Above photo: From Food and Water Watch.
Today, Governor Tom Wolf voted with the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware to ban fracking in the Delaware River Basin and to remove from consideration regulations that would have allowed the transfer of water from the basin to fracking operations elsewhere and the importing of fracking wastewater for treatment, processing, storage, or disposal.
We congratulate our allies who have fought for this ban for 11 years and worked to stop the additional regulations proposed in 2017.
The reasons cited for today’s decision include the rapidly growing body of peer-reviewed science on the adverse impacts of shale gas development and evidence of the harms done in areas outside the basin for more than a decade. Many of those studies include or focus specifically on data from Pennsylvania. Many of the harms they have noted have occurred in Pennsylvania. For too many Pennsylvanians, the harms are still occurring with no end in sight.
Communities outside of the Delaware River Basin are entitled to the same protections as those within it. We reject allowing any part of the state to be a sacrifice zone,