CDOG  Responds to NPR’s Un-Natural Gas Propaganda Campaign

In September, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a 3 day series on the issue of extracting natural gas from stone, the content of which suggested NPR is now just another Naturalgas Propaganda Resource. Below are links to the 3 days of NPR’s un-natural gas promotion, with a CDOG response below each link.

Link to Day 1, of NPR’s petro dollared propaganda campaign:
09/22/2009 Rediscovering Natural Gas by Hitting Rock Bottom
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113043935

CDOG Response to Day 1:
In your 09/22/09 Morning Edition story, Rediscovering Natural Gas by Hitting Rock Bottom, NPR framed the issue as gas drillers being nice small independent entrepreneurs struggling against an energy market dominated by big oil and big coal. That’s false. Those little gas drilling wildcatters are controlled by big oil and gas corporations, which use them to limit liabilities (evade deep pocketed corporation responsibility for purposeful pollution). The not so small “independent” Nornew, positioning itself over the Marcellus shale here in New York, is actually a subsidiary of the international O&G corporation Norse Energy, based in Norway.

Your report focused upon increased estimates of possible gas quantities, without providing evidence of the quality deficits, like the water wells now being destroyed in Pennsylvania by this form of drilling.

The only downside to ripping remnants of gas from stone that the NPR reporter reported was that gas prices are too low, making it difficult for the optimistic “energy independence” drillers to make a profit from their [money] expensive operations. The National Propaganda Radio reporter didn’t report on any of the costs to the public that the drillers externalize. To be truly FOXworthy fair and balanced there was a brief reference to “many environmentalists” after which only an institutionalized, industrialized “environmentalist” position was offered.

Unconventional horizontal hydrofracturing drilling, to extract natural gas from low-permeable stone formations, is environmentally unsound. The Halliburton developed process focused upon solving the industry’s extraction problem… with absolutely no concern for the environmental costs to others, from the industry’s use of it.

The scale of the drilling (number of wells and hydrofractures required), that’s necessary to extract those myriad remnants of gas so tightly bound up within the stone, will over time have a catastrophic cumulative negative environmental and human health impact… polluting air, ground, and water in this desperate process of extraction intended to maintain our fossil fuel dependancy.

All of the enormous quantity of clean fresh water used in the hydrofracture process is permanently removed from the natural water cycle, because the chemicals added to it cannot be fully removed to change the toxic waste, which the process creates, back into the safe drinking water it was before the drillers abused it.

The massive amount of toxic waste created by the drillers, which they either do not leave in the hole, or (Love Canal) bury at the site, is taken to municipal sewage waste treatment plants, through which the chemicals then pass on to be dumped into our rivers… and eventually come out of our faucets.

Link to Day 2, of NPR’s petro dollared propaganda campaign:
09/23/2009 Who’s Looking At Natural Gas Now? Big Oil
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113080237

CDOG Response to Day 2:
The nice “small independent company” that developed the new production techniques to rip the last remnants of natural gas from stone, having the small guy innovation which NPR falsely claims beat BIG oil, was… Halliburton!

If NPR considers Halliburton to be a “mom-and-pop” operation, then what does it consider to be a beastly overlarge corporation?

Those little guy operators that NPR romantically astroturfed are the private contractor gas driller domestic equivalents, here at home, of what Blackwater is where fossil fuels can be found elsewhere.

National Propaganda Radio’s reporting implies that the remnants of natural gas, which the myriad tentacled energy industry has in recent years been so hazardously ripping from the earth, are ENORMOUS; but then NPR claims they’ve been deposits too small scale to have yet attracted large corporations. If the remnant areas were large corporation considered so profit inconsequential, then why has the Millennium Pipeline been built to and now through those areas? Would the vast matrix of gas drilling rigs and pads, packed close together covering the whole landscape from the Catskills for 350 miles or more all the way across the broad breadth of New York State to Lake Erie, which will be necessary for the industry to successfully unconventionally extract all that natural gas trapped down there too tightly within non-porous stone… be small scale?

