2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Lets be honest about Jerry Brown... [View all]ebayfool
(3,411 posts)fracking. I look through the thread and see very little concern for the problem, but lots of cheerleading for fracking as long as it benefits the Clinton campaign (Brown's endorsement). And listing the Calif Dems Legislature's accomplishments does NOT make them Brown's accomplishments. He is a PART of those accomplishments, but he doesn't get all the credit for other Democrat's hard work.
snips from your link/
In May 2013, Brown called fracking a fabulous economic opportunity that he had to balance against his commitment to climate protection. He has resisted calls to sign an executive order imposing a moratorium or ban on fracking, which as governor he has the authority to do at any time. Instead, last September he signed California Senate Bill 4, which allows fracking to continue but requires drillers to notify regulators and nearby residents in advance; SB 4 also requires the state to monitor water quality near fracking sites, and to complete a study of frackings environmental and other implications by 2015. (In 2005, George W. Bush signed a law that largely exempts fracking from the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and other major federal oversight.) In case anyone still wondered, Mark Nechodom, the director of the Conservation Department, told a public panel last October in no uncertain terms: Governor Brown supports hydraulic fracturing.
Environmentalists have also voiced suspicions about the $500,000 that Occidental Petroleum, long one of Californias top oil companies, contributed to Browns campaign in 2012 to pass Proposition 30, which raised taxes on wealthy Californians to fund increased spending on public educationgenerally not the kind of initiative that big corporations favor. Occidentals contributions came a few months after Brown fired the previous director and deputy director of the Conservation Department, following complaints from the oil industry that DOGGR was too slow in granting drilling permits. When a Los Angeles Times article linked the two firings to industry complaints, the governors office pointedly did not issue a denial.
That was a clear signal to the industryboth the firings and the nondenial, said a former administration official familiar with the decision.
But by far the biggest development in the fracking debate is one Brown had nothing to do with: on May 20, the bottom dropped out of the economic case for fracking in California when federal officials slashedby a whopping 96 percenttheir estimate of how much recoverable oil is contained in the Monterey Shale. So much for the initially projected 13.7 billion barrels of oil that had oil companies salivating. The Energy Information Agencys new estimate is that the Monterey Shale contains a mere 600 million barrels of oil. This [EIA] report hammers the final nail in the coffin for oil companies ludicrous claims that fracking is the key to Californias prosperity, said Zack Malitz, a campaigner with CREDO, an activist group coordinating opposition to fracking in the state.