The Republican Brain

by is Mooney

  212 one sweeping book of bad right-wing history Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Press, 2004.

  213 “not as analysis but as catechism” David Greenberg, “History for Dummies,” Slate, March 11, 2005. Available online at http://www.slate.com/id/2114713/.

  213 David Barton For one essay on the misinformation that has been sown by Barton see Rob Boston, “David Barton: Master of Myth and Misinformation,” June 1996, http://www.publiceye.org/ifas/fw/9606/barton.html.

  214 God told him to start working David Barton, America: To Pray? Or Not to Pray? 5th Edition, 2nd Printing. Aledo, Texas: WallBuilder Press, February 1995.

  214 Jefferson set aside land For a debunking of these claims, see Chris Rodda, Liars for Jesus, Volume I, available online at http://www.liarsforjesus.com/downloads/LFJ_FINAL.pdf. Quotation from p. xiv.

  214 Treaty of Tripoli For the text of the Treaty of Tripoli, see the Avalon Project at Yale Law School: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp.

  214 Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists, January 1, 1802. Available online at http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html.

  215 “makes sure that Christian principles will always stay in government” The documentation of Barton making this claim about Jefferson’s letter is in Nate Blakeslee, “King of the Christocrats,” Texas Monthly, September, 2006.

  215 “men of little faith” Cecelia M. Kenyon, “Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Jan., 1955), pp. 3–43.

  215 “they weren’t all going to fit one book” Chris Rodda, Liars for Jesus, Volume I, available online at http://www.liarsforjesus.com/downloads/LFJ_FINAL.pdf. Quotation from p. xiv.

  Chapter Twelve

  What the Frack Is True?

  If you wanted to specially design a political controversy that would make liberals—and environmentalists—emotional and outraged, you could hardly have done better than the fight over the controversial gas drilling technique known as “fracking.”

  Imagine receiving a blast email from your trusted environmental group on this subject. It’s likely to contain claims like these:

  Fracking is infusing chemicals and toxins into a public resource—our drinking water—and endangering our health.

  We don’t even know what those chemicals are in many cases. The big gas and drilling companies—who are reaping huge profits off this technology—don’t have to tell us.

  One of those companies is the notorious Halliburton, which originally invented fracking to begin with.

  How are they getting away with this? Former vice president Dick Cheney, who was Halliburton’s CEO before he was in the White House, slipped a little known piece of legislation into the 2005 energy bill—the so-called “Halliburton loophole”—to protect fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

  Reading this, liberal that you are, you’re likely to be pretty disturbed and alarmed. You may grow very engaged in the issue, and become very emotional about it.

  Why is that? Liberals and environmentalists, as we’ve seen, tend to be motivated by communitarian and egalitarian values. Egalitarians don’t want the powerful (e.g., corporations like Halliburton) to have more advantages or privileges than the less powerful—the “people.” Communitarians, meanwhile, believe that societies and governments should protect their most vulnerable members—and indeed, all citizens—against harm and injurious outcomes, as would surely result from the pollution of drinking water supplies. Rather than just letting the free market rip, they think we’re all in it together.

  No wonder, then, that for liberals, fracking pushes all the right buttons. It sure sounds like a case of corporations and special interests running roughshod over regulatory constraint, the public interest, and the little guy.

  What happens, then, if some of these liberal impulses happen to be misguided—or if some of the charges against fracking don’t shake out, or aren’t well supported? Shouldn’t we expect liberals to have rapid-fire emotional reactions too, as well as rapid-fire moral intuitions that powerfully guide their thinking? And shouldn’t these lead them astray, cause them to twist the facts, and perhaps even lead them to generate misinformation and argue back to reinforce their beliefs about the badness (or even evilness) of fracking?

  Well, let me tell you a little story about that. Let me tell you what happened when this liberal was called on to investigate fracking—and whether the claims about it were true—in a feature story for Scientific American.

  I started where anybody would start. I watched the Oscar nominated 2010 documentary Gasland, by Josh Fox, and saw those classic scenes of people lighting their taps on fire after gas companies had moved into the neighborhood and started drilling. I thus began from the assumption, tacit at least, that fracking was indeed responsible for these cases of water contamination, and that the gas industry was trying to whitewash things—just as big corporations have done in other cases, like tobacco, acid rain, and global warming.

  And I was going to find the science prove it.

  But it didn’t turn out that way, because not all of the science was there to be found. Industry certainly wasn’t innocent; but it also didn’t appear guilty in the way that many environmentalists seem to assume. So let me tell you what I learned, and what it means for our political battles over facts.

  First the basics: Fracking, or more precisely “hydraulic fracturing,” has been used in conventional-style wells since the late 1940s. When a vertical well hits a geologic formation that’s being targeted for its hydrocarbon resources (oil, gas, and so on), the drill is removed. Then—in gas drilling, anyway—chemically treated water and sand are blasted down the wellbore at high pressure to crack open the rock and liberate methane, or natural gas, which then rises back up the pipe.

