Laura Ingraham: Celebrities Can Talk About Fracking But a Neurosurgeon Can't Discuss Healthcare

Conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday made a marvelous observation about the media firestorm surrounding Dr. Benjamin Carson's speech last week at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Ingraham said, "We can have celebrities talk about fracking and all sorts of political issues...but the head of pediatric neurosurgery at one of the top hospitals in the world" shouldn't discuss healthcare (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

LAURA INGRAHAM: So we can have celebrities, right, talk about fracking and all sorts of political issues, but we actually have the head of neurosurgery, pediatric neurosurgery, at one of the top hospitals in the world, who gets up on that stage at the National Prayer Breakfast, and he addresses a number of topics, right, but from a common sense, very respectful fashion. He wasn’t mean-spirited. He wasn’t nasty. But the reaction was so profound from the public, thinking, “Why don’t we have politicians who speak in these common sense terms?”

Absurd, but not at all surprising.

Consider the anthropogenic global warming debate.

The media are far more interested in what Al Gore - a man that did terribly in science classes while at Harvard! - and pop star Sheryl Crow have to say on this subject than actual scientists including the over 31,000 that have signed the Oregon Petition.

America's press in 2013 aren't interested in facts or a serious discussion on issues facing the nation.

Instead, the modus operandi is to fill the airwaves and print with nonsensical propaganda while demonizing anyone that deigns to disagree with it.

As Dr. Carson said Monday, "An uneducated populace will fall for anything" including "pundits on television."

(HT Mediaite)

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Laura Ingraham: Celebrities Can Talk About Fracking But a Neurosurgeon Can't Discuss Healthcare

Conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday made a marvelous observation about the media firestorm surrounding Dr. Benjamin Carson's speech last week at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Ingraham said, "We can have celebrities talk about fracking and all sorts of political issues...but the head of pediatric neurosurgery at one of the top hospitals in the world" shouldn't discuss healthcare (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

LAURA INGRAHAM: So we can have celebrities, right, talk about fracking and all sorts of political issues, but we actually have the head of neurosurgery, pediatric neurosurgery, at one of the top hospitals in the world, who gets up on that stage at the National Prayer Breakfast, and he addresses a number of topics, right, but from a common sense, very respectful fashion. He wasn’t mean-spirited. He wasn’t nasty. But the reaction was so profound from the public, thinking, “Why don’t we have politicians who speak in these common sense terms?”

Absurd, but not at all surprising.

Consider the anthropogenic global warming debate.

The media are far more interested in what Al Gore - a man that did terribly in science classes while at Harvard! - and pop star Sheryl Crow have to say on this subject than actual scientists including the over 31,000 that have signed the Oregon Petition.

America's press in 2013 aren't interested in facts or a serious discussion on issues facing the nation.

Instead, the modus operandi is to fill the airwaves and print with nonsensical propaganda while demonizing anyone that deigns to disagree with it.

As Dr. Carson said Monday, "An uneducated populace will fall for anything" including "pundits on television."

(HT Mediaite)

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Kidnappings, Pirates, Halliburton, Fracking, And Me.

by RL Miller

The London-based Control Risks holds itself out as “an independent global risk consultancy specializing in helping organizations manage political, integrity, and security risks in complex and hostile environments.” Or, in practical terms, it provides anti-piracy services, handles kidnappings and other crises, and writes white papers analyzing terrorism risks in various countries.

One suspects that this expertise doesn’t come cheap. Clients buy discretion for large sums of cash, but SourceWatch notes “a long history of working with the energy sector, covering ground in Algeria, Angola, Congo, Nigeria, Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Sudan and Yemen.”  And now it’s advising unnamed, but presumably energy-oriented and rich, businesses how to handle fracking activists.

Because a worried upstate New York farmer has a lot in common with a Somali pirate.

The splash page on “The Global Anti-Fracking Movement: What it wants, how it operates, and what’s next” is here. You’re supposed to be able to download the report only by giving an email address to receive more briefings, and if you’re a senior executive in the oil and gas industry you can get the report and a complimentary personal briefing. For those of us who are not senior executives in the oil and gas industry and who don’t want want to give our email address to a shadowy international business that may count Halliburton and Bechtel among its clients, here is the entire report (pdf format).

