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?
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