SNAKE OIL: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future

For the past decade I've been a participant in a high-stakes energy policy debate-writing books, giving lectures, and appearing on radio and television to point out how downright dumb it is for America to continue relying on fossil fuels.

September 18, 2013 | Source: Resilience.org | by Richard Heinberg

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A FRONT-ROW SEAT AT THE PEAK OIL GAMES

For the past decade I’ve been a participant in a high-stakes energy policy debate-writing books, giving lectures, and appearing on radio and television to point out how downright dumb it is for America to continue relying on fossil fuels. Oil, coal, and natural gas are finite and depleting, and burning them changes Earth’s climate and compromises our future, so you might think that curtailing their use would be simple common sense. But there are major players in the debate who want to keep us burning more.

In the past two or three years this debate has reached a significant turning point, and that’s what this book is about. Evidence that climate change is real and caused by human activity has become irrefutable, and serious climate impacts (such as the melting of the Arctic ice cap) have begun appearing sooner, and with greater severity, than had been forecast. Yet at the same time, the notion that fossil fuels are supply-constrained has gone from being generally dismissed, to being partially accepted, to being
vociferously dismissed. The increasingly dire climate story has achieved widespread (though still insufficient) coverage, but the puzzling reversals of public perception regarding fossil fuel scarcity or abundance have received little analysis outside the specialist literature. Yet, as I will argue, claims of abundance are being used by the fossil fuel industry to change the public conversation about energy and climate, especially in the United States, from one of, “How shall we reduce our carbon emissions?” to “How shall we spend our newfound energy wealth?”

I will argue that this is an insidious and misleading tactic, and that the abundance argument is based not so much on solid data (though oil and gas production figures have indeed surged in the United States), as on exaggerations about future production potential, and on a pattern of denial regarding steep costs to the environment and human health.

The change in our public conversation about energy is predicated on new drilling technology and its ability to access previously off-limits supplies of crude oil and natural gas. In the chapters ahead, we will explore this technology-its history, its impacts, and its potential to deliver on the promises being made about it. As we will see, horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing (“fracking”) for oil and gas pose a danger not just to local water and air quality, but also to sound energy policy, and therefore to our collective ability to avert the greatest human-made economic and environmental catastrophe in history.