Opinion

The Fracking Industry’s War On The New York Times – And The Truth

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. via The Huffington Post

October 20th, 2011 – Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake aligned with the industry’s worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an impressive propaganda effort carried by slick PR firms, industry funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio. In pitting itself against public disclosure and reasonable regulation, the natural gas industry is once again proving that it is its own worst enemy.

I confess to being an early optimist on natural gas. In July of 2009, I wrote a widely circulated op-ed for the Financial Times predicting that newly accessible deposits of natural gas had the potential to rapidly relieve our country of its deadly addiction to Appalachian coal and end forever catastrophically destructive mountaintop removal mining. At that time, government and industry geologists were predicting that new methods of fracturing gas rich shale beds had provided access to an astounding 2000-5000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the lower 48 — enough, they claimed to power our country for a century.

These rich reserves might have allowed America to mothball or throttle back our 336 gigawatts of mainly antiquated and inefficient coal fired electric plants replacing them with underutilized capacity from existing gas generation plants. That transition could reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20%-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain and slash America’s grid based CO2 by an astonishing 20% — literally overnight! Gas could have been a natural companion for wind and solar energy with its capacity to transform variable power into base load, and could have been a critical bridge fuel to the new energy economy rooted in America’s abundant renewables.

American sourced natural gas might also have helped free us from our debilitating reliance on foreign oil now costing our country so dearly in blood, national security, energy independence, global leadership, moral authority, and treasure amounting to $700 billion per year — the total cost to our country of annual oil imports — in addition to two pricey wars that are currently running tabs $2 billion per week.

My caveat was that the natural gas industry and government regulators needed to act responsibly to protect the environment, safeguard communities from irresponsible practices and to candidly inform the public about the true risks and benefits of shale extraction gas.

The opposite has happened.

The industry’s worst actors have successfully battled reasonable regulation, stifled public disclosure while bending compliant government regulators to engineer exceptions to existing environmental rules. Captive agencies and political leaders have obligingly reduced already meager enforcement resources and helped propagate the industry’s deceptive economic projections. As a result, public skepticism toward the industry and its government regulators is at a record high. With an army of over 40,000 highly motivated anti-fracking activists in New York alone, popular mistrust of the industry is presenting a daunting impediment to its expansion.

I sit on the New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel. I and the other panelists are charged with developing recommendations to the Commissioner regarding rules that will hopefully safeguard New Yorkers from the kind of calamities caused by the natural gas industry to communities just across our border with Pennsylvania. We spend much of our time sorting truth from the web of myths spun about fracking by fast talking landsmen, smarmy CEOs, and federal regulators.

Recent studies have raised doubts about many of the industry’s fundamental presumptions;

• For example, releases of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas, may counterbalance virtually all the benefits of CO2 reductions projected to result from substituting gas power for coal. Robert W. Howarth, Renee Santoro, Anthony Ingraffea, Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations, Climatic Change (2011); Wigley T. (2011) Coal to Gas: The Influence of Methane Leakage. Climate Change Letters. DOI 10.1007/s10584-011-0217-3.
• The human health impacts of gas extraction on local communities may rival those associated with coal. A new study by Centers for Disease Control finds that breast cancer rates have dropped in every county in Texas, but have increased in the six counties with the heaviest natural gas air emissions.
• The U.S. Geological Survey just slashed its estimate on the amount of gas in the Marcellus Shale by 80%, raising doubts about all the industry’s positive economic projections about jobs, royalties, and revenues. Industry based those projections on resource estimates that the federal government has now jettisoned.
• Meanwhile local communities are finding the costs of irresponsible drilling to be ruinous. Contaminated well water, poisoned air, nuisance noise and dust, diminished property values and collapsing quality of life are often the predictable collateral damage of gas shale development in the rural towns of the east. Barth. The Unanswered Questions About the Economic Impact of Gas Drilling in the Marcellus Shale: Don’t Jump to Conclusions. March 2010. Accessed 8/10/11; Christopherson & Rightor. How Should We Think About the Economic Consequences of Shale Gas Drilling? May 2011. Accessed 8/10/11;Stephen G. Osborn, Avner Vengosh, et al., Methane Contamination of drinking water accompanying gas wells drilling and hydraulic fracturing, PNAS Early Edition, April 14, 2011; Riverkeeper, Fractured Communities (Sept. 2010),
• In a devastating admission, the industry now acknowledges that it absolutely cannot afford to pay localities the costs of roads damaged from the thousands of truck trips per wellhead, leaving those ruinous costs to local taxpayers, many of whom will see no benefits from the shale boom, but only declines in their quality of life.
• With several notable exceptions, like Southwest Energy, the industry has demonstrated a disturbing fervor for secrecy while advocating regulatory policies that favor the most irresponsible practices and the worst actors.

