New Jersey Lawmakers Keep the Fracking Ban Pressure On

Susan Phillips

Recent Stories

Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

February 9, 2012 | 1:50 PM

You have to hand it to the Garden State fractivists. While liberal Philadelphia lawmakers are strong-armed into voting for an impact fee bill they think is paltry and flawed, their legislative neighbors across the river get to introduce all-out fracking bans.
New Jersey’s Senate Environmental Committee put their stamp of approval on a bill Thursday that would ban hydraulic fracturing. New Jersey does not contain large deposits of natural gas within the Marcellus Shale like Pennsylvania. So the state has not seen a drilling boom. But environmentalists there worry about the Utica Shale, which lies below the Marcellus. The Utica Shale stretches from upstate New York, through Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, all the way to Tennessee. But just a small portion of the formation lies in the northwest corner of New Jersey.
“We need this ban bill to protect New Jersey’s environment and economy since the Governor and the federal government has not,” said New Jersey Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel in a press release.
New Jersey lawmakers tried to ban fracking before. It got through the legislature, but Governor Christie turned it into a one year moratorium.