The report views American environmental activists through the same hostile lens as it uses on kidnappers of Exxon executives. It is shocked to report that “A notable feature of the anti-fracking movement – shared with other social movements such as Occupy – is the extensive use of online social media to disseminate information, organise and mobilise.” (p.8)

The white paper carefully separates those who call for an outright ban from those seeking tighter regulation: “the majority of the anti-fracking movement simply wants tighter environmental regulation of unconventional gas development. With tighter regulation, enforcement and accountability, a sizeable swathe of the anti-fracking movement – from grassroots activists with single-issue grievances to influential environmental NGOs such as the UA’s Natural Resources defense Council (NRDC) – is prepared to drop its objection to hydraulic fracturing.” (p.5) And it goes on to discuss, without actually suggesting that big green groups concerned about climate should co-opt local people concerned about their food and water supply, wink, nudge (p.9):

International environmental NGOs also play a key global networking role. For example, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund) each mount anti-fracking advocacy campaigns and support local anti-fracking groups. yet in contrast with grassroots activists, focused primarily on local social, economic and environmental impacts, international environmental NGOs situate unconventional gas extraction largely within their efforts on climate change.The intervention of international NGOs has inevitably pulled the anti-fracking movement – at the global level – towards the climate change agenda, meaning that purely climate change-focused groups, such as 350.org, have obtained a prominent position. This
has occasionally resulted in friction within the anti-fracking movement, to the extent that some climate change-focused NGOs – though not the three listed above – view unconventional gas as a low carbon alternative to coal. Not only do such groups ignore
pressing local impact concerns, they may also be more amenable to tighter regulation as opposed to an outright ban.

Control Risks’ final suggestions for handling those pesky activists: “acknowledge grievances,” “engage local communities,” “reduce impacts,” and “create more winners” (pay people).  But nothing about actually listening to the activists, cleaning up wastewater, disclosing toxic fluids, or actually reducing carbon emissions. California is next in line for a fracking boom, if the clients of Control Risks have their way the federal Bureau of Land Management’s first auction of fracking leases sold 18,000 acres in ten minutes flat. The divide-and-conquer strategy is just beginning; most large green groups have stayed silent on the woefully insufficient draft regulations recently proposed, Very Serious Editorials opine that full disclosure of fracking fluids is somehow sufficient, bills being introduced echo the call for regulation rather than a moratorium, and efforts within the California Democratic Party to call for a moratorium are being watered down.

As for me, I’m not going to kidnap or terrorize the pro-fracking folk. I just don’t want them doing to the vineyards and suburbs of California what has been done to the farms of Pennsylvania and New York.

RL Miller is an attorney and environment blogger with Climate Hawks. This piece was originally published at Daily Kos and was reprinted with permission by the author.

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Vermont Bans Fracking; CNN: What the Heck is Fracking?

Vermont is not an oil and gas state. Check that. Vermont is not an oil and gas producing state. According to the state geologist’s website, a total of six wells have been drilled targeting oil and gas since the Green Mountain Boys trod its, uh, green mountains. All of the wells were dry holes, and the last one was drilled in 1984.

But VT is an oil and gas consuming state, to be sure. Just to clarify, Gov. Shumlin is OK with fracking, as long as it’s in OK (or TX, LA, NM, WY, ND, PA, WV, MI, OH, UT, etc.)

I am going to contact my legislator to get a ban on harvesting maple syrup in Louisiana as a kind of retaliation. My Lord, who knows what might happen if you get that sticky, microbe-laden goo in the water supply!

(CNN) Vermont’s governor has signed a bill making it the first U.S. state to ban fracking, the controversial practice to extract natural gas from the ground.

“This is a big deal,” Gov. Peter Shumlin said Wednesday. “This bill will ensure that we do not inject chemicals into groundwater in a desperate pursuit for energy.” [Fracking is regulated in every jurisdiction and certainly does not involve injecting "chemicals into groundwater". -- Ed.]

Shumlin said fracking contaminates groundwater and the science behind it is “uncertain at best.” He said he hopes other states will follow Vermont’s lead in banning it.

