Big energy companies have been trying for five years to tap the riches of the Marcellus Shale in southern New York, promising thousands of new jobs, economic salvation for a depressed region, and a cheap, abundant, clean-burning source of fuel close to power-hungry cities. But for all its political clout and financial prowess, the industry hasn't been able to get its foot in the door.
One reason: Folks like Sue Rapp and Vera Scroggins are standing in the way.
Rapp, a family counselor in the Broome County town of Vestal, in the prime shale gas region near the Pennsylvania border, is intense and unrelenting in pressing her petitions. Scroggins — a retiree and grandmother who lives across the border in hilly northwestern Pennsylvania, where intensive gas development has been going on for five years — is gleefully confrontational. She happily posts videos of her skirmishes.
The anti-fracking movement has inspired a legion of people like Rapp and Scroggins— idiosyncratic true believers, many of them middle-aged women, who have made it the central mission of their lives to stop gas drilling using high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus region that underlies southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
An enormous marine heatwave off the US west coast is ringing alarm bells among ocean and...
Authorities in Orange county, California have ordered the evacuation of 40,000 people over concerns about a...
More than 17,000 people were under evacuation orders in southern California on Tuesday as a wildfire...
