Aiming for the maximum

In what can only be described as a confluence of terrible news, catastrophically strong Hurricane Florence is now taking direct aim at North Carolina at the same time as the Trump administration has announced its plans to roll back Obama-era methane emission standards.  The reasons for this are the same as the reasons they've done every other damnfool thing they've done; (1) it benefits Trump's corporate sponsors in the petroleum industry, and (2) it allows him to check off another thing that Obama accomplished that he's undone.  Methane is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases known, having a heat-trapping capacity over seventy times higher than carbon dioxide's.

Some methane does occur naturally from decomposition.  This is why thawing of the Arctic permafrost is a grave concern; the anaerobic decomposition of the thick layer of organic matter underneath is feared to create a huge methane spike.  Methane also is present in cow farts, so the beef industry shares some of the blame, here.

But increasing the allowable amount of methane leakage from oil and natural gas drilling makes no sense unless you honestly have a short-term profit über alles attitude toward the habitability of the Earth.  The new proposal is a nasty confection of handouts to the fossil fuel industry at the expense of environmental health.  It includes:

• increasing the time between required inspections on drilling equipment from six months to a year
• increasing the time required for repairing known leaks from thirty to sixty days
• allowing states that have laxer emissions standards to follow those standards instead of the federal ones

Unsurprisingly, the petroleum industry is thrilled by all of this, and projections are that they will recoup nearly all of the $530 million that they'd have had to invest into following the Obama-era regulations.

If that's not enough, last week it was announced that William Happer has joined the National Security Council.  Happer has stated outright that "there's no problem with CO2," and had the following to say about climate change science:

There is no problem from CO2.  The world has lots and lots of problems, but increasing CO2 is not one of the problems.  So [the accord] dignifies it by getting all these yahoos who don't know a damn thing about climate saying, "This is a problem, and we're going to solve it."  All this virtue signaling. You can read about it in the Bible: Pharisees and hypocrites and phonies...  [T]he significance of climate change has been tremendously exaggerated, and has become sort of a cult movement in the last five or ten years.

If a monster storm at the same time as all of this isn't sufficiently ironic for you -- increasing strength of hurricanes, after all, was predicted as an outcome of anthropogenic climate change thirty years ago -- last week a study from the University of Geneva was released that gives us some rather horrifying news about where all this could lead.  The warmest point in (relatively) recent Earth history is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which occurred 56 million years ago and is thought to have been triggered by a double whammy of intense volcanic activity and destabilization of frozen methane hydrates on the ocean floor.  And I'm not talking about a little warm spell, here; the average global temperature shot up by five to eight degrees in a phenomenally short amount of time, and the recent study found that very quickly broad swaths of equatorial regions became effectively uninhabitable.  By the middle of this event, the amplitude of catastrophic flooding events had increased by a factor of eight, and there were palm trees growing above the Arctic Circle.

And I haven't told you the real kicker; once that maximum was reached, it took several hundred thousand years for the Earth's systems to recover.

Scientists are uncertain where we are with respect to the tipping point -- the point where feedbacks (like the thawing of the permafrost I mentioned earlier) begin to amplify, rather than counteract, the effect of global warming.  I'm convinced that the Trump administration doesn't disbelieve in climate change as much as it simply considers the question irrelevant.  So what if the world warms? seems to be the attitude.

We'll already have banked our share of the profit.  To hell with everyone, and everything, else.