Gov. Shumlin’s understanding of fracking is the only thing that is “uncertain at best”, but I think even energy advocates like me can live with the fracking ban in Vermont. Next winter, just turn that thermostat up, Governor. Burn, baby, burn!

The good news is that there is someone who is more confused about issues surrounding oil and gas development than Gov. Shumlin: CNN’s own Lizzie O’Leary. As her video accompanying the Vermont article “explains”:

One of the things that oil companies and gas companies and geologists always kind of knew was that there were pockets of oil and natural gas under BIG rock formations, big layers of rock that you couldn’t get at by drilling straight down so this process involves drilling horizontally.

(Cut to image image of a horizontal well. Only it isn’t a horizontal well. It’s a pipeline. Whatever. It’s a big pipe. See below.)

That’s the kind of rock — shale– that you find these oil and gas pockets underneath.

Um, underneath?

The US doesn’t have that much oil or gas if you look at it compared to the rest of the world (sic) and also remember there are a lot of places in the US where you can’t drill for oil and gas; the government only allows it in some places (sic) so they allow fracking in different places than they do, say, traditional oil drilling (sic, sic, sic).

Ay, caramba! You send these people books and they eat them!

Cross-posted at stevemaley.com.

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Fracking is Blamed for … Well, Everything, Really.

Boom! goes the dynamite, not the frack fluid.

Blaming natural phenomena on fracking is this year’s fad, reminiscent of the mood ring, the pet rock or Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Item 1. Vice-President of the United States Joe Biden may not know what hydrofracking is, but he does know that it sounds plenty scary.

“… There’s a thing called fracking. They’ve got to go crack the rock in order to get [oil and gas] out. You can environmentally do that well or you can environmentally do that poorly,” the vice president said.

“If you do it poorly, you use up the water aquifer. [Huh?! - Ed.] You can create, in some cases the argument is, earthquakes,” he concluded.

Mr. Biden was referring to a string of minor tremors over the past year in the Youngstown, Ohio, area, including a 4.0 quake that shook the city on New Year’s Eve.

But state officials have confirmed that the temblors were the result of a wastewater-disposal well, not fracking itself.

As I commented at the time, the problem here is not that frack fluid is being injected. Mother Gaia is indifferent to whether the fluid is frack water, bong water or mother’s milk. Fracking is not the culprit; if you inject lots of fluid into an existing fault zone, that may create a problem, but its a problem best addressed by state authorities. They are in a much better position to appreciate local geomechanics than is a Federal agency like the EPA.

The evidence here reveals one thing that is definitely caused by hydraulic fracturing: Vice-Presidential confusion.

Item 2. Is hydrofracking causing the mysterious Clintonville (WI) booms?

Um, no.

I first asked the question on March 28: Who will be the first to blame Clintonville WI “booms” on #fracking?

Since then, my blog registers several hits a day from Google searches containing the words “Clintonville” and “fracking”. When I did my own search, this was one of the most popular hits:

This is a breathless video from a young man who knows that there must be some connection between oil and gas fracking and the Clintonville booms, but his concept of fracking is fuzzier than V.P. Biden’s hairline.

In it, there is reference made to a map of “fracking sites in Wisconsin” (reproduced at right). Very interesting indeed, because there is no oil and gas drilling in Wisconsin.

Closer inspection shows that the sites identified on the map are sources of frac sand. Fracking uses lots of plain, old quartz sand. Sand that’s pure, round-grained and of uniform grain size works best. But the sand comes from a plain old sand pit, just like the sand that would be used in construction, glassmaking or a kid’s play yard.

Mother Gaia must know that She’s going to be violated with this particular sand, because she puts up quite a fuss. Why Clintonville, WI became ground zero for Her wrath is anybody’s guess.

I’ll leave that to the smart guys, like Joe Biden.

For those who may have a lingering suspicion that old Vladimir is full of crapola and that the Clintonville booms just might have some connection to oil and gas drilling activity, consider the map below. It is a map of all the oil and gas drilling activity in the upper Midwest.

The blue triangles denote rigs drilling for oil, while the red circles indicate rigs drilling for gas.

Moral of the story: There may be a spot in the Lower 48 that is more remote from drilling activity than Clintonville, Wisconsin, but you’ll have to look a good while to find it.

Cross-posted at stevemaley.com.

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