Josh Fox talking:
in terms of earthquakes, which we do cover in the new film because there’s a huge shale play in California, and in fact there’s a Legacy thousand-acre oil field in the center of Los Angeles, which is being drilled and fracked right on top of the Newport-Inglewood fault line—the earthquake study showed that earthquakes far away, you know, on the other side of the planet, could then trigger bigger earthquakes where they have injection well facilities. So, injection well facilities are used for fracking waste. Fracking, you know, creates an enormous amount of wastewater. When they frack the wells with two to nine million gallons per well of fluid and water, that fluid has to come back up and be disposed of somehow. The industry has a huge problem figuring out how to dispose of it, so they inject it back down into the ground. And what the report says is that fault lines are becoming critically stressed by the process of injection wells. It also says that the fracking itself can cause minor earthquakes.
the oil and gas industry has been attacking the film, the families in the film, the scientists in the film, consistently for the last three years since it came out, and they’re at it again with this new film. It’s extraordinarily disheartening to see that this is their strategy. It’s deny, deny, deny, spread money around, try to influence politicians, spend lots and lots of money in the media to convince Americans that it’s a great idea to drill one to two million new gas wells. Those are the projections. The oil and gas industry has leased more land than the total landmass of California and Florida combined, which means that a lot of those adjacent properties in these 34 states where the drilling campaign is going on are also influenced, so it’s maybe twice that amount of area. It really is shocking that what they’re saying, similar to the way that they attack climate science, that some of these things are a hoax, that they’re not actually true. This is a really blatant attack on the science, on the way that this issue has been reported for the last three-and-a-half years. And they also revealed themselves to be doing some kind of dastardly things in the background without us knowing about it.
Jeremiah Gee Tioga County, Pennsylvania, here explains the situation with his water supply: You know I’ll get a phone call in a few minutes asking why I was up here with a guy with a camera. We were told point blank that the word “freshwater” does not mean what you think it means. Freshwater means fresh to this site. Every bit of water that will be coming here and used in the frack tanks has already been used at a different site.
this is audio that was recorded by a blogger named Texas Sharon, working for Earthworks, who was at an oil and gas industry conference where they were discussing all the bad PR that they were getting and how to counter it. And what they go on to do is explain how they’re using former PSYOPs officers, psychological operations officers, who were newly coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, to write local laws, to develop techniques to divide local landowners. That’s Matt Pitzarella from Range Resources talking about that. Chesapeake then goes on to talk about people who are fighting the gas industry, like landowners, like you just saw, Jeremiah Gee, as insurgents. And one of the PR spokespeople for Anadarko, another huge petroleum company, says that what they should actually do is download the counterinsurgency manual, which is a 300-odd-page book about, you know, how to deal with an insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are terms of war, and it was very, very shocking to see that.
But it goes hand in hand with a strategy that’s very overt in the media, which is to buy—you can’t turn on the TV, except for perhaps this show, where you’re not going to see ads from the natural gas industry. And we’re seeing also editorials and these kinds of things on blog posts seeded to do things to try to discredit the very clear science, and in most cases the science that the industry themselves did. This is following the tobacco industry’s playbook. The tobacco industry for decades sponsored bogus science, went out to try to create doubt in the media as to whether or not the cigarettes were harmful to people. And that strategy was developed by a PR firm called Hill & Knowlton. The America’s Natural Gas Alliance hired the same PR firm in 2009, and we’re seeing that same kind of strategy of creating doubt and of creating a false debate in the media over whether or not this drilling contaminates water.
Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania, had a $900,000 contract to be the chief spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition. At around the same time, we noticed that the Department of Homeland Security, which—of course, Tom Ridge was the first Department of Homeland Security chair—the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security started circulating bulletins to law enforcement that listed anti-fracking organizations as possible ecoterrorists, which had no basis in reality. There had never been anything at all violent. These were people doing democratic organizing and organization. But then it was discovered that the Department of Homeland Security was actually circulating those bulletins directly to the Marcellus Shale Coalition and to other gas industry lobbyists and stakeholders. This was a scandal in Pennsylvania, which ended up with the DHS head resigning. But Tom Ridge and a lot of—three Pennsylvania governors in a row—Tom Ridge, Ed Rendell and now Tom Corbett—have heavy ties to the gas industry and go on to advocate for fracking and drilling without disclosing those ties in the media. It’s a situation where, in a report by the Public Accountability Initiative called “Fracking and the Revolving Door in Pennsylvania,” they describe as having the regulatory agencies and the democracy itself being taken away from the citizens. And that’s really the journey and the question behind this new film. The film is—you know, the first film features a lot of people lighting their water on fire. This is a film about the natural gas industry lighting our democracy on fire.
President Obama advocating for fracking without ever saying the word “fracking,” both domestically, also for export, and around the world in an initiative to promote shale gas and fracking around the world. What’s really disappointing about this is that this is a moment when an American president has come forward and spoken about climate change and exhibited his obvious and earnest desire to take on the problem; however, the emphasis on fracked gas makes this plan entirely the wrong plan. The plan focuses on carbon dioxide, but how we count global warming potential is in carbon dioxide equivalence, and methane, which is leaking out of these sites in very large quantities, is a super greenhouse gas. It’s up to a hundred times more potent than CO2 in the atmosphere, which means if you have more than 1 percent methane leakage, it’s like burning the gas twice. In the field, we’re seeing 7 to 17 percent of total production methane leaking into the atmosphere. Moving from coal to fracked gas doesn’t give you any climate benefit at all. So the plan should be about how we’re moving off of fossil fuels and onto renewable energy, which is what we know can power the planet, as we—with current technology.
this administration has done a lot of meetings with the natural gas industry. We know that. There is, I think, an undue influence of their promotion of themselves on the policy. And what we’re doing right now is asking President Obama, “Please, meet with the families and the scientists and engineers in the new film. Give us an opportunity to make the case, have equal time.” This president’s legacy should not be one of just meeting with the corporations. He should meet with the people who are coming out and are saying—who are emblematic of thousands who are suffering at the hands of this huge drilling campaign. So we’ve submitted those letters to the White House, to the vice president, to the energy secretary, to Valerie Jarrett, and done this in a very public way, appealing to say, “Listen, you can’t go ahead and advocate for fracked gas and try to deal with climate change at the same time. It’s a policy contradiction.”
New York state did something very unusual that other states didn’t do: They used democracy. They did an environmental impact study, and that environmental impact study has comment periods. And New Yorkers flooded those comment sessions. The latest comment review got 204,000 public comments by New Yorkers. This is unprecedented. The last record for pre-fracking issue on an environmental impact study was a thousand comments. So we’ve seen an unprecedented outpouring of people in New York participating democratically, and that has stopped the most powerful industries on the face of the planet. And it’s still not over, of course. But I think people are seeing the citizens of New York and the way the government in New York has handled it to allow citizen participation as an example, and we can only hope that that is something that inspires people around the world to do the same.
– source democracynow.org
Josh Fox, director of Gasland Part II, which premiered on HBO earlier this week. His previous documentary, Gasland, was nominated for an Academy Award.