Opinion: Vote ‘yes’ on Ohio Issue 1 if you love state parks and democracy

By Melinda Zemper, Anne Sparks, Jenny Morgan, Mary Huck and Cathy Cowan Becker

If you love state parks and democracy, vote “yes” on Ohio Issue 1.

Ohio endured 36 days of 90-plus-degree weather this summer, a third of the summer season. Climate scientists acknowledge we’ve crossed the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius warming and say it’s urgent we halve our greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

We must phase out coal, gas, oil and liquified natural gas as energy sources quickly while simultaneously ramping up clean, renewable energy at an accelerated pace.

Scientists and environmental advocates like us are distressed because we understand the science. Climate change deniers and the fossil fuels industry focus on politics and profits, preventing real progress.

If Ohio voters continue to elect climate change deniers and fossil fuel supporters as lawmakers, we’re on track for not just more suffering faster, but for suffering in a corrupt and autocratic state.

Look to House Bill 6, the $1.3 billion nuclear energy bailout scandal, for a throughline of energy-related corruption in Ohio. Ohio’s former Republican Speaker of the House was sentenced to prison for 20 years last year and two other men indicted in the scheme committed suicide. Gov. Mike DeWine texted FirstEnergy for dollars during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign.

During DeWine’s second term, 78 Republicans and one Democrat in the General Assembly passed HB 507, a bad law requiring fracking under our state parks and public lands and falsely naming natural/methane gas a “green energy.”

Why, when five states have already banned fracking? Why, when fracking’s methane emissions are known to increase childhood cancers and chronic diseases? Fracking also destroys biodiversity and its greenhouse gas emissions irrevocably heat the planet.

The supermajority in the Statehouse wants to stay in power, and gas and oil dollars and dark money donations help them do so.

Would we have HB 507 on the books today if our gerrymandered legislature were not dominated by supermajority politicians genuflecting to the oil and gas industry? Probably not. It took almost a decade for Republicans to fulfill expectations of the industry and hand over our state parks and public lands to be fracked.

Ohio’s survival in a hot, flat and crowded world will be diminished if legislators continue to industrialize pristine eastern and southeastern parts of our state − lands that belong to Ohioans, not politicians − as sacrifice zones to oil and gas frackers.

These extractive companies are not just from out of state, either. They hail from Canada, too, a country we’re used to thinking of as a friend, not a colonizer.

Fracking depletes billions of gallons of freshwater annually from Ohio’s lakes, rivers and streams and mixes it with unregulated toxic chemicals, eventually rendering it radioactive and unfit for human consumption forever.

Fracking’s wastewater, or produced water, by law, must be stored deep underground in Class II injection wells, which we know is neither a wise, nor permanent storage solution. These wells leak wastewater, which can migrate for miles, threatening private drinking water wells.

Methane leaks, flares and accidents from gas and oil production and transportation contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that accelerate climate warming. Yet JobsOhio, the state’s private economic development corporation funded by Ohio liquor sales profits, plans for the Ohio Valley, which includes Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, to provide 45% of the nation’s natural gas by 2040.

Ohio is both a climate villain and a climate victim.

Either Ohio’s General Assembly doesn’t know what it has done by opening wider the Pandora’s box of fracking, or it doesn’t care. Either excuse means this supermajority legislature is unfit to govern.

On Nov. 5, Ohioans vote on Issue 1, which removes the creation of voting districts from politicians and gives it to the people − a committee of five Democrats, five Republicans and five independent voters. Fair voting districts can be a new beginning for Ohio politics and the start of real progress on other issues, too.

If Ohioans want to take back agency and our democracy, they must vote “yes” on Issue 1.

Melinda Zemper, Anne Sparks, Jenny Morgan, Mary Huck and Cathy Cowan Becker are members of the Save Ohio Parks Steering Committee.

This opinion piece was originally published in the Cincinnati Enquirer on October 30, 2024.

Photo by Cathy Cowan Becker