http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/6/no-fracking-way-forward/print/#.T_oT5ZY_TKE.email
Greenies turn against natural gas in their war on cheap energy
American oil is enjoying a renaissance few would have predicted even a decade ago. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates nearly half the crude oil we consume will be produced at home within a mere eight years. Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm, discoverer of the Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota, goes further and says the United States can produce enough oil to replace OPEC.
What this rosy scenario overlooks is that the environmental movement’s sights increasingly will be set on outlawing – or, at minimum, strangling via regulations – the “fracking” techniques that make it possible to access much of this oil.
Ironically, this was not a battle of choice for U.S. Big Green organizations. Fracking also is responsible for the natural-gas revolution, and it was only yesterday that the major environmental outfits were touting natural gas, which produces half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal, as the bridge to a renewable energy future. Chesapeake Energy, this country’s second-largest natural-gas producer, kick-started the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal anti-coal campaign with $26 million in donations. (Such shortsightedness is typical of American corporations – seeking to gain advantage over rivals in the short term, they overlook the probability that their strange bedfellows will soon turn on them.) As recently as 2010, leaders of the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) were joining with heads of the natural-gas industry in a Critical Path Energy Summit in Aspen, Colo., in recognition, so they said, “that the only way to unleash the economic, social and environmental benefits of natural gas [is] to work much more closely together.”
But the pressures have been mounting on the U.S. green complex. The same year as the Critical Path Energy Summit, the Sierra Club’s Executive Director Michael Brune says he walked away from an additional $30 million offered by Chesapeake. Part of the pressure comes from the grass roots, which have been fired up in a way unseen since the heady days of the anti-nuclear-energy movement, when outfits like the Clamshell, Palmetto, Shad and Bailly alliances manned the barricades. (Before popular passions were unleashed, both Audubon and the Sierra Club supported nuclear energy for years.) In August 2011, 68 groups, with names like Climate Action Alliance of the Valley, Free the Planet, Gas Truth of Central Pennsylvania and Kids for Saving Earth sent a letter to President Obama urging him to “employ any legal means to put a halt to hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’).” The following month, hundreds of protesters bore down on a shale gas convention in Philadelphia with signs like “Fracking Poisons Air and Water; Fight Back Now,” claiming people were falling ill, cattle were dying and pets were losing their hair. In June, more than 100 groups, along with the usual assortment of celebrities, attacked Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to permit fracking (now under a moratorium) in parts of New York state.
Within the Sierra Club, its Atlantic chapter has been the most vociferous, calling the club’s fracking policy “completely inadequate.”The policy has been to allow chapters to oppose fracking only on a project-by-project basis. In a sign of shifting sentiment within the club, at the 2011 national meeting, the Atlantic chapter’s resolution that would allow chapters to advocate for a total fracking ban passed by a vote of 34-20. (It was referred to committee.)
