US Greens Report Lies About Shale Gas

Fracking scares the hell out of the Green ecomentalists so they produced a report that lies about Shale Gas

The Green dream has crashed and burned globally, none of their predictions of environmental holocaust and Armageddon have come true, the planet in blissful ignorance of the predictions of flawed computer models and junk science data manipulation stubbornly refuses to warm and the flag-ship of their dream wind and solar power has proved an economic disaster.

The Green renewables industry works on crony capitalism and Green taxes paid for by consumers, sure they call the Green taxes Feedin Tariffs or other sanitized expressions for tax, but Green taxes are what keeps the economically unviable renewables industry barely afloat.

Shale Gas and fracking have sounded the death knell for expensive renewable energy and now one Green ecomentalist has a produced a report piece of Green propaganda that seeks to prove that Natural Gas is the dirtiest fossil fuel ever:

Not long ago, environmental groups were heralding natural gas as a “bridge fuel to a more climate-friendly energy supply.” Today, New York “progressives” are leading the charge to demonize it as a “bridge to nowhere” — producing “water contamination, air pollution, global warming and fractured communities.” Why the flip-flop?

The Greens thought wind and solar would become competitive as fossil-fuel supplies dried up. But those alternatives proved unrealistic — even as natural gas has become plentiful, thanks to dramatic advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

The developments made a shambles of the green dream. So the activists are aggressively promoting the view that the natural-gas industry is sacrificing the environment for short-term corporate profits.

One key distortion: that shale gas is dirtier than coal. Ground zero for that belief is at Cornell University, home to activist Professor Robert Howarth and the Park Foundation, the national funding center for anti-natural-gas research and campaigning.

The Greens firmly believed their own propaganda, which is always a big mistake, they believed all the artwork for Peak Oil they produced while failing to remember that a graph has X and Y axes not just an unscaled blob marked Peak Oil.

Park has poured more than $6 million over the last two years into community protest groups Upstate and anti-shale-gas lobbying by Mother Jones magazine, the Environmental Working Group and more than a dozen other high-profile advocacy groups. It funded the totem of the movement, Gasland, the engaging but scientifically questionable documentary that made the rounds at Sundance and Cannes.

Howarth and his wife, lab partner Roxanne Marino, are longtime anti-fracking activists. He told me that the foundation recruited him two years ago to fund a study “proving” shale gas was dirty. Last April, the marine-ecosystems expert with no background in gas-related geology co-authored a paper claiming shale generates more greenhouse emissions than coal or oil.

It would be difficult to overstate the article’s influence, ballyhooed by The New York Times and debated in the British parliament and the European Union.

Howarth’s report is too much junk science even for other Green zealots:

Howarth’s colleagues at Cornell (with actual expertise in this subject) as well as liberal experts at the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Council on Foreign Relations and Environmental Defense Fund panned the article.

“If wells are constructed right and operated right, hydraulic fracturing will not cause a problem, says EDF senior policy adviser Scott Anderson.

But their comments got little play. Large swaths of the media, treating Howarth like a rock star, subsequently ignored a University of Maryland peer-reviewed response and a Carnegie Mellon University report, partly funded by the Sierra Club, that endorsed conclusions by the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory supporting the relative merits of shale gas.

Then there are the lies propagated by ecomentalists  like Howarth about water contamination and the composition of fracking fluid

Other environmental scares are equally disingenuous. The vast majority of gas drilling, for example, occurs below water tables so aquifers aren’t affected.

The economic benefits of shale gas are what will really kill off the renewables scam.

Meanwhile, shale’s long-term benefits for New York are already evident in the area around Elmira — where the airport is booming, hotels are at capacity and retailers report 60 percent growth, thanks to the surge of shale drilling activity in nearby Pennsylvania. Fracking there has created 100,000 jobs in the last year alone, with an average wage of nearly $70,000. The crumbs spilling over into nearby Chemung County are but a taste of what the shale gas boom could offer New York.

Natural gas is no longer the “bridge” to a low-cost, low-environmental impact, job-creating future — it is the future.

Affordable energy, jobs and wealth creation, everything that the Green ecomentalists seek to destroy, little wonder then they are working so hard to try to stop the Shale Gas revolution.