Fifty years or so after coffee became popular in Sweden, King Gustav III decided to take extreme action against this menace to the public health. In 1746, the monarch issued a royal edict warning citizens of the obvious dangers of this known poison. First he heavily taxed coffee, then he banned it outright. People kept drinking it anyway.
To turn the public against the caffeine threat once and for all, he ordered up an experiment involving two identical twins, both of them condemned prisoners. One would be forced to drink three pots of tea a day; the other, three pots of coffee. Two doctors were assigned to supervise. One doctor died. The other doctor died. Poor King Gustav himself was assassinated. At length the tea drinker died, at age 83. The coffee drinker? He survived them all. The coffee ban kept getting renewed anyway, until the 1820s.
Fracking looks more and more like the coffee of the 21st century.
Everyone knows that hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas from shale deposits far beneath’s the earth’s surface is evil. It’s poisoning the water supply, it’s killing the cattle and it’s making cancer rates spike.
Except no one can show that any of these claims are true. When a study comes up negative, though, it leads only to . . . more studies. Because “We can’t find anything wrong with it” can’t be the right answer.
Thanks to Gov. Gustav III — er, I mean Gov. Cuomo II — the moratorium placed on fracking in New York state in 2008 remains in effect. Other US areas have halted fracking as well, while study after study concludes the process is safe. The EPA. The state environmental regulators.
Meanwhile, cheap, abundant, relatively clean and job-creating energy sloshes around in an ocean right beneath our feet — there is enough domestic gas to power the US for 110 years — as the Saudi sheiks and Vladimir Putin laugh at us. The Department of Energy has estimated that if the transportation sector switched to natural gas, we could reduce carbon-monoxide emissions by at least 90%, carbon-dioxide emissions by 25% and nitrogen-oxide emissions by perhaps 60%. Even Mayor Bloomberg has come out in support of fracking. Which means it must be less dangerous than trans fats.
Yet all you really need to know about how the game has changed for energy issues is these two words: “secret report.”
Remember when “secret report” led you to a story about some nefarious oilmen who had successfully covered up all of their toxic misdeeds, all the seagulls and trout their greed had killed? Last week, we learned of a “secret report” into fracking that was produced by the state of New York’s Health Department and somehow kept under wraps for a year before it leaked out. The secret was: Fracking is safe.
“Shh!” went the bureaucrats. Don’t let anyone find out!
Government officials rushed to the microphones to put the most horrifying spin they could on this good news. Department of Environmental Conservation spokeswoman Emily DeSantis said the document “does not reflect final DEC policy.” Exactly. It isn’t DEC policy because . . . the DEC hasn’t accepted it yet. It’s like Donald Trump saying, “Barack Obama’s birth certificate is not valid because it is my policy not to validate it.”
Gov. Cuomo’s officials called the report outdated. Well, yes, after they hid it for a year, it grew a year older. What material facts have changed lately about fracking, which has been conducted in the US for 60 years?
Cuomo’s administration recalls the scene in “Flight” where the slick lawyer, played by Don Cheadle, tells the boozehound pilot Denzel Washington that his blood was tested while he was half-dead after crashing his plane and the meter reading came up somewhere between “Smirnoff” and “Everclear.” But don’t worry, Cheadle says: He obtained a court order to have those (entirely accurate) results thrown out — because the blood-testing equipment hadn’t been recalibrated in a couple of years.
The pilot’s blood in that movie could have been lit with a match — in much the same way tap water gets set on fire in Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary “Gasland.” Propaganda doesn’t get any better than this film. Flaming faucets — what else do you need to know?
Most celebrities may not be very interested in reading anything but scripts, but they do watch movies. So after “Gasland,” suddenly stars from Beverly Hills and Manhattan (Lady Gaga, Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Olivia Wilde, Mark Ruffalo) began telling rural Americans in places like western New York and Pennsylvania to say no to fracking.
Matt Damon loved “Gasland” so much he reworked its themes (along with fellow Highly Concerned Actor John Krasinski, based on a story by Conscience of His Generation Dave Eggers) into a script for a somber fiction film, “Promised Land,” which appeared in theaters nationwide last week (and, having massively flopped, will probably be gone by next week).
‘Gasland” and “Promised Land,” with all of their media hype and the halo of Oscar-approved talent, were embarrassed this week by the release of a low-budget pro-fracking documentary, “FrackNation,” by Irish journalist Phelim McAleer. (It’s playing at the Quad Cinemas in New York City this week and will air on the obscure cable channel AXS TV on Jan. 22.)
McAleer applies a match of reason to “Gasland” that makes it explode. He does so by using Fox’s own tactics against him. For instance, McAleer approaches Fox at a public event to ask for a comment. Fox slips away, hides in the crowd and asks security to snag McAleer’s camera. If Fox has the truth on his side, why doesn’t he come out and win the argument?