  The fracking technique is thus hardly new. But only recently has it been combined with a technology called directional or horizontal drilling—the ability to turn a downward-plodding drill bit as much as 90 degrees and continue drilling within the targeted geologic layer, parallel to the ground surface, for thousands of additional feet. You can then frack the entire horizontal length, and the result has been a veritable Gas Rush. Once sequestered layers of methane-rich shale can suddenly have their resources harvested in a cost-effective way. The U.S. is estimated to have 827 trillion cubic feet of this “unconventional” shale gas within reach—enough to last for decades.

  The chief hurdle is that unlike the fracking of traditional, vertical wells, horizontal fracking, because of the distances involved, requires a staggering two to four million gallons of water for a single well, as well as 15,000 to 60,000 gallons of chemicals. Huge ponds or tanks are also needed to store the “flowback water” that comes back up the hole after wells have been fracked. Up to 75 percent of what’s blasted down returns again, laden not only with a cocktail of chemicals—used to help the fracking fluid flow, to protect the pipe and kill bacteria, and for many other purposes—but often with radioactive materials and salts from the underground layers. This toxic water must be stored onsite and later transported to treatment plants or reused.

  All of this poses clear hazards, and can result in accidents. “This is not a risk-free industry,” explains Terry Engelder, a hydraulic fracturing expert at Pennsylvania State University who has generally been a proponent of the process, but has occasionally criticized companies involved. In Pennsylvania, household taps have gone foul or have even been lit on fire, and companies have been cited and fined. Most recently, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection fined Chesapeake Energy more than $1 million for contaminating 16 families’ water wells with methane as a result of improper drilling practices.

  But here’s the thing. These kinds of impacts (spills, drilling snafus, and so on) can really only be blamed on “fracking” if the term refers to the whole industrial pr
ocess. But that won’t necessarily work if “fracking” simply means the underground water blast that fractures the rock after the drilling is done (as industry contends). And this semantic matter has very real consequences, since many environmentalists are calling for a “ban” on fracking. They’ve made it sound like the root of the problem.

  Is fracking really responsible for the injuries often blamed on it? To show as much, you have to examine the alleged threat that is simultaneously the most publicized, and yet the most murky—the idea that water blasts deep underground can directly contaminate our drinking water, by creating unexpected pathways for gas or liquid to travel vertically between the deep shale layers and shallow groundwater reserves. And that turns out to be a much tougher case to make.

  It’s not that gas companies haven’t polluted water supplies. They clearly have—and deserve much of the anger directed at them. But in the cases where they’ve done so, there often appears to be much more mundane cause than fracking—like, for instance, drilling the hole in the ground in the first place.

  On the way down, any well has to pass through the near-surface layers that contain groundwater, and it could also pass through unknown pockets of gas. Drillers fill the gap between the gas pipe and the wall of the hole with cement so that buoyant gas cannot rise up along the outside of the pipe and possibly seep into groundwater. A steel casing failure might also allow the chemical-filled flowback water, propelled by the pressure released when the shale is cracked, to leak out.

  Cementing is the obvious “weak link,” according to Anthony Gorody, a hydrogeologist and consultant to gas companies who has been a prominent defender of fracking. Other scientists emphatically agree. “If you do a poor job of installing the well casing, you potentially open a pathway for the stuff to flow out,” explains ecologist and water resource expert Robert B. Jackson of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Although many regulations govern well cementing and although industry has strived to improve its practices, the problem may not be fully fixable. “A significant percentage of cement jobs will fail,” says Anthony Ingraffea, an engineering professor and fracking expert at Cornell University. “It will always be that way. It just goes with the territory.”

  So wait a minute—does that mean liberals are wrong? Is fracking innocent, and the problem just cementing and other mistakes happening at the surface, rather than at depth?

  The best answer I can come up with—a typically spineless liberal one, I confess—is “it looks that way, at the moment though there may be exceptions and more research would help add clarity here.” I’m forced to take this stand because when I tried to figure out how fracking could directly pollute groundwater, and whether this was a risk that deserved to be taken seriously, I encountered many speculations and possibilities but no systematic evidence of this happening regularly. Meanwhile, I also learned there are a lot of reasons to think the chances of it are probably pretty small.

  In order for fracking—which is often occurring a mile or more beneath the surface—to contaminate shallow groundwater, there would have to be a pathway, a geologic “communication,” allowing liquids and gas to travel vertically. But even then, such movement wouldn’t be assured. For as Penn State’s Terry Engelder explains, while natural gas is buoyant and will rise vertically (like air bubbles when you blow them at the bottom of a swimming pool), that’s not true of fracking fluid. “Water doesn’t travel uphill,” Engelder explains.