Perhaps as of November, we'll see some new faces in Congress -- with luck, ones who not only care about science, but take the time to understand it.  Between now and then, I can only hope that the damage and loss of life from Florence and the other storms currently brewing in the Atlantic is as low as possible, and that maybe -- just maybe -- enough voters will wake up and see where we're headed before it's too late.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a charming inquiry into a realm that scares a lot of people -- mathematics.  In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole investigates the beauty and wonder of that most abstract of disciplines, and even for -- especially for -- non-mathematical types, gives a window into a subject that is too often taught as an arbitrary set of rules for manipulating symbols.  Cole, in a lyrical and not-too-technical way, demonstrates brilliantly the truth of the words of Galileo -- "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

David 1, Goliath 0

There's been so much bad news lately that I've several times felt like I needed to avoid all forms of media not to go into a full-blown, crashing depression.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that we're in a downward spiral.  Our leadership is the most corrupt, dishonest, self-serving bunch of politicians that I can remember, and I'm 57 years old.  The driving force in our government at the moment is corporate interests über alles.  We're progressively alienating all of our allies, disregarding science, passing legislation that trashes the environment, and in general paying attention to nothing but short-term expediency and lining the pockets of the already-wealthy.

So today, I want to tell you about some good news.

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that over the last five years, I've become involved in a fight right here in my home county against storing liquified petroleum gas (LPG) in unstable salt caverns beneath Seneca Lake.  Salt cavern storage has been tried before, with disastrous consequences.  Explosions, collapses, and contamination of rivers and streams have been documented over and over, and here in New York, the county and state governments seemed bound and determined to ignore what the geologists were saying -- that the caverns underneath the lake were unstable on a huge scale, and that only fifty years ago there'd been a humongous ceiling collapse that, if the caverns had been filled with natural gas, would have caused a massive explosion, followed by the southern end of the lake becoming so saline that it would no longer be usable as a source of drinking and agricultural water.

We not only live in an area of great natural beauty, but the Seneca Lake wineries and farms are a huge money-maker for residents in the area.  Risking this for no good reason other than putting money in the pocket of Crestwood Midstream -- a Texas-based petroleum company -- makes no sense whatsoever.

So a lot of us began protesting.  At first, with letter-writing campaigns and often fiery debate in town, county, and state-level meetings.  Dr. Sandra Steingraber, a local resident and highly acclaimed ecologist, writer, and activist, became one of the most determined opponents of Crestwood's plan, and was tireless in her efforts to block the project.  The low-key methods had no effect, however, and so we were forced to kick it up a notch.  We organized blockades of Crestwood's Seneca Lake site -- resulting in hundreds of us being arrested, and a number were sent to jail.

I was one of the ones arrested -- although I was never jailed.  I had three court appearances, and the charges were eventually dropped.

[Photograph by Carol Bloomgarden; used with permission]

The protests and civil disobedience stretched out over years.  But eventually, people started to listen.

And just last week, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation unanimously voted to kill Crestwood's plan to store LPG underneath Seneca Lake.

Basil Seggos, commissioner of the DEC, was unequivocal.  "The record is compelling that the permitting this proposed gas storage facility on the western side of Seneca Lake is inconsistent with the character of the local and regional Finger Lakes community," Seggos said, as part of his 29-page decision.

"This is truly a great day for our region,” said Yvonne Taylor, vice president of Gas Free Seneca, which formed seven years ago to combat the project.  "Don’t ever let anyone tell you that David can’t beat Goliath."

Look, I know we need energy, and that a switch to renewables can't happen overnight.  But continuing to support fossil fuels -- with its history of pollution and fostering climate change, not to mention spills, explosions, and fires -- is simply unconscionable.  We should be finding ways to cut back on fossil fuel use by becoming more efficient and looking for clean energy sources -- not foisting expanded storage on a community whose residents either didn't want the project or didn't understand its dangers.

So this is one win for the little guy, and a ray of hope in what has been a very, very dark time in our nation.  At least in our neighborhood, scientific research and plain good sense triumphed over corporate interests.

Which should be encouraging to others fighting in the hundreds of other David-versus-Goliath scenarios currently being played out.  You can win.  But only if you're determined to put yourself on the front lines -- and never, ever give up.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

Oil prophecies

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy is the practice of picking out the data points, after the fact, that support whatever your claim is.  The name comes from the story of a guy traveling across Texas.  He sees an old barn with bullseyes painted on the side, and in the exact center of each bullseye is a bullet hole.  The guy sees two old-timers leaning against a fence near the barn, so he stops to talk to them.

