Laura Dailey spoke for SpectraBusters at clean water rally in Tallahassee

Floridian’s Clean Water Declaration Campaign, facebook, 18 February 2015,

Laura Dailey of SpectraBusters brought a strong message in favor of solar energy and against the pipeline that’s proposed to cross the springs heartland.

More about Laura Dailey, Director of Community Outreach & Speaker’s Bureau. And a few more of her notes for that speech:

Throughout history, the smart investor has bet his money on the future. Today, colleges and universities, even major corporations are divesting from fossil fuels. Why? Because fossil fuels are the new DINOSAURS, and we already know how that story ends! Even Duke Energy, just last week committed $225 million to the development of Solar energy. Think of the water that can be saved!

Since 2006, the cost of solar panels has dropped 66%, and when prices began to fall, they began to Dive! Even as I speak, solar gets cheaper, in fact is now cheaper than gas is most places in the developing world! Currently, for every job created by the fossil fuel industry, nine are created by the solar industry! Why not Florida?

Sabal Trail/Spectra will tell you that energy from natural gas is clean energy, but I’m here to tell you that just because it’s invisible, doesn’t mean it’s clean! To extract this “clean” energy from DEEP inside the earth, it requires 4.4 million gallons of water, infiltrated with highly caustic and toxic chemicals, per well! 15% of that water is flowback and treated wastewater from previously fracked wells, 20% is water purchased from public utilities, and…..wait for it…..a whopping 63% is water taken from rivers, streams and springs!! 4.4 million gallons, per well & each well can be fracked multiple times! 27,000 new shale gas wells were completed in the US in 2011! Let’s round those water needs up to 5 million gallons per well, to include post frack-job cleanup, and do the math 27 thousand wells, times 5 million gallons of water each, for each frack job, equals 135 billion gallons of water per day for fracking just those new wells! That’s enough water, on average, for 12 million households per day!

In 2013, Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said that “Solar is growing so fast it is going to overtake everything.” My goodness, does it take a little country girl like ME to wonder where all those “smart investors” are now?

And it shouldn’t take a little country girl like me, to see that no company in its right mind is going to spend 4 billion dollars to service a million households in south florida. The biggest percentage of this gas is likely going to be for export! We take all the risk, Spectra takes all the money, we lose! We lose our clean water, our pristine environment and we lose billions in tax revenues from the visitors who will no longer to come float & paddle our rivers, because the riverbed is gone due to an “unfortunate incident” such as a pipeline exploded under a riverbed! People who will not come because a pipeline explosion has caused a wildfire on the ground and a canopy fire in the trees that was impossible to fight, because our small towns along the pipeline route were not equipped adequately enough to stop it!

Solar does not explode! 84 years ago, Thomas Edison said:

“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy—sun, wind and tide…. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that!”

To that, I just have to say to Florida, we have two choices: we can lead the way, or we can get out of the way!

Joe Roetz, NBC-2 (WBBH Fort Myers), 18 February 2015, Group demands lawmakers fix water quality,

Groups from across Florida converged on Tallahassee, demanding lawmakers work to fix water quality issues across the state. We followed a group that departed early Wednesday and arrived about noon to rally on the steps of the Florida State Capitol.

The first sign seen in this video is “No Pipeline in Springs Heartland” held by Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson of Our Santa Fe River; see OSFR’s fracking category for counties passing resolutions against fracking.

NBC-2.com WBBH News for Fort Myers, Cape Coral

-jsq

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