Frack Gas: A Bridge to Nowhere

Natural  Gas has become the 33-year bridge to nowhere

By S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

The gas industry itself, in 1981, came up with the clever pitch that natural gas was a “bridge” to a clean energy future. We’ve been on it 33 years. Long bridge! And the far bank ain’t nowhere in view. Natural gas people don’t say what that far bank is, or where it is.

In 1988 – the year that the climatologist James Hansen warned Congress, in historic testimony, about the urgent problem of global warming – the American Gas Association began to explicitly frame its product as a response to the “greenhouse effect.” It wasted no time, in other words, selling itself as the solution to a global crisis that it had helped create.

The principal methods of advancing its interests have been (1) influence peddling to political and business elites and (2) sound bites for those who take their reality predigested from TV and Newspapers. Things like “Natural Gas. It’s hot stuff,” “Clean, Reliable, Abundant and Affordable” and “Nature Loves Natural Gas.” We’ve all seen the executive type female dancing around under a blue flame extoling the virtues of fracking in a lengthy advertisements on the evening news. And we’ve seen them selling to any captive audience from kindergarten to 4-H clubs to high school students to farmers to civic and business clubs.

It might interest you to know this started as early as 1921. There is an article called “Seventy Children win prizes for Natural Gas Essays” in Natural Gas (billed as the Official Publication of the Natural Gas association of America). “In this contest the children attending public and parochial schools of the Pittsburgh district were offered $1000 in prizes for the best slogans, posters or essays on the controversial subject of natural gas conservation,” it says.

Gas companies even go to colleges! In The Triangle, The Independent Student Newspaper of Drexel University, for November 30, 2012, there is an article called “Class Promotes Use of Natural Gas.” The 11 students were given a budget of $3000.

They were competing with 15 other colleges and universities from around the country to do the best work for the American Natural Gas Alliance. ANGA is an advocacy group that, according to its website, “promote[s] the economic, environmental and national security benefits of greater use of clean, abundant, domestic natural gas.” [You may have heard their “Think About It” advertising.]

Furthermore, “The class generally wanted to increase awareness of the benefits of natural gas, and they did so by organizing and sponsoring events throughout the term in order to reach as many students as possible with ANGA’s message,” according to The Triangle.

“Start ‘em out early and bring ‘em up right” seems to be the motto of the petroleum industry. Some of this stuff gets scary. In California, Chevron even provides cleaned up frack water for irrigation of nut trees, to alleviate the drought. Then they use the nut hulls to clean up the frack water! Wonder if they employ a chemist?

For oodles and oodles of detail on the reality of gas fracking, see Andrew Nikiforuk’s article in the Alberta, Canada, Tyee titled “Shale Gas Plagued By Unusual Methane Leaks.”

Do you suppose fracked gas is going to be a bridge that is never finished, because, in the fracker’s minds, there really is no other side?

Chesapeake Energy

Commentary by S. Tom Bond of Lewis County, WV.

The United States seems to be moving back toward the Middle Ages when truth came from Authority – meaning the Medieval Church and the King, who was essentially anyone who, with his buddies, could field more thugs than anyone else.

“True” statements then involved no necessity to demonstrate connection to the physical world, only to the pronouncements of “Authority.” If your statement did not conjoin with the dominant theme, you were simply pounded into place. Frequently a place underground.

Today’s “news” has given up analysis for the valueless “he said, she said” format, or to simply massaging the advertisers. After all, the outward purpose of “news” is to entertain and the inward purpose is to make money. This results in consolidation of the media – money-making winner take all. Do I need to mention Rupert Murdoch?

We are used to pharmaceutical company advertising, which was forced to mention side effects, some of them pretty horrifying, only after jumping to advertising directly to potential customers. Or chemical companies, which advertise plastics without mentioning bisphenol A or other endocrine disrupters given off by many other products.

