The Real Reason Environmentalists Hate Fracking

Back on June 15, 2011, I posted a story and asked folk what was the first thing they thought of when they read the story.

The story had to do with fracking and my first thought after reading the article was that the environmentalists were surprised how fast fracking success took off. Caught off-guard, those folks are now doing what they can to kill the industry.

Well, lo and behold, someone else has picked up on that and ran with it.

It comes from HotAir.com: The New York Times Natural Gas Fiasco.

Here's the gist of the article that caught Greg's interest and alerted me to it:

Both quotes suggest Urbina [the author of The New York Times story] had the facts at his fingertips — but deliberately disregarded them. The seeming anti-natural gas agenda this reveals perplexes me, until I consider what Ed wrote just this morning in his defense of hydraulic fracturing, a technique used in the natural gas drilling process.

The problem with fracking isn’t that it’s particularly new or dangerous. The methodology has been in use for decades, and it is as safe as other drilling processes. The real problem is that it could produce relatively cheap hydrocarbon energy for a very long time, and that’s what has environmentalists worried.

So it is: Natural gas just might be the energy solution environmentalists say they want, but actually can’t stand because nothing would put them out of business faster. Forbes blogger Chris Helman words it perfectly:

We would have thought that the Times would be in favor of plentiful, low-cost natural gas. It burns a lot cleaner than coal, and with nuclear off the table for now, gas is poised to fuel U.S. economic growth for more than a generation to come. I can only guess that the problem, as the Times sees it, is that as long as we have all that cheap gas, there’s precious little need for solar panels, windmills and other cornerstones of their much-heralded but slow evolving green jobs revolution.

Forbes, on the other hand, thinks it’s pretty awesome that thanks to drilling ingenuity the U.S. has proven to have one of the world’s biggest and cheapest hoards of clean-burning gas. Now that’s a story.

And to think I posted that very thought about two weeks ago.