The shale gas industry’s campaign against The Times illustrates the difficulty in getting solid information upon which to base a regulatory scheme. The Times is doing an unusually rigorous job at covering this extremely important and complex issue. The paper’s ongoing series on natural gas drilling is one of the strongest pieces of investigative journalism this year from any news venue. Thankfully, The Times is covering this extremely important topic with rigor and balance. But it is also going the extra mile in the level of documentation it provides to bolster its stories, a move that raises the bar on public service journalism.

In an era when few papers or news outlets are still willing to take on very powerful interests, The Times has pursued very difficult questions about one of our country’s richest and most aggressive industries. At a time when accessing documents through open records requests faces an obstacle course of daunting roadblocks, the series has spent nearly a year using these flawed tools to collect and publish an extraordinary trove of original documentation. Archives published by The Times include thousands of pages obtained through leaks and/or public records requests. The Times reporters provide page-by-page annotations explaining the documents so that the reader can sift through them in guided fashion.

Among the revelations uncovered by The Times’ admirable reporting;

• Sewage treatment plants in the Marcellus region have been accepting millions of gallons of natural gas industry wastewater that carry significant levels of radioactive elements and other pollutants that they are incapable of treating.
• An EPA study published by The Times shows receiving rivers and streams into which these plants discharge are unable to consistently dilute this kind of highly toxic effluent.
• Most of the state’s drinking water intakes, streams and rivers have not been tested for radioactivity for years — since long before the drilling boom began.
• Industry is routinely making inflated claims about how much of its wastewater it is actually recycling.
• EPA, caving to industry lobbyists and high level political interference reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney era, has narrowed the scope of its national study on hydrofracking despite vocal protests from agency scientists. The EPA had, for example, planned to study in detail the effect on rivers of sending radioactive wastewater through sewage plants, but dropped these plans during the phase when White House-level review was conducted.
• Similar studies in the past had been narrowed by industry pressure, leading to widespread exemptions for the oil and gas industry from environmental laws.
• The Times revealed an ongoing and red hot debate within the EPA about whether the agency should force Pennsylvania to handle its drilling waste more carefully and strengthen that state’s notoriously lax regulations and anemic enforcement.
• The Times investigation also explodes the industry’s decade old mantra that a “there is not a single documented case of drinking water being contaminated by fracking.” The Times investigation of EPA archives exposes this claim as demonstrably false.

A second round of New York Times stories showed that within the natural gas industry and among federal energy officials, there were serious and disturbing reservations about the economic prospects of shale gas:

• Government and industry officials made sure that all of their reservations were discussed privately and never revealed to the American public. Internal commentary by these officials is striking because it contrasts so sharply with the excited public rhetoric from the same agencies, lawmakers, industry officials and energy experts about shale gas.
• Many industry experts have reservations over whether the wells produce as much gas as industry is claiming and whether companies may be misleading investors, landowners, and the public about the true costs of shale gas.
• Shale gas wells often dry up faster than companies expected — sometimes several decades faster than predicted.
• Rather than coming clean, the companies downplay how much it costs to keep these wells flowing and overstate how much profit companies can make by these wells.
• Furthermore, only a small percentage of the land in each shale gas field turns out to be highly productive, even at the start. Nevertheless, companies routinely pretend that all of their acreage will be equally promising.
• These emerging issues also sparked private discussion among federal energy experts, who expressed grave concern that their agency’s predictions were too heavily influenced by the natural gas industry’s over-optimism. The Times found that the EIA was heavily reliant on data provided by companies with shale-gas industry ties.

The science writer for the Knight Ridder Journalism website summed up the significance of the Times’ revelations about the industry’s ballyhooed economic prospects. “From here, it appears that the Times and [the series principal author] Mr. Urbina are calmly saying we should learn a lesson from the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, suggesting investors and regulators and gov’t planners step with care and not be blinkered by all the money that’s pouring in.”

The organized attack on The Times and its reputation by well financed industry spin machines is illustrative of the perils and real challenges facing public service journalism today.

The Times piece has been the target of massive industry blowback. Industry funded front groups like Energy in Depth, an army of slick PR firms, and former regulatory officials like PA DEP Commissioner John Hanger, now on industry’s payroll, have artfully manufactured deceptive talking points and posted blogs that are parroted by journalists looking for an industry response to The Times coverage and then emailed as “facts” to the industry’s supporters and its indentured servants in Congress.