And of course, there is political advertising, which is a quintessence of self-interest masquerading as economic principle or ethical balance. One of the mysteries of psychology is how people can so easily be convinced to support platforms diametrically opposed to their own interests. Obviously it’s done by advertising to people who have their minds turned off. But how is it accomplished so easily?

Shale advertising appears everywhere. I recently turned to a Moscow newspaper hoping to get the Russian view on an event written in English. The entire paper was in Russian, except… get this, and ad to invest in shale drilling!  Here in the U. S. there are two or three booster ads on the local news broadcast each night, telling how great it is. There are some in the newspapers, others on billboards along the highway and on many of the sites you open on the internet.

The universal characteristic of advertising is that it presents the product as the advertiser wants it. Tobacco ads and drug ads are under federal constraint, but otherwise the advertiser calls the tune. If there is a different view it can be countered in this medium only by some entity paying for the counter-advertising.

The dirty aspects of shale drilling, such as aquifer and stream damage, devaluation of property, interference with other industries, long term and health effects, just disappear under the blitzkrieg of ads and lesser news-entertainment.

The authority appealed to, of course, is “business.” The vast sums ($126 billion a year average over the last six years, according to Ernst and Young) gotten from investors who only want a quick and large return, allow vast sums for shaping public opinion by advertising. As they say, “It’s great to be the King!”

The $13 billion in subsidies awarded to hydrocarbon fuels by the United States, helps, too. Why should mature, profitable industries be getting subsidies? The world-wide figure is $58.7 billion, so the US is not the only country pumping money from it’s citizens to aid the pollution from burning carbon.

What can we do? We need to keep working to raise the consciousness of those around us. The sun did not go around the earth in the Middle Ages, and aquifers are not safe today. No matter who says the opposite. It will come out eventually. But sooner is better, because more of the Earth is being harmed all the time.

We need publicity, we need political action, and we need to work together with the several hundred groups trying to regulate shale drilling in the US and the dozens of others all over the world. The truth is on the ground everywhere shale drilling is tried, and the authority is concentrated in a few companies and a few banks. Truth will come out, but until it is recognized, damages will continue.

CBS “Sunday Morning” today carried a commercial from “energyfromshale.org” saying that Williamsport, PA, is much better because of the new natural gas drilling and fracking activities in the area.  Here is an example of the message from their web-site:

In towns across America, like Williamsport, PA, people are experiencing the benefits of shale energy.  New jobs.  Renewed hope.  They’re also asking questions, like “How are you protecting our water?”  The energy industry is answering these questions with facts.  Like the fact that we encase our wells in multiple layers of steel and cement.  And that we monitor and test as we drill for oil and natural gas.  These questions and answers are important.  Because we know success in a town like Williamsport means success for us all.

However, another web-site entitled “usclimateactionnow.org” has a different message, namely:  Gas industry sponsored ads sometimes show an intent, inquisitive, blond-haired toddler crouched on a patch of perfect, green grass; he is peering through a big magnifying glass, directing his sight into the earth. His background is a pleasant, out-of-focus expanse of green leaves.

The headline reads: “WHERE IS AMERICA FINDING MORE THAN A CENTURY’S WORTH OF CLEAN, DOMESTIC ENERGY?” The answer, placed below the large picture of the toddler, is stated as “RIGHT BENEATH OUR FEET.” Additional text asserts: “technology has improved”, “safely recover”, “practices employed to protect the environment”, “transform America’s energy security”, “creating jobs and growing the economy”, and “let’s unlock it.”

Here is the question: HOW IS THE IMPEDIMENT TO CLIMATE STABILIZATION POSED BY ADS SUCH AS THIS EFFECTIVELY COUNTERED?   Answers are provided below.

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Resource Insights is a web-site raising questions about the natural gas industry, as an independent source of news on natural resources and the environment, edited by Kurt Cobb.

If you live in the United States and bother to turn on your television, it’s almost impossible to avoid ads telling you that natural gas from shale is both abundant and environmentally safe to develop. In these ads, so many happy people seem to enjoy burning natural gas that it would be difficult to imagine that their smiles might come to a premature end.

