Anti-Drilling/Fossil Fuel

Last week four anti-drilling groups, who also happen to have gobs of money (investor groups), issued an anti-drilling “report” and “scorecard” titled Disclosing the Facts: Transparency and Risk in Hydraulic Fracturing Operations. The so-called “report” supposedly shows drillers, many of them active in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, are not fully disclosing the nebulous “impacts” of fracking on communities near where they drill. The aim of the four organizations issuing the report–As You Sow, Boston Common Asset Management, Green Century Capital Management, and the Investor Environmental Health Network (IEHN)–is to get investors to stop investing in oil and gas companies and instead invest in their companies (i.e. mutual funds) because they back “renewable” and “sustainable” energy. Anyone else see a big, fat conflict of interest here?

Of course mainstream media (like Bloomberg) dutifully and unquestioningly regurgitates the press release and so-called “report” from these anti-drillers as real news. Below is the press release and the “report” itself, in case you care. We bring it to you to show you a glittering example of what charlatan propaganda looks like…
Read More “Eco-Nut Investor Groups Trot Out Faux Report on Fracking “Risks””

As a stuffed replica of Pete Seeger shuffles out onto the stage…wait, no! That really IS Pete Seeger, about 150 years old now (too ornery to die), out there peddling a new master work of artistic quality…OK, it IS Pete Seeger, so the music ain’t all that great. Pete is on stage hawking a new anti-fracking album, called Buy This Fracking Album, that he and some of his anti-fracking buds are cooking up right now. And it’s for a very worthy cause: an attempt to make a boatload of money from a bunch of suckers, er, call attention to the serious issue of fracking.

This calls for a press release! And so Pete & co have issued one (below). We’ve inserted MDN snarky editorial comment a) for your reading enjoyment, and b) to set the record straight and tell the truth about this album and about fracking. Enjoy…
Read More “Buy This Fracking Album – MDN Version”

This is what passes as “journalism” at Gannett. (Specifically with McNewspaper–otherwise known as USA Today.) Interview someone who is ideologically driven and rigid–someone who abjectly hates fossil fuels and works for a benign sounding “institute”–oh, say like the Post Carbon Institute. (What utter folly to name it that. How about the Post Oxygen Institute? Or the Post Hydrogen Institute? Why not pick one of the other low atomic number elements? Why pick on carbon? But we digress…) This so-called expert–who is nothing of the kind–tells USA Today he’s “studied” the drilling issue and has pronounced that fracking for gas and oil is a flash in the pan, a temporary phenomenon. It’ll all be over soon. Can’t be economical much longer. Let’s all move along to “sustainable energy” nirvana now.

Then, just for good measure, sprinkle the story with a picture of two of people protesting fracking–you know, to convey the right impression that hordes of people are against this insane environmental rape of Mother Earth. Here’s the interesting thing: Ever notice the pictures they use of people protesting against fracking are always a shot of people protesting in New York State? Looks to us like it may even be the same 100-200 protesters! Same group, different angles, different events. Why is that, do you think? Could it be there are only a few hundred dedicated, full-time, paid (by groups like the Park Foundation) hippie wannabes people who travel around like Gypsies (or pot smoking Deadheads) doing this kind of protesting? JS–jest sayin’…
Read More “USA Today Picks on Demon Carbon – Says Fracking Can’t Last”

Cornell professor Anthony (Tony) Ingraffea is very talented. Ingraffea is not only an erstwhile stand-up comic (see Cornell Hydraulic Fracturing Expert Headlines First Meeting of New York Residents Against Drilling (NYRAD) in Vestal, NY) and fictional report writer (see Howarth, Ingraffea Shale Gas Study on Global Warming Discredited by U.S. Department of Energy), he’s now added another new skill to his towering intellectual quiver. Tony has learned how to cut & paste in Microsoft Word! Yes, it’s a real resume enhancer.

Our entertaining Cornell prof thought he would get away with cutting and pasting his own previously published “exclusive” editorial for the New York Times by sending it off to flyover country where he didn’t think the hicks would notice. Tony sent essentially the same column to Wyoming previously published in the NYT. However, the hicks noticed…
Read More “Cornell Prof Tony Ingraffea Learns a New Skill: Cut & Paste”