The New York Department of Environmental Conservation (NY DEC) is poised to decide whether to begin issuing permits for hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" within the state of New York. Fracking is a controversial drilling process used to extract natural gas from shale, coal beds and "tight sands" with vertical and horizontal drilling. Sand, water and chemicals are blasted at high pressure to fracture rock where natural gas is trapped. Communities all over Canada, the U.S. and other countries are fighting against fracking because it pollutes water and harms people's health.

On Monday, Oct. 31, Niagara-on-the-Lake Councillor Jamie King will introduce a resolution calling for a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing and the treatment of fracking wastewater within the Great Lakes Basin. To read a copy of the resolution, visit that city council's website here.

The resolution was sparked by concern about the Niagara Falls (New York) Water Board's move to explore treating fracking wastewater in Niagara Falls' wastewater treatment system.

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as "fracking," is an issue that is increasingly being seen in the media. Fracking is a process used to extract shale gas using vertical and horizontal drilling. Sand, water and chemicals are release at high pressure to fracture shale where natural gas is trapped.

Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was convicted yesterday of two felony counts. DeChristopher was on trial for bidding on more than 22,000 acres of public land that he could not pay for: his two crimes are making false representations to the government and interfering with the land auction.

DeChristopher made the $1.79 million bid in order to “do something to try to resist the climate crisis,” he told Tina Gerhardt, in an interview published by AlterNet. But, as Kate Sheppard explains at Mother Jones, the judge threw out “the defense that his actions were necessary to prevent environmental damage on this land and, more broadly, the exacerbataion of climate change.”

The natural gas industry is afraid that Josh Fox, director of the muckraking film Gasland, might win an Oscar on Sunday. Earlier this month, an organization called Energy in Depth, backed by the oil and gas industry, sent the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a letter in which it argued that Gasland, Fox’s exposé on the natural gas industry, should be removed from consideration for best documentary feature because it contained inaccurate information.

During the State of the Union address earlier this week, President Barack Obama spoke at length about clean energy, with nary a mention of climate change. This is the new environment in which America's energy policy is being made.

Just two years ago, Democrats were rallying to combat climate change, one of the most worrying challenges the country faces. But now, Obama has apparently given up his plan to openly fight climate change during his presidency. It's hard to imagine how, even in a second term, he would choose to re-fight the lost battle to create a cap-and-trade system.

It won’t be long before the world has to confront its diminishing supply of clean water.

“We’ve had the same amount of water on our planet since the beginning of time, ” Susan Leal, co-author of Running Out of Water, told GritTV’s Laura Flanders. “We are on a collision course of a very finite supply and 7.6 billion people.”