Sustainable Development, Natural Gas, and pernicious NIBY-ISM

Last week the Sundance award-winning documentary "Gasland" premiered on HBO. In 2005 the film's director, Josh Fox, was offered $100,000 by a natural gas company to drill on his land. The film chronicles his experiences investigating the industry as he ultimately makes the decision not to allow drilling on his land.

The film's main villain is the process of hydraulic fracturing, better known as hydrofracking or simply fracking. It's a process in which millions of gallons of a pressurized mix of proprietary chemical-laden water and sand are pumped into the ground smashing a layer of rock that holds billions of small bubbles of gas.

Not a lot is known about the safety hydrofracking - in part because a 2005 legislation spearheaded by then Vice President Dick Cheney exempts natural gas drilling from federal clean water laws (it should be noted that the Cheney linked energy company Haliburton is a major player in the hydrofracking business). What is known is that where hydrofracking occurs it's not uncommon for residents to suddenly discover that not only is their tap water no longer drinkable, but that on more than one occasion it has become flammable. Youtube videos of residents of communities in which hydrofracking occurs setting their tap water alight can be found that date back to at least 2008. While it makes for great video watching it does beggar the question if one should bathe, cook or drink this water.

Because natural gas companies are not require to disclose the chemicals they use in the hydrofracking process (unfair competition), it's not possible to draw a causal link between hydrofracking and water toxicity. It is possible, however, to draw correlations between hydrofracking and the chemical cocktails of arsenic benzene and naphthalene which landowners have discovered in their drinking water wells after allowing drilling to occur.

If it were as simple as private landowners leasing their land for a specific use and discovering that their lessee had damaged said land, it would be no big deal. The problem is, however, that water doesn't respect property lines and many people are being exposed to toxic water - water that it will take generations to properly cycle through and clean - without having the benefit of a large cash payout. It is, in part, this latter reason why hydrofracking is garnering so much attention right now.

There is a big push towards natural gas extraction because natural gas is considered a 'cleaner' alternative to coal, and because North America has plenty of it meaning it's a domestic energy source. Both are in line with the current goal of 'clean' energy and energy independence. Yet much of the negative effects of hydrofracking have been going on for years with little to no mainstream attention. What's shifted?

What has shifted is the discovery that the Marcellus Shale - a 95,000 square mile expanse that cuts across large areas of Pennsylvania, parts of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and New York State - is home to, by some estimates between 15 and 20 year supply of natural gas for the United States.

Now if Marcellus had been located in parts of Wyoming, rural Texas, or merely been confined to Appalachia where much of the natural gas drilling has occurred up until this point most of us would have remained blissfully unaware of the cost of our natural gas habit. Much like coal or oil drilling out of site is out of mind, and ecological effects are generally relegated to intellectual ideas related to global warming thanks to the big blinders of ecological injustice. Rich people get to consume while poor people suffer the effects of that consumption.

A sizable chunk of the Marcellus shale, however, happens to be located smack dab in the middle of New York City's watershed…a watershed that the city had just spent $660 million dollars ecologically restoring so that it would not have to spend $6 billion dollars building an artificial water filtration plant. It was not willing to see that investment upended on the assurances of an industry with a questionable history. Activists - from city government officials to the typical activist types - descended on the state capital in protest.

As of this writing, for the part of the shale that's in NYC and Syracuse's watershed Albany passed a series of stricter rules than which apply to the shed overall (and NYS rules are stricter than that of Pennsylvania's). Each well within the watershed, for example, needs its own environmental impact statement, which is costly and annoying and not required in other parts of the shale. I.e. elsewhere in the shale they can just fill out a generic EIC for a bunch of wells. Additionally as of April there are no permits for either NYC's or Syracuse's shed.

This story has two morals.

The first is that bad things happen more easily in shadow. The second is that wealth inures you from your consumption - much of New York City's environmental plan involves using natural gas and everything from its busses to its sewage treatment facilities run on it.