Teach the Kids in a Truck

WV Museum (Clay Center) Launches Gas Funded Pro-Fracking Exhibit for Kids

From an Article by Joe Solomon, Huffington Post, July 20, 2015

The Clay Center, West Virginia’s premiere arts and science museum for kids, recently launched a new exhibit focused on the science and wonders of fracking, thanks to hefty donations by the oil and gas industry.

The exhibit, called “Power Your Future,” is housed inside a natural gas-powered truck, which enables it to be driven to local elementary and middle schools.

I tried repeatedly to get permission for a tour of the mobile exhibit, but all of my inquiries went unanswered. What I’ve been able to piece together from photographs and the testimony of those who’ve been on-board is that the interior feels like something between a spaceship and an arcade room—with strips of neon blue and orange lights covering the floor and ceiling. The walls are lined with interactive digital displays where kids can play games which relate in some way to the natural gas drilling industry.

In one game, for example, students race against the clock to connect the different elements which make up methane and other gases. In another, they can create their own music based on the seismic waves industry geologists use to identify shale deposits. A third screen, themed like the popular Facebook app Farmville, allows kids to plant trees as part of a hypothetical “fracking reclamation” project.

There’s also a station called “The Future Starring You” where kids can answer a personality quiz, take a selfie, and then get to see their picture embossed over a cartoon of a worker in the natural gas industry. One photo shows a child’s face on the head of a carton driller, next to a placard that reads “Drill here.”

To be clear, there are no digital games on-board the exhibit that help children learn about the scientifically confirmed dangers of fracking—like say, the proven spikes in earthquakes,climate-warming methane leaks, or cancer-causing radon.

Natural Gas Influence

The Power Your Future exhibit was paid for with $1.2 million in grants donated by EQT Corporation and Energy Corporation of America, two very wealthy gas companies whose logos are emblazoned on the side of the truck.

When critiqued for taking gas money and just showing one side of fracking story, Lloyd Jackson, the chair of the Clay Center’s board defended their “balanced and fact-based educational programming.” Jackson went on to laud fracking, saying, “Natural gas is and will be a central issue for our State and our counties for decades” and that “we can expect the gas industry to be around for a long time.” Jackson was also very defensive about the exhibit’s sponsors, extolling EQT and ECA for their “commitment to our community [and the] betterment of our children.”

It might be important to know that Lloyd Jackson, in addition to chairing the museum board, is the President of Jackson Gas Company, his family’s gas drilling and production business.

The President of the Clay Center, Al Najjar also defended the exhibit by stressing its focus on science-based learning. Najjar told the Charleston Gazette, the way the museum staff addresses the controversy surrounding fracking, “is by talking about it” and “not shouting and screaming about it.” He said, “It’s really about making sure we are getting students to understand how it works, to literally talk about the science.”

Najjar’s logic that the way you address concerns surrounding fracking is by zeroing in on the science seems like a line you’d expect to hear from a gas company’s PR representative.

After all, this is the same logic that says that the way to discuss benzene, a chemical that’s known to cause cancer in humans and is sometimes used in fracking injection fluids, is by only discussing its chemical composition. As it happens, benzene’s molecular composition is C6H6, a rather elegant hydrocarbon design. The form of cancer benzene is most known to create is leukemia.

While the Clay Center claims they give lesson plans to teachers that address some of the larger questions surrounding the gas industry as well as other forms of energy, one wonders why some of these areas of deeper concern were not featured in the exhibit itself?

What’s Your Story?

One also wonders why the Clay Center decided not to highlight the stories of fracking’s impacts on West Virginians. It seems especially ironic when you find out that the Center runs a concurrent exhibit for kids called “What’s Your Story?”

The stories of fracking’s harmful impacts are plentiful in the mountain state.

Eileen Burke, an art teacher for 16 years at Doddridge County High School in West Virginia, in a county where fracking is well underway, heard multiple “horror stories” from her students. Some students would tell her how they couldn’t shower because of how “dark and nasty” their water had become and one girl described how her family was “driven crazy with the noise of two drilling rigs near her home, and the bright lights on the pads—how it’s like daylight at night.”

Other students would fear just getting to school as their school bus would compete with fracking equipment and water trucks on narrow mountain roads.

Eileen herself couldn’t take the stress of having EQT’s fracking wells across from her property. After years of waking up with “metallic coughing,” endless rainy nights worrying about flooding from nearby waste water ponds, and endless truck traffic outside her house, she sold the home she hoped to retire in, and is moving out of state.

Eileen Burke and her husband tried to get answers at EQT’s Bridgeport offices back in 2012. Read the story here.

Another Doddridge County resident, Tina Del Prete, recently started a petition on MoveOn.org calling on West Virginia to follow New York’s lead and ban fracking. The petition has gathered over 2,650 names – with many West Virginians sharing their story alongside their signature.

One recent comment reads: “As a native West Virginian, I would most prefer to raise my two children in the land of their heritage and history. But, we had to leave W VA last year with a lack of confidence that we were safe drinking our tap water, breathing clean air, or if we were literally on stable ground.”

This past April, EQT sued 103 West Virginian landowners so they could trespass their land to pursue its proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline. Many of these landowners continue to protest, bringing their stories of protecting their heritage and their children’s future to bear.

And in 2004, EQT’s contractor bulldozed a historical cemetery of black coal miners in Logan County in order to move fresh pipe to a drilling site quicker. Their descendents’ stories of seeking justice continue to go unheeded.

Why Not Focus on Renewables?

One of the obvious questions that comes up in discussions of the Clay Center’s pro-fracking exhibit is: Why not create an exhibit for children that focuses on renewables? Why not spotlight the energy sources of the future – like wind and solar? Such sources of power are far safer and don’t come with flares and fireballs, water contamination, metallic coughing, dangerous roads, intolerable noise and night light, worsening climate change, and the perils of another boom and bust economy. Plenty of science goes into photovoltaics and converting wind turbines’ kinetic energy into electricity.

