Gas Stock
Inconceivable!
And another offering from the fun movie quote front. I’m still dwelling on the “How many people have to be lying in order for the Gas Industry to be telling the truth?” question. How much longer will the industry continue to insult our intelligence with marketing, spin, and outright lies? I don’t have an answer but I am so grateful to Josh Fox for getting Gasland on HBO. I’ve had so many great conversations with friends about the issue since they saw it. Truly wonderful. Awareness is spreading!!
In other news, I’ve been invited to be a panelist on Penn State Radio’s Sustainability Now program. It’s on 90.7 WKPS TheLion Friday evening at 5:00. I’m most excited about the other bloggers who will be appearing including the sharp pens behind Un-naturalgas.org and Susquehanna River Sentinel! Hope you can listen in. The secret to undermining the industry marketing is our own independent networking.
And in other other news, I’m headed out on an epic, cross-country multi-week business trip that will have me away from the keyboard for a while. I’ll sketch whenever I can, but in the meantime I urge you to visit the great blogs on the blog roll. —> I’ll try to put up some more video collections before I head out, too.
With Liberty and Justice for Some
From Animal Farm: ”Comrades!” he cried. “You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.”
Always remember: ”All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Have a safe and happy 4th and keep the sparklers away from the wellheads.
Ideal Gas Law
I know, I know, they’re the Four Laws of Ecology. Clever, succinct, sound, and widely applicable. Plus there is no Halliburton Loophole! Note that Commoner published them in 1971. That kind of blows my mind a little. Maybe next year we can have a little party to celebrate 40 YEARS of everyone ignoring them! It could actually be a big party, given how many people are ~connected~ to this mess. As in, everyone.
Lamentations
The interwebs have been abuzz over Josh Fox’s Gasland all week long. It’s great! People have a new perspective to consider (that gas drilling doesn’t make for good neighbors) and the more people consider it, the lamer the industry spin seems. I don’t have a good working theory for the actual mechanism by which all that crap is getting into the water. Is it the “frac job” itself? Is it all the spills at the pad? Is it the dribbles from those waste water pipes? Is something causing shallower volumes of gas to migrate? Is it in the geology – something they didn’t map? Or has industry simply not managed to learn how to pour concrete? (That last one was kind of a low-blow, given that concrete is a very tricky thing to engineer, but hey… if you haven’t mastered it, maybe you shouldn’t be drilling like you have.)
There is a formal logical fallacy called post hoc, ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”) which is used to describe the ever tricky “correlation is not causation” problem. This isn’t a problem necessarily for Big Gas’s lawyers because this fallacy is how they win cases in court. ”Prove,” they demand, “that this one action is responsible for that distant outcome.” And unless someone has figured out the exact mechanism by which it happened, the landowner can’t PROVE in a court of law that the drilling did something to the water. It’s simply a co-occurrence, not causation. Unless you have a lot of co-occurrences. And then a pattern develops. And the same type of contaminants keep popping up in the water. Then it becomes much harder to dismiss with a flick of the post hoc wrist. Especially if someone made a nifty documentary about people all over this great land having eerily similar stories. It won’t be long before landowners start turning down the hush “money” (frequently in the form of a full water buffalo) and the non-disclosure agreements so that they can share their co-occurrences, too.
And the next time you run across a plea online to “check out the other side of the story!” or “read how Gasland has been debunked!” ask yourself:
“HOW MANY PEOPLE* HAVE TO BE LYING IN ORDER FOR INDUSTRY SPINMEISTERS TO BE TELLING THE TRUTH??”
* People – as in apple-pie, dyed-in-the-wool, tax-paying, patriotic, hard-working, salt-of-the-Earth, live-and-let-live, give-you-the-shirt-off-their-back, Americans. People like you. People like me.
(Oh, and bonus points for whoever gets the “reference” in the comic…)
The Option of Public Condemnation
All this talk about pipelines. But they’re just so necessary. And like roads, you just can’t have enough of them. But necessary to the pipelines are the super awesome supercharged accessories called compressor stations. Compressor stations work best when they’re right by someone’s house. It’s just a fact. They’re quiet, smell like roses, and are just generally lovely landscape features.
Apparently there aren’t enough people rushing to have pipelines and compressor stations on their land. This is a HUGE problem. Big! So big that one pipeline company is trying to convince authoritays in Susquehanna Co. that they’re actually a public utility. Why bother? Because public utilities get to exercise eminent domain (or to be more precise: the “option of public condemnation”), that’s why.
Once again, many thanks to Gas Wells Are Not Our Friends for scooping this so early.
FUBAR
Such a badge of honor, being fracked up beyond all recognition. Dimock PA was hardly the first (see Silt, Rifle, and other Colorado towns; DISH Texas and other communities above the Barnett; Pavillion and Pinedale Wyoming and other towns in the Jonah field) and surely will not be the last. The question is whose town is next? Who gets to make that “necessary sacrifice” – you or your neighbor… or someone who lives far, far away?