"Who shot the holes in that barn?" the guy asks.

One of the old-timers says proudly, "I did."

"That some pretty fancy shooting.  You must be good."

The old-timer is about to reply when his friend chimes in, "Nah.  He's a lousy shot.  He got drunk one night, shot some holes in the side of his barn, and then painted the bullseyes around them."

The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday with the comment, "Hoo boy.  Get a load of this."  The link was to the homepage of the Zion Oil and Gas Company, whose raison d'être is... well, let me give it to you in their own words:

When first visiting Israel in 1983, I believe that God gave me a scripture (I Kings 8: 41- 43), a vision (Oil for Israel) and, as a Christian Zionist and New Covenant believer (Isaiah 65:1), the calling to render assistance to the Jewish people and Nation of Israel, and to aid them in the Restoration of the Land by providing the oil and gas necessary to maintain their political and economic independence.

Zion is a testimony and a journey of faith, which began for me when I was saved, or born again, in January 1981.  This testimony is based only on God’s faithfulness to the Jewish people and the Nation of Israel (Genesis 17:1-8). 

Both of which are covenant promises and will come to pass (1 Kings 8:56; Isaiah 25:1) and not because of my faith.  It is God’s purpose and will for my life to discover the oil of Israel (Isaiah 46:9-11; Exodus 9:16). 

I was saved by faith.  It is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:8,9; Romans 10:8-9). 

Jim Spillman came to Zion Temple in Clawson, Michigan in February 1981 and taught on “The Oil of Israel“; by faith I believed it and The Great Treasure Hunt.  God used Jim Spillman first in my life to deposit the vision for the oil in my heart.

Yup, you read that correctly.  The CEO and founder of Zion Oil and Gas, John Brown, started his company because he thought he was anointed by god to find oil for the United States and Israel.  Not only that, he uses the Book of Genesis, and the account of the Great Flood, to tell him where to drill:

God creates this.  He provides the money and the place where to drill. Now why we haven't got the oil yet, I don't know.  I have never drilled one oil well I didn't expect to find oil...  He talks specifically about the land of Joseph and the blessings of the deep that lies beneath.  It doesn't say specifically oil, but there's a huge possibility it could be, let's put it that way.

In fact, the motto of the company is, "Geology confirming theology."  (If you want more in-depth information about Brown and his company, check out the article about Zion on RationalWiki.)

The only problem is that Zion's batting average so far is... zero.  They've drilled four wells in Israel, at great expense to their stockholders, and every one has been a dry well.  The result: $130 million down the drain, and a 90% loss of their stock's value on NASDAQ.

[image courtesy of photographer Eric Kounce and the Wikimedia Commons]

Unsurprisingly, given the mindset of people who would fall for this in the first place, this zero return on investment has not been as discouraging as you'd expect.  One of them, one Andy Barron of Temple, Texas, was quoted in the above-linked article as saying, "Well, I used to have a lot more money in it than I do now.  The stock I bought has tremendously decreased in value over time.  But with my belief that God is in charge of all of it and it's all his anyway, I think the upside of betting on God is pretty good."

Another supporter, Hal Lindsey (whose name may be familiar from his cheery End Times books The Late Great Planet Earth and Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth), said that even though things haven't gone well, they're about to, and furthermore, that's an indication that the world is about to end.  "Zion Oil right now is on the verge of discovering oil," Lindsey said.  "[It is a sign that] we are really on the very threshold of Lord Jesus's return."

So that's using a prophecy to support an oil drilling operation that has had zero success, and claiming that supports a different prophecy.  Which should win some sort of award for pretzel logic.

