Antis Publish Study Revealing How They Manipulate Public Opinion
We shouldn’t be, but we’re stunned. We’ve discovered that anti-drillers are funding studies to discover how best to fool you. What words, phrases, stories and lies will resonate the best, and move low information types, to oppose fossil fuels. They study it and actually publish their findings (crow about it) for all the world to see! We’ve known for a long time that so-called peer reviewed research is nothing more than bought-and-paid-for propaganda (read this recent story in the New York Times: Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says; and this NY Times editorial: Scientists Who Cheat). A new study appearing in the October issue of American Sociological Review looks at how the propaganda in Josh Fox’s fictional movie Gasland, along with social media efforts, tangibly moved the dial in favor of anti-fracking sentiment among those who refuse to think for themselves. The study was originally titled “No Fracking Way!” Media Activism, Discursive Opportunities and Local Opposition against Hydraulic Fracturing in the United States, 2010-2013, but in good propaganda fashion, the authors changed the name, removing “Media Activism” (because that cuts a little too close to the truth) replacing it with “Documentary Film.” They also made the plural “Opportunities” into the singular “Opportunity.” The published title became: “No Fracking Way!” Documentary Film, Discursive Opportunity, and Local Opposition against Hydraulic Fracturing in the United States, 2010-2013. Below we connect the dots to the anti-fossil fuelers who funded the “study”…
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A very old and trite but true saying: Q: How do you know when a politician, like NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is lying? A: When he opens his mouth. Our illustrious man-child governor was in Syracuse yesterday to drop off a bag of money with $50 million, and an impertinent reporter had the gall to ask His Lordship about the secession rally held in Chenango County on Sunday (see 
It is an issue that simply won’t go away. Frankly, we’ve thought (until now) that it was more or less a publicity stunt. Pro-drillers and pro-gun rights residents of New York State have, since Gov. Andrew Cuomo banned fracking last December, called for upstate counties to secede from New York and either form a new state, or join with Pennsylvania. On the surface it may sound silly, but did you know secession has happened in our country three times before? And one of those times was for land that used to be part of New York State? No, we didn’t know that bit of history either. This Sunday, August 30th, a rally will be held in the tiny village of Bainbridge (Chenango County), NY from 1-3 pm for Marcellus/Utica landowners, gun owners and other overtaxed and over-regulated NY residents to demonstrate their support for secession. This is a movement that is gaining momentum. It’s a serious movement. None other than the liberal USA Today files this very serious report…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, located in New York State, released a decision yesterday in a case known as Beardslee v. Inflection Energy, LLC (copy of the decision is embedded below) that may create problems for future shale drilling in New York State–should the existing statewide ban ever be lifted. Yesterday’s decision is good news for landowners in one sense–it officially upholds the right of Tioga County, NY landowners party to the lawsuit to be released from old leases made in pre-Marcellus days when landowners signed leases for $3 per acre. Those leases were signed before the words “Marcellus” or “Utica” meant anything other than municipalities in New York State. (Interesting factoid: both shale plays are named after the NY towns where they were first identified. Further interesting factoid: both Marcellus, NY and Utica, NY banned fracking before the statewide ban was official.) The Second Circuit upheld a previous decision which we first wrote about in 2012 (see 
The gloves are now off and everything is out in the open: President Barack Hussein Obama wants to destroy the oil and gas industry in the United States of America. Yesterday Obama’s preferred tool of destruction, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), released a plan that brings the jackboots of the federal government down on the necks of the industry–forcing them to “reduce” methane emissions by 40-45%. Methane, you may recall, is what drillers actually extract from the ground and sell. Methane is what they get paid for–the very thing they are incentivized to capture so they can sell it. Drillers have reduced their methane emissions–the stuff leaking out around the edges–by at least 40-45% over the past few years. In other words, the industry is already doing what the EPA wants them to do. Which means this action is a blatant attempt at stifling drilling in this country. Let us be crystal clear: This action by the EPA is illegal. This is an outright attempt to regulate the oil and gas industry, contrary to the U.S. Constitution which reserves such regulation to the individual states. Just have a look at the so-called “rule” the EPA has published (all 591 pages of it). It is a top to bottom set of unlegislated regulations that will put all oil an gas drilling in the regulatory hands of the EPA.
As for the good guys, the guys in the white hats who support clean-burning natural gas and fossil fuels, they also weighed in on the EPA’s lawless new methane reduction rule, otherwise known as 40 CFR Part. Here’s what the good guys from ANGA, API, Marcellus Shale Coalition, WVONGA and even what three U.S. Senators had to say…
If you wonder whether or not a new regulation is good or bad, you can always tell by who supports it and who doesn’t. In the case of the EPA and their lawless new methane reduction rule, otherwise known as 40 CFR Part 60, national radical environmental groups like Earthjustice and the Sierra Club, along with regional and local radical groups like the Ohio Environmental Council and the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council, are applauding the action taken by the Obama EPA…
Some more details about the brilliant move by some average farmers in Tioga County, NY who plan to use propane to frack a Utica Shale well, bypassing the existing ban on fracking in New York because the existing ban only disallows high volume water-based fracking…
What could of been a valuable research project by a Stanford University researcher is, instead, just more “fracking maybe/might/could/possibly affect groundwater” headline grabber. Stanford environmental scientist Dr. Rob Jackson, a seasoned researcher, set out to determine at what depths is fracking safe and does not affect groundwater (“The Depths of Hydraulic Fracturing and Accompanying Water Use Across the United States” — abstract below). The press release describing the research attempts to redefine any shale well drilled and fracked at less than one mile down as a “shallow” well. This is an inaccurate characterization. From the release: “The most recent such study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, finds that at least 6,900 oil and gas wells in the U.S. were fracked less than a mile (5,280 feet) from the surface, and at least 2,600 wells were fracked at depths shallower than 3,000 feet, some as shallow as 100 feet. This occurs despite many reports that describe fracking as safe for drinking water only if it occurs at least thousands of feet to a mile underground, according to Jackson.” If a well was drilled at 3,000 feet down, that’s still 2,000-2,500 feet below water aquifers–a quarter of a mile of solid rock between the two! Not to mention that 2,600 wells out of 44,000 wells Dr. Jackson studied is a puny 6% of the total–a very small percentage. In other words, the vast majority of shale wells drilled are a mile or more under the surface. Interestingly, for all of the talk about “shallow” wells and the potential dangers of fracking, Dr. Jackson’s study “has not found evidence that frack water contaminants seep upward to drinking-water aquifers from deep underground”…
This sounds like something out of a Jules Verne novel. You may recall from school that Verne wrote some of the earliest sci-fi adventures ever, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth. In Journey, Verne wrote about strange and mysterious critters that live deep in the earth–in rock caverns. Turns out Verne may not have been so far from the truth after all. And there’s a tie-in with the Marcellus Shale and with fracking. In November West Virginia University and Ohio State University received an $11 million grant by the federal government to study the Marcellus and Utica Shale (see