It was just another campaign ad, extolling the virtues of an industry under scrutiny and improbably proclaiming its benefits to the world.
Hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, or “fracking,” the sweet-voiced woman reassures us, is perfectly safe for the environment — she should know, being a rancher — and it provides great jobs and abundant domestic energy.
Curiously, the ads on radio, print and television continue running today, well out of campaign season, well after Colorado Congressman Jared Polis proposed and then withdrew 2014 ballot initiatives to curb the harmful excesses of the oil and gas industry, and well after a state task force established some tempered reforms.
“The industry has been relentless in … continuing to advertise,” Denver political analyst Floyd Ciruli recently observed to the Colorado Statesman in discussing efforts that have undermined a grassroots groundswell against fracking.
Why would Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development (CRED) continue the multimillion-dollar campaign to try to convince people of the joys of fracking and undermine critics of the practice that requires injecting a cocktail of chemicals, sand and fluids deep into the ground to crack open fissures in rocks and release trapped gas?
In part, it’s because the non-profit organization, which is funded by Anadarko Petroleum and Noble Energy, realizes that the battle for public opinion is not over and local fights over fracking continue county by county.
But in greater part, it’s an effort to whitewash an industry that pollutes groundwater with dangerous chemicals like benzene, taints the air in rural areas with smog worse than major cities, spills toxic fluids daily in Colorado, generates 24-hour noise and increasingly encroaches residential areas and schools despite pushback from some communities.
And the latest study from the University of Colorado, published earlier this month in the journal Science, definitively links hundreds of earthquakes to the wastewater from oil and gas drilling pumped at high pressure into the ground.
Facing growing evidence that fracking is taking a horrific environmental toll, the oil and gas companies have embarked on a perpetual political campaign, lining up industry-paid scientists to spin research and generate pseudo-science arguments.
“Get the facts,” the CRED website crows, then offering little but spin. For instance: Fracking fluid is 99.5 percent water and sand and 0.5 percent “safe chemical additives, most of which are found in common household products.”
Sure, toluene is used in paint thinner and leather tanners. That doesn’t mean you want to breathe it unless you’re fond of brain, liver and kidney damage. Similarly, the solvent ethylbenzene causes throat and eye irritation, chest constriction and neurological effects such as dizziness, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
We’ve seen this before, this effort to obfuscate, confuse and deny proven science with artificial doubt. We’ve seen it in the deceit and duplicity of the tobacco industry as it blithely denied that smoking was harmful until the courts ruled it no longer could make those intentionally erroneous assertions. We’ve seen it with climate-change deniers, who refute overwhelming scientific consensus and substitute politics and greed for common sense and common good.
And we’ve seen it with the gun lobby, which continually makes the demonstrably false assertion that more guns make us safer.
It doesn’t take a genius, though, to understand that contaminating groundwater with cancer-causing chemicals could cause problems, nor that occasional incidents of flaming tap water and severe illnesses reported by neighbors might just be linked to new fracking operations.
Regrettably, with fracking as well as with these other efforts, misleading public-relations efforts work — at least for awhile, until the evidence is so insurmountable that it cannot be denied with a straight face.
But think of it this way: If fracking were as wonderful as the energy companies say it is, they wouldn’t need to spend millions of dollars convincing us.
So whenever there’s another ad extolling the virtues of fracking, think: The industry doth protest too much.
Steve Lipsher (slipsher@ comcast.net) of Silverthorne writes a monthly column for The Denver Post.
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