But you can bet if Zion does strike oil at some point, John Brown and his pals will shout from the rooftops about how this proves the prophecies and the Great Flood and his company being blessed by god and whatnot.  Thus the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy that I started with.  Given long enough, you can find incidental support for damn near anything, especially when you choose to ignore all of the failures.

Anyhow, that's today's exercise in wishful thinking.  All of which supports the idea that even though religion -- in at least some circumstances -- can be a decent guide to moral behavior, it's a lousy substitute for science.  Oh, yeah, and caveat emptor.  Not to mention "a fool and his money are soon parted."

Debate debacle

I have a particular aversion to seeing people humiliate themselves.  I remember as a kid watching sitcoms on television, and when I knew a character -- even one who richly deserved it -- was going to be put in an embarrassing situation, I often couldn't bear to watch it.

Still, there are certain exceptions.  I have to admit to experiencing an emotion that can only be described as "glee" when I heard that Sarah Palin was going to debate Bill Nye on the topic of climate change.

What, it wasn't bad enough that Ken Ham had his ass handed to him in a debate with Nye?  Ham at least is somewhat articulate, even if he doesn't seem to understand the concept of "evidence."  Palin, on the other hand, often seems to be speaking in some weird dialect that involves replacing every third word with a randomly chosen noun or verb.

Either that, or she does her speeches while drunk.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So a Nye vs. Palin debate would basically be Godzilla vs. Daffy Duck.  It would be worth watching purely for the comedic value.

However, I did wonder what Nye thought he stood to gain by debating her.  When your opponent has a fourth grade vocabulary and thinks that saying "You betcha" followed by a finger-gun constitutes a valid talking point, there's nothing much you can do that will have any effect.  Especially given that the topic is science.

So it was with combined disappointment and relief -- along with saying, "Aha.  That makes better sense" -- that I found out that Nye isn't actually debating Palin.

Palin is debating clips from speeches on climate change Nye has made.

So in effect, she'll have a cardboard cutout of Bill Nye standing there, play some carefully chosen sound bites, state her rebuttals, and declare victory.

The whole spectacle is set to coincide with the release of the petroleum-industry-sponsored propaganda piece Climate Hustle, which will be about as scientifically valid as Andrew Wakefield's anti-vaxx film Vaxxed that caused such a kerfuffle when it was pulled from showing at the Tribeca Film Festival.  The difference is that the anti-science climate change deniers and Tea Party right wingers like Sarah Palin are being funded by people like the Koch brothers, who have considerably deeper pockets than the anti-vaxxers do, and therefore far more influence.

Despite my reluctance to watch a long exercise in self-humiliation, I might watch the Sarah Palin climate change "debate."  If for no other reason, to pick up a few more lines like the following, part of a speech in 2011 in which she was trying to talk about the bravery of Paul Revere:

He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.

Yeah!  Right!  What?

So I wonder what she'll have to say about anthropogenic climate change.  And whether she can pronounce "anthropogenic."  My advice: tune in on May 2.  When else will you have the opportunity to watch the spectacle of a person being defeated in a debate by someone who isn't, technically, there?

Wagering everything we've got

Prior to the 20th century, lung cancer and emphysema were rare diseases.  When someone contracted either of these diseases, doctors took notice, simply because they occurred so infrequently.  But with the turn of the 20th century came the rise of tobacco consumption, and the formation of the big tobacco companies -- R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard, and Philip Morris -- who cashed in on the fad, and quickly rose to be formidable forces in the marketplace.

Doctors soon noticed the uptick in lung cancer rates, and it wasn't long before they figured out the strongest predictor of lung cancer occurrence.  Way back in 1939, Franz Hermann Müller of Cologne Hospital published a study of 86 lung cancer patients and a similar number of cancer-free controls, and found that the cancer sufferers were far more likely to have smoked than the cancer-free individuals did.