  In fact, the study that best documents the clear risks that drilling poses to groundwater also seems to absolve fracking itself. It’s a 2011 paper on “gas migration” by Robert Jackson and his colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The scientists analyzed samples from 60 private drinking-water wells overlying the Marcellus Shale in northeastern Pennsylvania and the Utica Shale in upstate New York. Methane existed in 51 of the 60 wells, but wells closer to drilling sites contained considerably more of it. Chemical analyses suggested that much of this methane was of deep, thermogenic origins rather than being “biogenic,” or originating from microbes nearer the surface. None of the samples contained fracking fluids, however, or salty brines consistent with deep shale layers.

  Jackson therefore thinks the likeliest cause of the contamination was faulty cementing and casing of wells. He notes another possibility: fracking may create at least some cracks that extend upward in the rock beyond the shale layer itself. If so, those cracks could link up with other preexisting fissures or openings, allowing gas to travel farther upward. Northeastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York are “riddled with old abandoned wells,” Jackson observes. “And decades ago people didn’t case wells, and they didn’t plug wells when they were finished. Imagine this Swiss cheese of boreholes going down thousands of feet—we don’t know where they are.”

  That’s an important point: If hydraulic fractures could connect with preexisting fissures or old wells, the gas and chemicals could clearly pose a groundwater risk. And fracking “out of zone” can certainly happen. Kevin Fisher, an engineer who works for Pinnacle, a Halliburton service firm, examined thousands of fractures in horizontal wells in the Barnett and Marcellus Shale formations, using microseismic monitoring equipment to measure their extent. Fisher found that the most extreme fractures in the Marcellus Shale were nearly 2,000 feet in vertical length. That still leaves a buffer, “a very good physical separation between hydraulic fracture tops and water aquifers,” according to Fisher. But you can also read the evidence in a more worried way: After all, the farther the fractures extend the more preexisting pathways they could encounter.

  No one is saying, then, that fracking has never directly polluted an aquifer. In fact, there are several alleged cases of this actually occurring—one in 1984, in West Virginia (long before the current Gas Rush), and another in Wyoming that emerged as this book went to press. At the same time, however, this hardly seems the most likely route to contamination.

  When you consider the weight of the evidence, then, it seems likely that most of the cases of water contamination that get blamed on fracking are actually the result of poor surface drilling practices—well cementing and casing—as well as leaking containment structures and poor disposal practices for flowback water. These are, after all, precisely the things that companies have been repeatedly cited for. The idea that fluids are regularly traveling vertically through what is sometimes over a mile of rock, is more implausible.

  To be sure, no one can rule out that it may occur in some minority of cases. That possibility surely ought to be studied further. For the moment, though, the evidence above suggests that those liberals and environmentalists who position themselves as anti-fracking are either unaware of the nuances of the issue or, if they are aware, exploiting a semantic ambiguity. They’re really opposed to reckless and inadequately regulated unconventional gas drilling—the entire Gas Rush—but not to a technology that, in and of itself, may be one of the least risky parts of the whole process.

  So why not just say as much? Well, as the fracking fight goes on, becomes more familiar, and garners more attention, that’s precisely what is starting to happen.

  My colleagues at DeSmogBlog.com, a site dedicated to tracking misinformation about global warming, are very critical of gas drilling in general. While we do not always agree, it is notable that their chief report on this subject does not treat deep underground fracking as the key problem—rather, it lists an array of problems, such as poor drilling and casing practices, and indicts the industrial process of “unconventional gas drilling” as a whole.

  Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, acknowledged that in 2011 there were no known cases of fracking directly polluting groundwater (as of that time). In the meantime, the agency has launched a comprehensive study of fracking to make sure of this.

  Not waiting for the EPA, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation has already weighed the science and come to the same basic conclusion: that the most publicized threat
from unconventional gas drilling is actually fairly unlikely. The department is moving forward on allowing fracking in New York State—with a bevy of new regulations to address the causes of concern that have arisen in other states. But the department wants to address actual risks, not hypothetical ones that seem unlikely to manifest themselves.

  On fracking, then, the nuanced position, the deliberatively complex one, would run something like this:

  While there are certainly risks (and inadequately regulated companies have made a lot of careless mistakes in Pennsylvania and other states) natural gas is still a better fuel than oil or coal if you’re worried about greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, fracking itself is likely not the main source of groundwater contamination—it’s doubtful that fractures a mile beneath the surface will connect back up to groundwater—so most instances of contamination are probably the result of shoddy well construction at the surface, surface spills of flowback water, and cutting corners. Therefore, natural gas and drilling companies need to be more tightly regulated, so that safe drilling can continue—even as more scientific research continues so that we can more precisely delineate all the risks involved.

  Not exactly a troop-rallying message, perhaps; and not what you’re going to get in an email from most environmental groups. But this nevertheless strikes me as a proper adjustment of one’s views to the current reality of the situation. And it’s a position increasingly being taken by mainstream liberals, Democrats, and environmentalists—and the Obama administration—because it is a position that science and the facts allow them to take.

  For the most part, these liberals won’t lose sleep if the most prominent charge against fracking doesn’t pan out. There are other charges to be reckoned with, and an industry that still has to be better regulated—although not shut down entirely.