DRILLING FOES COMING TOGETHER ACTISTS

ALBANY — John Lennon famously sang "Gimme some truth." His widow, Yoko Ono, invoked that lyric on Friday at the state Capitol as she and other activists dropped off some 204,000 comments at the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Accompanied by her son, Sean Lennon, and a platoon of hydrofracking opponents, Ono also delivered a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo calling for a continued moratorium on the controversial natural gas drilling technique.

The comments, contained in dozens of boxes bearing the names of the environmental groups formed to oppose hydrofracking, were prepared in response to the DEC's latest set of draft regulations, released in early December. The agency has been looking at hydrofracking, which uses high volumes of water and a small amount of chemicals to crack open underground gas-bearing shale, for more than four years. The drilling industry insists that the practice, which is used in several other states, is safe.

The 30-day comment period on the new set of regulations ended Friday.

"Fracking kills," Ono said. " ... The state of New York is not going to be crazy." 

Anti-fracking activist and physician Sandra Steingraber, representing Concerned Health Professionals of NY, criticized the release of the regulations before the completion of the latest version of the DEC's mammoth environmental impact statement on hydrofracking, especially the chapter devoted to its potential health impacts — a key section now under review by the state Department of Health, with assistance from outside experts.

"The regs are thus arbitrary placeholders as part of a legal maneuver that allowed the DEC to avoid missing a rule-making deadline," Steingraber said. The DEC has admitted as much.

She called the composition of comments "the writing assignment from hell," due to what she described as the lack of transparency in the process and the brevity of the comment period during the December holiday season.

Although many of the advocates on hand doubt that any regulatory framework can make fracking safe, Steingraber believes the comment-writing exercise was useful both to put DEC and the Cuomo administration on notice of public opposition ("Silence is consent," she said) and to encourage close study of the new regulations.

Sean Lennon said that concern for his family's farm upstate got him interested in the issue. He said the process threatens an "unparalleled industrialization" of the state's rural regions.

It's not clear whether these comments will get the same close eye the DEC devoted to more than 60,000 comments received after the release of the most recent environmental statement — a pile that took months to review by both DEC staff and a private contractor.

"DEC will review, carefully consider and respond as appropriate to all comments received on the revisions to the regulations," agency spokeswoman Emily DeSantis said in an e-mail.

Asked what his father would have said about fracking, Lennon said John Lennon cared enough about nature to buy the property upstate. "That's my dad's house. ... It still is," he said.

Sean Lennon, representing Artists Against Fracking, joined other activist groups as they held a press conference Jan. 11, 2013 in Albany, N.Y.

(timeunion)