And of course, that information eventually found its way to the higher-ups in the tobacco industry.  As Robert Proctor points out in his paper "The History of the Discovery of the Cigarette-Lung Cancer Link: Evidentiary Traditions, Corporate Denial, Global Toll," it is clear from the documents that the people in charge of Big Tobacco knew about the connection -- but suppressed the evidence, or lied about it outright.  Proctor writes:

Tobacco industry insiders by the mid 1950s clearly knew their product was dangerous.  In December of 1953, when Hill and Knowlton were exploring how to respond to the uproar surrounding the publication of carcinogens in cigarette smoke, one tobacco company research director commented in a confidential interview: ‘Boy! Wouldn't it be wonderful if our company was first to produce a cancer-free cigarette.  What we could do to competition!’  Another remarked on how fortunate it was ‘for us’ (ie, for cigarette manufacturers) that smokers were engaging in ‘a habit they can't break’.  The mid-1950s cancer consensus was clearly (albeit privately) shared by the companies; and the reality of addiction was also starting to be conceded—at least in internal industry documents. 

UK cigarette makers also commented on the lung cancer consensus.  Three leading scientists from British American Tobacco (BAT) visited the USA in 1958, for example, and found that with only one exception all of those consulted—including dozens of experts inside and outside the industry—believed that a cancer connection had been proved.  Alan Rodgman at Reynolds  four years later confessed that while evidence in favour of the cancer link was ‘overwhelming’, the evidence against was ‘scant’.  Helmut Wakeham at Philip Morris about this same time drew up a list of dozens of carcinogens in cigarette smoke.  None of this was made public; indeed the tobacco industry throughout this time and for decades thereafter—until the end of the millennium—refused to admit any evidence of harms from smoking.

The result?  Proctor estimates that at current worldwide cancer rates, there is a death from lung cancer every twenty seconds.  90% or more of them would not have occurred had the individual not been a smoker.

1950s pro-smoking advertisement, meant to cast doubt on the link between lung disease and cigarettes [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Appalled?  Then consider, if you will, the parallels between this situation and the current campaign of disinformation and denial being waged by petroleum companies with regards to anthropogenic climate change.

According to an investigative report done by Inside Climate News, in 1978 Exxon launched its own carbon dioxide monitoring program, after reports that scientists were looking at a connection between carbon dioxide levels and global average temperature.  Between 1979 and 1983, Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio, Standard Oil of California, and Gulf Oil formed a task force to monitor and share climate research.

And what came out of this joint effort was, at first, an acknowledgement of the problem.  In 1980, Bruce S. Bailey of Texaco made what would be today a mind-boggling statement coming from a petroleum executive: that "an overall goal of the Task Force should be to help develop ground rules for energy release of fuels and the cleanup of fuels as they relate to CO2 creation."

But they very quickly realized two things; the problem was far bigger than they'd thought, and reducing carbon dioxide release was going to be very bad for business.  Soon, the delegates from the petroleum companies were singing a far different tune.  The CO2 and Climate Change Task Force was renamed the Climate and Energy Task Force, and by 1990 they had formed the Global Climate Coalition -- a lobbying group whose sole purpose was to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change, and to make certain that the United States government did nothing to curb fossil fuel use.

As a communication between members of the GCC, recently made public by the Inside Climate News report, put it: "Unless 'climate change' becomes a non-issue, meaning that the Kyoto proposal is defeated and there are no further initiatives to thwart the threat of climate change, there may be no moment when we can declare victory for our efforts."

As far as the scientists employed by the oil companies, they certainly knew what was going on.  One, Raymond Campion of Exxon, wrote to colleague J. T. Burgess in 1979 that "warming of the atmosphere... may be noticeable in the next twenty years," and that natural oscillations in weather patterns would "worsen the effect."  They even requested input from the scientists; in 1980 John A. Laurmann of Stanford University was asked to address the members of the GCC, and told them that "the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is projected to double by 2038, [and] would likely lead to a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures with major economic consequences...  [M]odels show a 5 degrees Celsius rise by 2067, which would result in globally catastrophic effects."