Well, apparently, a few years ago the Clay Center asked themselves this very same question.

I spoke with an ex-Clay Center staffer who told me that at the inception point of the mobile exhibit – back when it was still an idea on a drawing board a few years ago, the hope was that it would focus on all kinds of energy – from coal to gas to renewables like solar and wind. This ex-staffer, who wished to remain anonymous, told me they weren’t sure what happened, but that a moment came pretty quick in the brainstorming process where the museum curators decided to double down on gas.

One could guess that ECA and EQT’s money had something to do with it.

Gas Industry Dazzle for Kids Only

See also: www.Marcellus-Shale.us

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?

 Who is “Tom Shepstone?” Spokesman for Energy In Depth?

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, farmer in Lewis County, WV

To begin with, who is the man reported to have made these claims: (1) shale drilling helps “the neediest among us,” (2) natural gas drilling is not only environmentally responsible, but essential to health, (3) “hydrofracking improves water quality!” (4) “natural gas produces water rather than depleting it,” (5) natural gas drilling is not only environmentally responsible, but essential to health, (6) gas drilling is responsible and it will save our environment, (7) “there is no evidence the development of this resource will damage the environment . . . but plenty of evidence the farm and the woods can be saved with it,” (8) “hydraulic fracturing is an open book” – a response to the complaint that drilling chemicals are unknown.

Give up? No question what industry he is in, though, is there? Well, he is a well paid top spokesman for EID – Energy in Depth, and a leading practitioner of an art I learned about in college.  It was a Philosophy course, and one of the things the professor taught was propaganda and how to detect it. (Love that Liberal Arts education!) One of the techniques he taught I have observed many times since. It is called “the Big Lie Technique.” You can say the exact opposite of the truth and repeat it over and over.

Many unwise people will never detect a statement is false if said with enough conviction and often enough. That is the method of Energy in Depth, energized with all those dollars that are no longer actually profitable in producing gas. EID has a whole company giving speeches, writing articles and getting out advertising.

Mr. Shepstone began by doing land use planning in the Delaware River area. He was a certified planner, member of the professional land use planning organization, and worked in many counties in the area for years. However, he somehow got connected up with the shale drilling industry.

Mr. Shepstone added “right to mine” to his planning documents, which was interpreted to mean a right to drill wells. None of the areas in his planned towns was safe from drilling, and the required minimum distance from existing buildings was the least in the nation. This may have been in part due to his far-right political views, but likely reflects influence from the shale drilling industry. In 2008 he dropped his professional membership but continued to do land-use planning.

The petroleum industry has long had a penchant for organizations. The Independent Petroleum Association of America, hereafter IPAA, was formed at a conference which began June 10, 1929. President Herbert Hoover called a national and state conference to discuss and formulate a practical program for the conservation of America’s natural petroleum resources. Today IPAA’s function has morphed. Its function is to promote the most widespread use of petroleum possible and overcome all obstacles to that goal.

When shale drilling began the industry learned it “had a bull by the tail.” It promised to be hugely profitable, but there was no regulation of growth and there were huge side effects which were an obstacle to acceptance. The old boy smile, handshake and pat on the shoulder could not bring the price up, and it could not placate people who had their drinking water contaminated, their property values decimated, their hunting and fishing threatened and their roads destroyed. Nor could the legal bullying used in the past on widespread individuals shut up the networks of injured citizens, demanding their rights. In short, the industry was in trouble.

The answer they chose was PR, public relations. They had done a good job buying legislatures to give favorable laws and underfund and limit enforcement of those inadequate rules. The PR vehicle they came up with is Energy in Depth, EID.

Energy in Depth was born out of the IPAA and a large, long-time public relations firm in 2009. The purpose was to defend hydraulic fracturing and unconventional gas in the wake of a rising number of investigative media reports calling the industry’s risky practices into question. Support came from many huge corporations such as Anadarko, BP, Chevron, El Paso Corporation, EnCana, Halliburton, Marathon, Occidental Petroleum, Schlumberger, Shell, and Talisman. Also the American Petroleum Institute.

EID attacks not only shale drilling opponents of any stripe, but also academic studies that do not hew the line, and news articles that are not favorable. Here is an example right from EID’s page:  A recent Bloomberg National Poll that found an increase in public support for more regulation on hydraulic fracturing appears to have made three key mistakes – asking a question of the wrong group of people, asking it in the wrong way, and asking it after a series of other questions that may have affected the results. As a result, this poll doesn’t add any substance to the debate over hydraulic fracturing, and is actually quite misleading.

Who is more pro-business than Bloomberg? Would they settle for any poll that showed anything less than ecstatic joy with the industry?

EID has branches that cover shale drilling everywhere. So who is Tom Shepstone?

Shepstone came on board Energy In Depth in April 2011. He is the spokesman for the most aggressive branch, called the Northeast Marcellus Initiative. It is the one which covers Pennsylvania in particular, his home territory, and the rest of the Marcellus-Utica area.

Just after being hired, Shepstone organized “packing” the federal safety hearing in June of 2011 with testimony favorable to the industry. The subject was safety of hydraulic fracturing. His plan was to offer those who would make statements for deregulating the shale drilling industry free meals, hotel rooms and transportation. The night after the hearing the Pittsburgh Pirates were playing the Mets, and a trip to that game was thrown in as an additional incentive. Those who spoke for more and better regulation had to pay their own expenses, of course.

You’ll likely be hearing more from Tom Shepstone, his tricks and his inverted reality. Even if you don’t care to stay tuned in.