In the town of Dimock, Pennsylvania, which Fox portrays as victimized by fracking, McAleer interviews Craig and Julie Sautner, a couple brandishing jugs of filthy water of uncertain provenance. They sued a fracking outfit for contaminating their well. McAleer films Craig Sautner making the absurd claim that there is “weapons-grade” uranium in his drinking water (highly enriched weapons-grade uranium doesn’t exist in nature, which is why you need all that high-tech equipment to make it).
Then he asks Sautner to turn on his tap, which produces clean water. When McAleer comes back later in the movie, Julie Sautner threatens to sue him for using the video of Craig, tells him she is armed and threatens to sic the NRDC on him (the Natural Resources Defense Council is a big-bucks lobbying outfit that can afford much fancier lawyers than McAleer, a freelance journalist).
McAleer, undeterred, instead uses the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a hilarious video of Craig and Julie freaking out because they’ve just learned from EPA officials, after extensive testing, that their water is . . . safe. (The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said the same thing.) The freaking has been overruled, so Dimock can go back to fracking.
Who’s against fracking? McAleer turns up a surprise environmentalist — Vladimir Putin. A Financial Times journalist tells McAleer he was present when the normally phlegmatic Putin delivered an impassioned rant worthy of Al Gore about how Europe and the US will face horrific consequences from fracking — whose chief danger from his point of view is the threat it poses to his natural-gas industry.
If you don’t believe “FrackNation,” just Google “Groundtruthing Gasland.” That brings up a lengthy, devastating takedown of virtually every scary claim in “Gasland.” The flaming faucet had nothing to do with fracking, and as McAleer points out in his film, flammable methane in water (which isn’t harmful to drink anyway) is a phenomenon so old that George Washington came across it in 1783, when he lit the air above the Millstone River in New Jersey on fire.
Ah, you say, but who wrote the article on “Groundtruthing ‘Gasland’ ”? A Houston gas billionaire? Rush Limbaugh? Dick Cheney? No, it appeared on the site of The New York Times. The Times is not exactly pro-fracking: In 2011 it published a two-part series of front-page stories that attacked fracking and the natural-gas industry on business rather than environmental grounds, raising the specter of an Enron-style scandal. The Times’ then-ombudsman issued an extraordinary two-part rebuke to the articles, questioning their neutrality and the quality of their sourcing (an intern was described as an “official”).
Is fracking 100% guaranteed clean and safe? No. In Bradford County, Pa., improperly cemented boreholes (not the fracking process itself) used to place drills that carry out fracking led to pockets of methane seeping into the water supplies of 16 families, which led to a $1 million fine. There have been surface spills, such as an 8,000-gallon leak of fracking fluid (which contains small amounts of a number of chemicals) in Dimock. What to do with this waste waster is a problem. (In Texas, they inject it back underground.)
But as Popular Mechanics writes, “The idea stressed by fracking critics that deep-injected fluids will migrate into groundwater is mostly false. Basic geology prevents such contamination from starting below ground.”
Fracking generally takes place thousands of feet below the water table, so it’s highly unlikely it could affect aquifers. Still, the industry and regulators must keep a close watch on the few locales where fracking happens at a much shallower level, such as in Pavilion, Wyoming (pop. 230), where EPA investigators are trying to figure out whether fracking chemicals got into groundwater.
Damon’s film “Promised Land” pictures rural Americans being tempted by fracking only because they’re getting wiped out by evil global economic forces. But market changes aren’t new, or there would still be lots of blacksmiths and mill workers out there. Aren’t the costs and benefits for the people who live above the Marcellus Shale to decide? We can’t stop the economy from changing, so we need to adapt. If showbiz personalities keep using their environmental piety to block pipelines in the Heartland, drilling in Alaska and fracking everywhere, pretty soon they won’t have anyone to sell movie tickets to.
What fuel source comes with zero risk and zero pollution? Oil? Coal? Maybe solar and wind will power our country someday, but that day is far in the future. Neither source is cost-effective at the moment (which is why both are cashing huge checks from you, the taxpayer) and both create significant environmental hazards.
Solar panels, as McAleer’s film mentions, use rare-earth metals (an area in which China enjoys a near monopoly) that require environmental destruction to extract. Windmills, because of the intermittent nature of wind power, must be backed up with constantly running power plants anyway, plus they kill birds by the thousand and create a major noise problem for anyone living nearby.
Fracking is as good as it gets when it comes to energy production. It’s more than that: It’s a near-miracle. But environmentalism, that noble project of Teddy Roosevelt, has morphed into an unshakable religious faith that fossil fuels are the devil’s playthings. Trying to convince Sean Lennon, Matt Damon or Lady Gaga that fracking is safe is like trying to convince the Salem Puritans of 1620 that their crops weren’t ruined by witchcraft.
But then again, three months ago MSN.com published this (misleading) headline: “Too Much Coffee Linked to Blindness.” Maybe we should put a moratorium on our morning joe while we study it for another 300 years. Just to be safe.
kyle.smith@nypost.com