Their response?  To make sure that the information never gained traction beyond the scientists themselves.  Henry Shaw, a scientist at Exxon, said that such information shouldn't become common knowledge because it "may alarm the public unjustifiably."

The result was that until the mid-1990s, most people in the United States had never heard of climate change.  It got out eventually, of course -- but rather than making the fossil fuel industry retreat in disarray, they stepped up their campaign of denial in the media, and made sure that the advisory posts on the subject of energy production and the environment were occupied by pro-industry individuals.  For example, after George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001, he appointed Philip A. Cooney, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, as chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality.

Does the phrase "fox in charge of the henhouse" come to mind?  Especially given that when Cooney resigned in 2005 -- after allegedly doctoring reports to cast doubt on scientific consensus on global climate change -- he went to work for ExxonMobil?

And this is the group of people who are still, ten years later, driving climate policy in the United States.  They are still spending millions of dollars in a disinformation campaign, still funding candidates for public office who are unwilling to take away the petroleum industry's carte blanche, and still doing whatever they can to convince us that the last ten years of record-breaking temperatures and insane weather have nothing to do with anthropogenic carbon dioxide.  Jack Gerard, the current president of the American Petroleum Institute, has said that any federal mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is "destructive government interference."

But eventually the "la-la-la-la-la, not listening" stance of our government toward climate scientists will be revealed as what it is -- catastrophic mismanagement by the individuals who were elected to safeguard the citizenry of the United States.  Eventually the climate itself will cast a harsh light on the past forty years of evidence suppression and outright falsehoods.  And if this year is any indication, "eventually" might be coming awfully quickly.

Because this time, we're not talking about people getting cancer because they were misled by unscrupulous tobacco companies who cared more about the profit motive than they did about either public health or the truth.  This time, the stakes are higher.

This time, we are in a game with people who have a proven record of lies, evasions, and half-truths -- and what is being gambled on is the long-term habitability of the Earth.

Corporate-run small government

Some days, being an optimist is a losing proposition.

In previous posts, I have outlined the evidence supporting the claim that hydrofracking is (1) extremely wasteful of water, (2) dangerous, (3) likely to result in contaminated groundwater, and (4) contributing to climate change.  Any one of these reasons should be sufficient to prohibit it, but pushed by corporate interests, fracking is going great guns despite multiple mishaps (some of them resulting in loss of life) and most recently, the discovery of fracking chemicals in drinking water in Pennsylvania.  (For a summary of the dangers of fracking, with specific examples, see my post from last December.)

So it's not to be wondered at that some communities have taken matters into their own hands, and outlawed fracking.  And for people who claim that this is just the NIMBY principle at work ("Not In My Back Yard") -- I would argue that this technology shouldn't be in anyone's back yard.

Hydrofracking well [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That's what the citizens of Denton, Texas did last year -- they voted in November to join a growing list of towns that have banned fracking within their boundaries.  But this week the state of Texas overrode that vote, by passing a resolution 24-7 that prevents communities from banning anything done by oil and gas companies.  The resolution is going to Governor Greg Abbott this week, who is expected to sign it into law.

"Oil and gas companies donated $5.5 million to the campaigns of legislators in the last elections," said Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas.  "And clearly they got their money’s worth."

Supporters of the bill were, of course, elated, as were the oil and gas corporations.  Troy Fraser (R-Horseshoe Bay) said that the bill found "the common ground" between the energy industry and municipalities, which is true in the sense of a rabbit finding "common ground" with a wolf when it gets pinned to the ground and eaten.

