Demonstrators protest in favor of a fracking moratorium at the state house in Annapolis, Maryland.
It's taken years for activists to get this far, but on Tuesday, the Maryland House of Delegates
passed a three-year moratorium on hydraulic fracturing by an overwhelming 93-45 vote. The bill will now go to the state senate where a bill to hold companies strictly liable for injuries to residents or property passed on Tuesday by 29-17.
The immediate impact of the House bill, if it is approved by the senate and not vetoed by the governor, is likely to be small since Maryland is not issuing new permits for fracking operations until after the completion of several studies on the practice, which uses chemicals and water under high pressure to pry natural gas and oil from tight rock formations. No fracking is currently underway in Maryland in the state's sliver of the Marcellus Shale formation that is being fracked elsewhere.
Eight amendments designed to weaken the bill were defeated Monday, as was an attempt by Republicans to make it easier to use the technique in western Maryland.
In an editorial published Tuesday afternoon, the Baltimore Sun backed the moratorium:
Even if the process of extracting natural gas can be done safely—and that remains a pretty big "if" despite Maryland's efforts to develop best practices to make it so—there are some adverse effects that have clearly been demonstrated elsewhere. With fracking comes the headaches common to the recent natural gas boon—contamination of local wells, 24/7 heavy truck traffic, quantities of toxic waste that must be contained and disposed, and increased exposure to air pollution.
None of these is particularly compatible with Western Maryland's valuable tourism and vacation real estate industries—and that's not even to mention concerns about methane leaks and how natural gas extraction can worsen climate change, an especially important topic to a state with so much exposed coastline as Maryland. [...]
The boom-and-bust temporary jobs (often filled by out-of-state workers) that come with the natural gas extraction economy may look desirable, but not if they put at risk the more permanent, local positions that can be found in all those hotels, outfitters, restaurants, bed and breakfasts, marinas, vacation property management firms and on and on that are increasingly providing the foundation of Western Maryland's economy.
A permanent ban, like the one New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has imposed in that state, would be a better move. But other states should at least follow Maryland's lead. That, however, is unlikely in Pennsylvania, which only bars fracking from state parklands, in Oklahoma and Texas, where fracking waste injection wells have been linked to increasing numbers of earthquakes, or in Montana and North Dakota where fracking for petroleum in the Bakken Shale has boosted domestic oil production to its highest level in 45 years.
Marylanders can contact their state lawmakers here to back the moratorium.