's never been conclusively proven to be related to salt mining, the Tully Valley Mudboils, which are a unique geological feature to the area, are not recorded before 1900, about the time the Tully Valley hit its saturation of salt mines. You'd think the Onondaga would've noticed this geological feature at some point in their centuries of years living there...or is it millennia? Someone feel free to tell me, I'll cite you and everything.

If you are really unfortunate with your salt and water, THIS HAPPENS, but it wasn't from solution salt mining, and wasn't in CNY, it's just really snifty, in an engineering disasters terrible thing way of being snifty, and further illustrates the point that once we lose control of fresh water near a salt deposit we end up with saltwater that we can't do anything about.

The salt that enters Ninemile Creek, Onondaga Creek and Ley Creek are so pervasive that they are still there more than 100 years after the salt wells were closed. They contribute to the unique problems of Onondaga Lake, which is the second link that comes up if you google "most polluted lake in the world" and the first if you google "most polluted lake in the us" so when people in Syracuse call it polluted, they aren't joking. Hey, it's not just a lake, it's a superfund site. Since the salt isn't considered a big deal in the grand scheme of pollutants (and shouldn't be...mercury and PCB are bigger problems) there isn't much talk about it, but this salt is from industry closed over 100 years ago...from SEALED salt mines, and we can't really stop it, because it's NON-POINT SOURCE pollution.

[Well, we could dam the whole valley, and make it a salt water lake, with the only water going into the creeks from it coming from controlled places where we installed water treatment/desalination plants, plunk a big casino on the shores, fill it with crab and lobster and salt water fish that would die if they got out of the controlled area and it would pay for itself, but no one is going to spend that kind of money on anything in New York OTHER than a failed gubernatorial campaign..Carl, meet Tom, I assume the two of you have met? Get used to being in the same sentence.]

For the record, Onondaga Lake and Adam Richman are also responsible for a bruise on my butt, when he referred to the "Pristine Lakes" of Syracuse on the way to Heid's on his Man Versus Food, which involves Onondaga Lake Parkway, which runs along Onondaga Lake. Since I fell out of my chair at such a comment, I hold both the lake and Mr. Richmann responsible. That being said, he may've been distracted from knowing what lake it is by wondering HOW STUPID people in the greater Syracuse Area must be, or must think others are, to require a dozen signs, including flashing lights and a HUGE ORANGE STRIPE warning them of one low bridge...On a scale of one person dead to four people dead from stupidity, they are FOUR PEOPLE DEAD STUPID, by the way. Seriously, ask someone from Syracuse what the first question they asked was when they saw "bus hits bridge in Syracuse, NY" scroll by on CNN...if it wasn't 'on Onondaga Lake Parkway?' then they aren't from Syracuse.

Anyways, sorry for the stream of consciousness...

Even if you assume the mudboils are NOT the result of salt mining, the fact that we do not understand completely why they are there, and that they've eaten part of at least one road, tells you that we don't understand enough about the hydrogeology there to go mucking about with it... even for natural gas.

Of course, part of me says it's because big business wants to screw the Onondaga...but I'm prone to that fear, because I've seen it happen all my fricking life.

If we can't control the salt water that was added to the shale in places where it was pumped using minimal pressure, how are we going to control the fracking fluid when it is added under considerable pressure, especially when they've failed to do so in places that *don't* have as strong a history of water not staying where it is supposed to, like Northeastern PA.

Likewise, if we're using the fracking fluid to push natural gas into places where we CAN get it, how do we keep it from going into places where it is easier for it to go, like wellwater? It has happened before.

As things stand right now in the United States, natural gas is our best bet for things like heating. With all I said in the above post, I'll say quite clearly that I have a new high efficiency furnace and a slightly less new dryer, BOTH of which use natural gas. With the ability to produce natural gas as a 'side effect' of oil drilling, landfills, waste water facilities, drilling to naturally occuring large pockets and the like, plus the ability to manufacture biogas, there is no reason to resort to something that greatly changes the geography of a large area when it has been demonstrated to be unsafe when done in similar areas.

The primary 'selling point' of hydrofracking in Central New York is that taxes are so high, and employment so bad, that farmers and other landowners, promised a $300-3000 per month check, are willing to act against their longterm best interests for the chance to not lose the family farm. Those that refuse often end up screwed because of 'compulsory integration,' which is the gas well version of eminent domain.

What makes it particularly galling is that currently the EPA has no way of overseeing the hydraulic fracturing..make no mistake about it, when Republicans say they want a moratorium on new regulations, it is to STOP the new regulations in the works to give the EPA oversight into hydrofracking....The same EPA that said New York's own regulations protecting its waters are not strong enough.

The fact that federal republicans want to stop hydrofrackers from having any oversight means I really can't vote for a candidate that isn't willing to stop hydrofracking at the state level until it can be properly overseen by people who know what they are doing.

If Andrew Cuomo doesn't make a strong commitment to stopping it, I don't think he'll get my vote.

Don't get me wrong, because I'm not happy with the Greens either. They are just plain wrong on Nuclear energy and mostly wrong on GMOs, in ways I'll discuss at a later date...but this issue is just too important to ignore, and I'm now in the position of having to choose WHICH of the issues important to me are most important.

If I do vote Green, if my little support shows that more people than usual voted Green, I hope that the Democrats who win can realize I didn't do it to elect a Green...because it won't happen... I did it to tell them that this is actually an important issue, and I'm offended as hell that Cuomo doesn't know diddly about it.

I'm aware that a vote Green helps Paladino, who is an ass and a moron, but at this point I'm sure that even if he were elected he'd get impeached and be forced to leave faster than...well, faster than Paladino at a gay bar.