"House Bill 40 enjoys widespread support because the legislation provides cities with authority to reasonably regulate surface level oil and gas activities, while affirming that regulation of oil and gas operations like fracking and production is under the exclusive jurisdiction of the state," said Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association.  Which is mighty convenient, given that most of what the petroleum industry does is underground.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/barnett-shale/article20199849.html#storylink=cpy

Among the many things that appall me about this is the hypocrisy of the legislators who voted for the bill.  The yes votes come from a Senate that is 2/3 Republican, and the vote went largely along party lines. But isn't the Republican ideal that small government is the best?  Don't we always hear the quote from conservatives, sometimes attributed to Thomas Jefferson, that "the government that governs best is the one that governs least?"

Apparently this maxim only applies if you're talking about taxes and gun control, and not about communities exercising self-determination with regard to greedy corporations pushing their way in and ruining aquifers used for agriculture and drinking water.

Oh, and preventing public school biology teachers from teaching evolution, and limiting the rights of LGBT people to enjoy the same privileges we straight people take for granted.  Perfectly okay for the government to be huge and intrusive with regards to those issues.

But if a community decides -- by a popular vote, no less -- that it doesn't want fracking wells on its land, then the state of Texas steps in and says, "Sorry.  You can't do that."

Small government, my ass.  Apparently in Texas, the Republican rule has been changed to "Small government unless it's doing something that gets me votes or lines my wallet."

The whole thing reeks of corruption.  Metzger called it right; money talked, the hypocrites voted, and the corporations won.  And the citizens of towns like Denton lost, big time.  One can only hope that they'll challenge this ruling, and take that challenge as far as it can go.

And I also hope that whatever legal obstacles they set up are put in place quickly -- before the frackers come in and trash the place.

A risk too far

Assessing risk is a complicated thing.  The technical definition of risk -- that it is equal to the statistical probability of exposure multiplied by the statistical probability of harm -- seems simple enough.  But in practice, calculating those probabilities is far from straightforward.  And when you throw in questions like, "Are the people exposed to the risk the same ones as the ones who are benefiting from it?" and "What if the people involved in the risk assessment are very likely to be lying to you?", it becomes damn near impossible to determine.

Such is the situation we find ourselves in, here in upstate New York.  The current controversy that is polarizing the region surrounds the benefits and risks of hydrofracking and storage of natural gas and liquified petroleum gas (LPG) in salt caverns underneath Seneca and Cayuga Lake.  You see signs in front of houses saying "Ban Fracking!" and "Friends of New York State Natural Gas" in almost equal numbers.

So let's roll out some facts, here, and see what you think.

Hydrofracking well in the Barnett Shale, near Alvarado, Texas [image courtesy of photographer David R. Tribble and the Wikimedia Commons]

Hydrofracking involves the use of sand, salt, and surfactant-laden water to blow open shale formations to release trapped natural gas.  The gas is pumped back up, along with a toxic slurry of "fracking fluid" that then has to be disposed of.  The gas itself is transported down a spider's web of pipelines, some of which pump the pressurized gas down into the abandoned salt mines that honeycomb our area.

In upstate New York, the permission to build the infrastructure for this massive project was granted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last year, in a move that brushed aside objections from geologists and ecologists, and which appears to many of us to be a rubber-stamp approval of corporate interests over safety and clean drinking water.  Now, Crestwood Midstream, a Texas-based energy company, wants to expand the current salt-cavern storage to include LPG.

So let's see what we can do to consider the risks involved in this project.

The first piece, the risk of exposure, involves looking at the history of fracking and gas storage, to see if comparable facilities have experienced problems.  So here are a few accidents that have occurred in such sites:

• A blast that killed one and injured two in Weld County, Colorado.
• A blowout in North Dakota that released 10,000 gallons of combined oil and fracking fluid into a local creek system until the leak was sealed two weeks later.
• A second spill in North Dakota of three million gallons into the Yellowstone/Missouri River watershed that has yet to be contained.
• An illegal wastewater injection site in California that contaminated local agricultural and drinking water aquifers with three billion gallons of fracking fluid.
• Four separate accidents in Ohio, one involving a huge methane leak from a fracking site, a fracking well leak that spilled 1,600 gallons of drill lubricant into a river, an explosion and spill that leaked 25,000 gallons of various chemicals into a tributary of the Ohio River, and a well rupture in Guernsey County that required the evacuation of 400 families from their homes.
• An explosion of a gas well that required the evacuation of an entire town in Wyoming.
• A spill of an "unknown amount of brine" near California, Pennsylvania, "some of which left the containment site."