Though the ads will probably not be withdrawn, the emerging facts run counter to the gleeful tone of this television commercial produced by America’s Natural Gas Alliance, a consortium of shale gas drillers.

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Joe Gingerich, editor of The O’Dwyer’s PR Daily, reports that front groups are waging public relations warfare in the fracking debate.  He reports on the real issues and problems involving fracking chemicals, contaminated water supplies, the federal loophole in regulations, human health effects unchecked, and climate change due to the greenhouse gases that are released.

It comes as little surprise then, that natural gas companies now find themselves on the defensive, and are sinking historic sums into PR, marketing, advertising and lobbying efforts to sway citizen opinion and influence legislation. A 2011 Common Cause report found fracking companies have funneled nearly $750 million to lobbyists in the past decade to inspire laws ameliorative to hydraulic fracturing practices.

A bombardment of pro-fracking ad campaigns has followed. A series of commercials funded by ExxonMobil began appearing in 2011: in one, a particularly smug geologist discusses whether fracking can be performed safely. “At ExxonMobil, we know the answer is yes,” he says, aside bustling main street vistas of Everytown, U.S.A. In another series of national print and TV ads (titled “I’m an Energy Voter”), a montage of citizens carefully picked from an assortment of ages and racial varieties repeat the mantra “I vote,” before a repetition of varying subordinate clauses: “for more domestic energy,” “for energy security,” “for energy from all sources.”

This commercial was funded by Energy Citizens, a front group backed by the American Petroleum Institute. One tactic is bussing in hundreds of energy employees to bogus “rallies” created by the group to oppose cap-and-trade legislation. By establishing a perceived public support for fracking, Energy Citizens is able to cast the illusion that its services are a response to interests voiced by the masses.

The O’Dwyer report says further that perhaps no pro-fracking group has been as successful or more influential than Energy in Depth (EDI), a Washington, D.C.-based front group formed by the American Petroleum Institute and the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and funded by BP, Occidental Petroleum, Marathon, Chevron, Shell, Halliburton, El Paso Corporation, and the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.

At a November conference in Houston — titled “Media and Stakeholder Relations: Hydraulic Fracturing Initiative 2011” — EID called on trade groups to engage opponents with a “community approach” that includes a “focus on local concerns” and to remind them of “local opportunities: jobs, revenue, cost-savings.” Handling PR duties for Energy in Depth is FTI Consulting (formerly FD Public Affairs Americas). IPAA is also an FTI client.

At the Houston event, Matt Pitzarella, Spokesman for Pennsylvania energy giant Range Resources, was quoted stating his company is currently employing former military counterinsurgency officers to handle media inquiries, quell citizen concerns and ward off grassroots opposition to hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania. “We have several former psyops folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments,” Pitzarella was quoted saying.

True or not, blogs and Internet discussion forums are now abuzz with the rumor that the U.S. energy industry is hiring psychological warfare experts to perform duties previously reserved for Madison Avenue boardrooms.

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Roger Stone has written a blog on “biggovernment.com” entitled “Energy Independence: Frack We Must.”    He is overlooking the adverse impacts to the environment and our infrastructure as follows:

We must look at the scientific facts before making a policy decision, and the facts about shale gas, when you cut through a great deal of disinformation, are simple. First, it’s less expensive than the fossil fuel alternatives. At $66 per megawatt-hour, natural gas beats the dirtier and more dangerous coal, which costs around $90 per MWh. It even costs less than solar, wind (off and onshore), nuclear, oil and bio-diesel.

And shale gas doesn’t just save money, it saves lives. On average, fifty to sixty coal miners die every year. Every miner must wear artificial breathing apparatus to protect them in case of a disaster, disasters which happen with alarming frequency. Explosions, cave-ins and methane leaks combine to make coal mining the most dangerous job in the United States today.