Ironically, many of the attacks against the series have claimed that the articles were poorly sourced or under-researched. Yet, The Times has not printed a single factual correction. This is certainly an admirable reporting record for a series that has been running in the paper for nearly a year. This is because, despite massive efforts by the industry to find errors, no critic has been able to identify a single fact that The Times actually got wrong. The Times posted thousands of pages of closely annotated original-source documents along with its news articles.

Rarely has a series had such wide-reaching and immediate impact. The New York Times articles have led to major changes in how the industry as well as state and federal regulators are handling one of America’s most important energy issues.

Documents uncovered by The Times have already been put to use in litigation by injured parties seeking to force some treatment plants to stop handling the frack wastewater. The Times series has also pressured the EPA to begin a review of treatment plant permits (signaling the agency’s possible intent to prohibit plants from discharging treated waste into rivers without comprehensive testing for shale gas contaminants). Healthy skepticism raised by the series has dampened some of the thrilled exuberance among Wall Street bankers ecstatic about the latest gold rush, federal lawmakers in the thrall of industry money, and in hard pressed rural communities seduced by hollow promises of massive royalties, local prosperity and abundant jobs.

As our panel grapples with these complex and difficult problems, we have found that the principal impediment to going forward with recommendations regarding regulations that could allow fracking in our state is a general mistrust of the claims we are hearing from industry and federal regulators. Revelations from The Times series and elsewhere have cast doubt upon all the industry’s assurances about fracking and have complicated the task for those of us charged with advising the regulatory agencies on developing rules that could allow the industry to proceed while safeguarding the public interest.

For many of us on New York State’s fracking panel, the one bright light has been the presence of Southwest Energy’s Vice President and General Counsel Mark Boling. Boling is bullish on shale gas but his passion for public disclosure and a rigorous and rational regulatory framework, his candor about the perils of certain practices and his honest assessments of the costs and benefits of gas shale extraction have inspired trust and confidence among his fellow panelists. Boling’s candor may have made him a pariah in his industry, but the panel’s confidence in his integrity is the one thing that might allow us to go forward with recommendations regarding a regulatory scheme that could allow certain kinds of fracking to proceed in New York State. None of us wants to be in the position of getting seduced by sweet and lofty promises that quickly turn into a sour gas and impoverished communities.

Gas fracking flacks routinely make extravagant promises about bringing jobs and income to the depressed rural communities. If those jobs and royalties don’t come — the way they have not come for people in Bradford County, PA — New Yorkers will be justifiably angry, as they wonder why the government and our panel did not protect them when there were so many warning signs.

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Replicated only for posterity. All credit goes to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and The Huffington Post. Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Original article found @http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/fracking-natural-gas-new-york-times-_b_1022337.html

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Testimony of Dusty Horwitt, JD (Senior Counsel, Environmental Working Group)

Oversight Hearing on The Revised Environmental Impact Statement on Hydraulic Fracturing and New York City’s Upstate Drinking Water Supply Infrastructure.

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Excerpt from full testimony:

“Thank you for the opportunity to testify today on the Revised Environmental Impact Statement on Hydraulic Fracturing and New York City’s Upstate Drinking Water Supply Infrastructure. My name is Dusty Horwitt, and I am Senior Counsel at Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., with offices in Ames, Iowa and Oakland, California. This is my fifth appearance before the council on this issue.

Gas drilling poses great health risks – and financial risks – to New York City and much of the rest of New York State. We have reviewed the revised plan of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Some of its provisions could make drilling safer. But we are not convinced that if the state allows high-volume hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, it can sufficiently protect New York City’s drinking water supply – or the drinking water of rest of the state’s population.

The state’s environmental conservation department says that the gas drilling industry is unlikely to create many new jobs for New Yorkers. “Given the newness of the industry,” the plan says, “it is assumed that, in Year 1, 77% of the total workforce would be transient workers from outside the state.” It goes on to speculate that eventually, 90 percent of workers would be local – but not until year 30 of shale gas development.

A handful of jobs in the drilling industry could cost New Yorkers billions of dollars they don’t have. That’s why it is especially important for New York to proceed carefully.”

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Bernard D. Goldstein, M.D.

Biography of Bernard D. Goldstein, M.D.

Dr. Goldstein is Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health and the former Dean of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. From 1986-2001 he served as the founding Director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, a joint program of Rutgers University and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He was also the Chair of the Department of Environmental and Community Medicine at the medical school from 1980-2001. He is a physician, board certified in Internal Medicine, Hematology and in Toxicology. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

His experience includes appointment as Assistant Administrator for Research and Development of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1983-1985. He has been president of the Society for Risk Analysis and is currently editor-in-chief of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) His past activities include member and chairperson of the NIH Toxicology Study Section, EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, the Health Effects Institure Research Committee and numerous National Research Council (NRC), IOM and CDC committees, including serving as the current chair of the IOM/NRC Committee on Effectiveness of National Biosurveillance Systems: BioWatch and the Public Health System. He is currently Executive Director of the National Board of Public Health Examiners and a Board member of the National Urban Air Toxics Research Center.