NPR cloaks the socially irresponsible decisions of individual landowners in American Dream apparel, romanticizing those who place their communities in long-term nightmare jeopardy to personally short-term profit themselves. Is inviting a dangerous marauding invading occupier into your neighborhood a good neighborly thing to do? Is the energy industry’s economic draft persuading farmers to site chemical toxic waste production facilities on their farms the way a sane society would provide farmers an adequate income? Is embracing toxic waste production the way any sane society would provide farmers their only ability to have the healthcare they’ll need when the extraction chemicals used produce the effects they cause?

Link to Day 3, of NPR’s petro dollared propaganda campaign:
09/24/2009 With Little Clout, Natural Gas Lobby Strikes Out
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113138252

CDOG Response to Day 3:
By Day 3, NPR’s petro dollared propaganda campaign has become more subtle, providing some seemingly innocuous banter at the end, to reluctantly acknowledge the existence of some environmental “concern” regarding the type of drilling required to get the last remnants of gas from rocks that couldn’t be gotten before.

That ripping of gas from stone with the Halliburton hydrofracking process is not something that “might cause some contamination.” It has in the past; it does now; and it will whenever and wherever it is used, regardless of how tight, or tighter the un-enforced regulations are typed upon paper. The hydrofracturing process is the underground equivalent of mountaintop removal. Both of those extraction procedures have devastating environmental impacts, with mountaintop removal’s just being more readily apparent, while hydrofracture of low to non-permeable tight-gas bearing rock is insidious… like the cancers that it produces.

Being corporate media, when NPR turned its attention to the “political reality” it too subtly sporting announcer focused upon the gas lobby not having as much game as the coal lobby. The Waxman-Markey Bill is the product of industry bribery, with the biggest bidding bribers being rewarded. Yes, like a losing coach would, former [in the pocket of the gas industry] Colorado Senator Tim Worth “chewed out” the gas industry players… for being too cleaner than coal, when bribing Congress.

The gas industry is not the energy constituency with “the most to gain and the most to offer.” No! Those with the most to gain are we, The People, and those with the most to offer are the other environmentalists, who urge us to focus on serious conservation first, and rapid deployment of pervasive alternative renewable energy solutions, with the relocalization of energy production being necessary to bring our carbon footprints down to a size we can survive in.

National Propaganda Radio is still maintaining the false dichotomy of needing to choose gas or coal, repeating gas industry favorable claims of “some environmentalists” with those “some” being the institutionalized industrialized “environmentalists” who claim these last remnants of gas, which are so environmentally damaging to extract, are needed as a bridge-fuel to transition away from coal.

However, those “environmentalists” have taken the wrong exit, onto a bridge to nowhere. Gas from low to non-permeable stone is not a bridge to “transition” away from fossil fuels, but rather a desperate means to maintain the energy industry’s profits from our fossil fuel addiction dependence.

This nation has often displayed how quick and vigorously it can exert huge human energy devoted to the murder and mayhem of wars purposefully designed to government spend enormous amounts of money earned by working people to provide obscene profits to the most ruthless few. We would not need to choose only between dirty coal that won’t become clean, and the remnants of gas that’s so dirty when extracted, if we as a nation treated climate change as a problem of truly existential graveness, which it is.

What would some other environmentalists have to say?

We should stop spending trillions of dollars to fight wars over oil resources that are being used up by those wars fought over them. We should claw back the trillion dollars stolen by banksters. We should exert the same highly concerted human energy and ample money distribution, normally provided by this society only when engaged in global war, and direct that enormous effort and money into providing solutions for global survival… and make that transition from fossil fuel dependence to renewable energy independence be completed as fast as possible.

This nation, with the capacity to exterminate all life upon the planet with just a 20 minute war, surely has the capacity — if it can find the will — to make our planet sustainable in the years that is needed to be done, rather than waiting decades until it’s too late… and then can’t be done.

David J. Cyr

Tags: Natural Gas Alliance, NPR