Businessweek Finds Pa. Town Wounded from Anti-Fracking Battle
In
a rural area where “The economy sucks when it’s good,” natural gas
drilling could have gone a long way. Could have, until environmental
extremists and regulators got in the way.
That’s
what happened in Wayne County, Pa., just a few years ago when
“corporations offered struggling farmers lucrative leases for mineral
rights” but a documentary filmmaker and government prevented the
drilling, according to a June 7, 2012 story from Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
“Land
that sold for $2,000 to $3,000 an acre in 2004 was going for as much as
$10,000 an acre by 2009,” the article stated. That was all put on
hiatus thanks to a fear of pollution spread by a anti-fracking
neighbor/filmmaker Josh Fox and eco-groups that pressured the Delaware
River Basin Commission (DRBC) to institute a drilling moratorium.
That
interstate commission blocked struggling farmers from reaping the
benefits of the natural gas boom which was “the biggest thing ever
happened around here, in my lifetime at least,” according to [Northern
Wayne Property Owners] Alliance member Bob Rutledge. Rutledge is “a
dairy and beef farmer whose family has been in Wayne for 170 years.” He
slammed the DRBC saying the commission “isn’t writing me a check.
They’re just basically saying ‘screw you’.”
According
to the magazine, DRBC’s decision was influenced in part by local Wayne
county filmmaker Josh Fox, who made the anti-fracking film “Gasland” and
supporters who played up the fear of environmentalists. Despite the
fear spread by Fox and other anti-fracking activists, researchers from
the University of Texas at Austin have concluded that “there is no
evidence” of polluted drinking water caused by fracking.
Even EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has told the Ithaca Journal, “We
have absolutely no indication now that drinking water is at risk.”
“Gasland” is “packed with major errors, half truths, distortions, and exaggerations,” according
to Kathleen Hartnett White, director of the Armstrong Center for Energy
& the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. That film
famously highlighted water from a tap being set on fire, but according
to Phelim McAleer, another filmmaker, flammable water is nothing new and was not a result of fracking.
Businessweek
reported that “drilling is not officially dead in Wayne county,” since
DRBC had scheduled a hearing on in November 2011. But it was cancelled
and has yet to be rescheduled.
The
Businessweek story of frustrated farmers and people who would have been
better off economically if the DRBC had not stopped companies from
drilling for natural gas is a rare one in the mainstream media. The
anti-fracking view is more typically promoted by the liberal news media.
In May 2011, The New York Times had to correct
its claim that there were “numerous” cases of water pollution from
fracking. They were forced to admit “There are few documented cases, not
numerous ones.” Left-wing radio host Mike Malloy outrageously claimed (without evidence) that fracking had killed “thousands of Americans,” while liberal radio host Thom Hartmann claimed fracking had caused an earthquake.