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So what’s the rush to drill for gas?

A seasoned environmental health professional looks at the Marcellus Shale

August 17th, 2011 – Haven’t we learned anything from our past mistakes?

Public health and the environment have been my life since 1966. I have been a U.S. Public Health Service officer stationed in Los Angeles, our most polluted city; an assistant administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Reagan administration; and the director of an academic environmental health program in New Jersey, arguably our most polluted state.

Before the Marcellus Shale issue, I believed we had learned from past mistakes to approach potential environmental health risks intelligently. But now I’m not so sure.

Let me start by saying I’m in favor of extracting Marcellus Shale gas — but not yet. For reasons that include air quality and global climate change, natural gas is a better energy source than coal. At the risk of offending my environmentalist friends, I don’t believe that conservation measures combined with alternative energy sources will eliminate our need for fossil fuels within the next few decades.

I also agree it is in our national interest to decrease our reliance on fossil fuel imports. The gulf oil commission recently supported a return to drilling in the Gulf of Mexico because if we do not get this oil, Cubans, Venezuela or China will. But unless the Canadians can horizontally fracture under Lake Erie, the gas in the Marcellus Shale is ours for the taking.

The Marcellus Shale’s fixed location and limited amount of gas provides many reasons to go about it thoughtfully. Whenever we begin, we still will have at least the same amount of gas extracted over the same duration of time. In contrast, delaying allows us to prepare for three certainties.

First, there will be surprises. Fracking already has been linked to bromide in water and brominated compounds are potentially highly toxic. Will there be radioactivity or arsenic released into groundwater? Will the emissions of thousands of natural gas sources cause us to exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s ozone standard, thereby requiring pollution controls that limit industrial development?

We are told not to worry about surprises because shale drilling has been going on for many years elsewhere. But we are also told the gas in the Marcellus Shale is now available because of new advances in hydrofracking technology. It can’t be both.

Second, disease occurrences in communities vary both by environmental cause and by chance. It is a statistical certainty that an increase in disease diagnoses — be it pancreatic cancer, autism or whatever — will happen after Marcellus Shale drilling activities begin. When this occurs, journalists will notice, anxiety will rise, property values will fall, industry will be sued and lawyers will profit. The Pennsylvania Department of Health will investigate, but by then it will be harder to determine whether there is truly a cause-and-effect relation.

To avoid these inevitable problems, it is in the best interests of the public and of industry that we now start a comprehensive study of the impact of Marcellus Shale activities on human health.

Third, it is a certainty that the extraction industry will find ways to lessen the extent of environmental and human impact by such means as better recycling of fracking fluids (which they must buy) and limiting the environmental release of natural gas (which is the product that they sell). Let’s give them time to do so and the incentive to do it.

Should we be frightened about fracking chemicals? As a toxicologist, based on what I know now, I see nothing on the list of today’s fracking compounds that alarms me if exposure will truly be minimal. But until I know more about them I wouldn’t want these chemicals in my water supply or the air I breathe. The EPA has embarked on a major study of these chemicals which will be completed late next year. Why can’t we wait?

The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health recently found some drilling companies have more than twice as many environmental violations than drilling sites. Companies should lose their right to drill if they cannot comply with environmental regulations and laws. These regulations are changing in response to the recognized risk of damaging the environment and human health.

The EPA recently proposed standards that would limit air and water pollution by requiring that all companies use the best anti-pollution technology available, Gov. Tom Corbett received numerous recommendations from the state’s Marcellus Shale commission and President Barack Obama’s commission has just released its recommendations. Wouldn’t it make sense to postpone new wells until these protections are in place?

I realize it is not reasonable to turn off wells that are already extracting natural gas. But recognizing that the risk to our health and natural resources increases with every new well, that information and technology is on the way to lower the risk and that the natural gas will not go anywhere, Pennsylvania should join other states, including New York and Maryland, in not drilling new wells for now.

By Bernard D. Goldstein, M.D.

Bernard D. Goldstein, M.D., is a professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and the school’s former dean. He is the former assistant administrator for research and development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and he is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (bdgold@pitt.edu).

Replicated only for posterity. All credit goes to Bernard D. Goldstein, M.D.. and Post-Gazette.com. Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Original article found @http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11229/1167715-109-0.stm?cmpid=newspanel5#ixzz1VOPnws6c