What I haven't told you, however, is the time scale involved with these events.

All of them occurred within the past twelve months.

Kind of puts a new spin on the gas industry's claim that fracking is safe for humans and for the environment, doesn't it?

What seals the deal is the question of what happens after these accidents occur.  The answer is: not much.  The question is, honestly, not so much "what is done?" but "what could be done?"  And the answer is still: not much.  Such accidents are nearly impossible to remediate completely, and leave behind fouled ecosystems and contaminated drinking water that won't be useable for generations.

So as you can see from the above list, accidents really are more of a matter of "when," not "if."  This leaves it to the local residents to consider what the response would be if the unthinkable happens.  The result would be the salinization of a huge amount of water in the south end of Seneca Lake, which would likely be permanent as far as human lifetimes are concerned, given Seneca Lake's depth and slow rate of flushing.  Aquifers would become too saline to use for drinking water or agriculture, which would destroy not only local farms but the multi-million-dollar winery industry that has become a mainstay of the economy.

And whose responsibility would it be if a problem did occur?  The answer is, "Not Crestwood's."  They are not insured against accidents of this scale.  To quote directly from their own 10K report:

These risks could result in substantial losses due to breaches of contractual commitments, personal injury and/or loss of life, damage to and destruction of
property and equipment and pollution or other environmental damage. These risks may also result in curtailment or suspension of our operations. A natural
disaster or other hazard affecting the areas in which we operate could have a material adverse effect on our operations. We are not fully insured against all risks inherent in our business. In addition, we are not insured against all environmental accidents that might occur, some of which may result in toxic tort claims.

If there was a salt cavern collapse similar to one that happened in the 1960s, the result would be nothing short of a catastrophe for the local residents, because there would be no compensation forthcoming in the way of insurance money.  The only recourse would be a "toxic tort claim" against Crestwood, which would result in costly litigation that would be far too expensive for an average resident to pursue.

And Crestwood is planning on taking the same cavern that experienced a 400,000 ton roof collapse fifty years ago, and filling it with pressurized natural gas.

So if the whole thing blows up in our faces, literally and figuratively, Crestwood can cut their losses and go home to Texas.  We don't have that option.

This hasn't stopped the pro-gas voices from characterizing the risk as minimal, and the people who are speaking out against Crestwood as crazy tree-huggers who have "drunk the Kool-Aid" and who are the victims of "imaginary delusions."  These last phrases are direct quotes from one David Crea, an engineer for U.S. Salt, a company that is now owned by Crestwood.  Responsible, intelligent people, say Crea, couldn't possibly be against gas storage in salt caverns; and he points out that a lot of the people who have been protesting the Crestwood Expansion are from the eastern half of Schuyler County, not the western half, where the facility is located.

Because, apparently, you have to live right on top of a disaster before you're allowed to have an opinion about it.  This kind of illogic would claim that the objections of a woman in Oregon to the siting of a pesticide factory 400 yards away from an elementary school in Middleport, New York are irrelevant because "she doesn't live there."  (I didn't make that up; read about the situation here, which resulted in dozens of children suffering from permanent lung damage.)

So sorry, Mr. Crea; it's not the concerned locals who have "drunk the Kool-Aid."  There's not that much Kool-Aid in the world.  It's the citizens you and your ilk have hoodwinked, and who now sit on top of a site that has a ridiculously high likelihood of catastrophic failure.  And if you multiply all of those risk factors together, you come up with a figure so large that you would have to be on Crestwood's payroll to consider it acceptable.