The Town of Caroline, near Ithaca, is keeping the option of a local ban on hydrofracking on the table, after a three-hour meeting on Tuesday about the issue. Alyson Martin reports at the Ithaca Journal that the vote of the town board was cast in biblical terms:
Before the vote, Town Supervisor Don Barber gave a short statement about his stance on hydraulic fracturing in Caroline. He told residents in attendance that they had participated in government and had their voices heard in a way that doesn't always happen, especially not at a state or federal level. A meeting last month drew more than 250 Caroline landowners and residents. A petition that has circulated around Caroline has more than 900 signatures in favor of a ban on hydraulic gas fracturing. "This is a rare opportunity and you should treasure this," Barber said, of the role residents had in the democratic process. He went on to say that local government has to stand up for the civil society, referring to the town as "Davids" in a "David and Goliath" style battle.
Albany is a top green city
Albany has the nation's most green jobs per capita, reports the Innovation Trail's Marie Cusick. The findings come from a new Brookings Institution report, and the Times Union's Chris Churchill notes that New York's capital is just behind one of the greenest cities in the country:
Indeed, Brookings says only the San Francisco area, with 13,917 green-tech workers in 2010, bests the Albany area's employment of 10,092 people in the sector. Many of the workers are employed at sites such as the Albany NanoTech complex along Fuller Road or General Electric's renewable energy headquarters in Schenectady. They also work for companies like Plug Power Inc., a fuel-cell company in Latham, or AWS True Power, a wind-energy consultant in Colonie. Brookings notes the Albany area is one of just four metros -- Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco are the others -- contributing $1 billion annually to the clean-export economy.
Pennsylvania to N.Y. gas pipeline
A gas pipeline has broken ground in New York State, reports Steve Reilly at the Press & Sun-Bulletin:
In a clearing off an unmarked road in rural Windsor on Wednesday, officials from Laser Northeast Gathering Company, LLC broke ground on New York's portion of the Susquehanna Gathering System, a 16-inch-diameter pipeline that will bring natural gas north from Susquehanna County to the massive Millennium Pipeline, which runs 186 miles from Corning to Ramapo, N.Y. "We have all the permits in hand and we've started to build the right-of-way," said Laser Chairman and CEO Thomas Karam. "We're thinking that we'll be flowing gas sometime within the next 60 days."
Turbines spike port business
Business at Oswego's port is booming, thanks to the need to ship wind turbine parts, reports Debra J. Groom at the Post-Standard:
Jonathan Daniels, executive director of the Port of Oswego, said windmill parts came in by ship and were offloaded to trucks for shipment to Howard, just south of Canandaigua Lake. The ship then was to continue to Cleveland, Ohio with more parts destined for a wind turbine project in Euclid, Ohio. “But we were able to negotiate a rate to discharge that cargo here,” Daniels said. “It added two days of work for our longshoremen. It was another day of the vessel being here. It was good for everybody. It shows the port’s ability to expand its reach.” “Shippers carrying wind component cargoes continue to send vessels into Great Lakes ports,” McGill said. “These oversized pieces move economically by water to ports where rail or, more commonly, trucks move them to site destinations.”
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