Say It Ain’t So: Is Brown Really a Fracking Whore?
Gov. Jerry Brown is dedicated to preserving the environment and leading the fight against climate change. He’s fearless enough to slap Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a “disgrace” for trying to incite the states to reject White House efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And he’s deft enough to label Sen. Ted Cruz, a climate-change-denying GOP presidential candidate, as “absolutely unfit to be running for office.”
All of which renders Brown’s persistent defense of fracking – the environmentally dangerous and water polluting practice of drilling for oil by hydraulic fracturing – such a huge disappointment.
On the one hand, he calls for – and even leads – a “crusade to protect our climate”; on the other he allows oil companies to engage in a practice that science and common sense insist is destructive, wasteful and unsafe to the environment and to Californians.
So, more in sadness than in anger, we must ask: Why is Brown acting a fracking whore?
Quid Pro Quo? Oh No. Surely, it can’t be that Occidental Petroleum gave $500,000 in 2012 to help Brown pass his crucial Proposition 30, which raised taxes on wealthy Californians and increased spending on public education. That would seem oh too quid quo pro for this political Jeremiah who self-righteously thunders that climate change denial “borders on the immoral.”
And yet, whenever he is challenged on his approval of fracking – he called it a “fabulous economic opportunity” in May 2013 – Brown slips the punch by citing all the other good stuff he’s set in motion to combat climate change.
As Mark Hertsgaard wrote in February:
“I challenge anybody to find any other state” that’s doing as much about climate change, Brown shot back to anti-fracking protesters during his speech at the California Democratic Party’s convention last March. California was on track to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 25 billion tons by 2020, Brown accurately pointed out. The state will also obtain at least 33% of its electricity from solar, wind or other non-carbon fuels by then, he added.
OK. But good deeds on climate change don’t provide a free pass on fracking.
Don’t Frack With Me: Again Hertsgaard, the smart and sharp environmental correspondent for The Nation magazine:
Unlike conventional oil drilling, fracking injects vast amounts of water, sand and industrial chemicals such as benzene into the earth at extremely high pressure, shattering rock and freeing the oil or gas below to be pumped to the surface. In effect, fracking creates new reserves of product that energy companies can bring to market.
This not only raises health issues – which caused New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to ban the practice – but for California, in the midst of an historic drought, questions about the diversion of desperately needed fresh water. As Hertsgaard explained:
Fracking a single oil well can require 2 million to 8 million gallons of water that is then left too polluted for human or agricultural use. Scientists have also concluded that fracking, which aims to shatter underground rock to free oil and gas, has helped cause earthquakes in Ohio and Oklahoma — no small consideration in California.
Moreover, the “fabulous” economic benefits of fracking that Brown once cited were all but wiped out last May, when federal officials slashed by 96% their estimate of how much oil can be recovered from Monterey Shale deposits that stretch from Kern County to Monterey.
Asked last week by NBC’s Chuck Todd if California’s water crisis alone isn’t enough of a reason to ban fracking, Brown answered with a kind of uncharacteristic, defensive non-sequitur word salad:
No, not at all. First of all, fracking in California has been going on for more than 50 years. It uses a fraction of the water of fracking on the East Coast for gas, particularly.
This is vertical fracking for the most part. It is different.
California imports 70% of our petroleum products. Our cars drive over 330 billion miles, mostly on petroleum. If we reduce our oil drilling in California by a few percent, which a ban on fracking would do, and we import more oil by train or by boat, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
What we need to do is to move to electric cars, more efficient buildings, and more renewable energy. And in that respect, California is leading the country and some would say even the world, and we’re going to continue moving down that path.
Uh, yeah, but what about the question Chuck actually asked?
Man Up, Gandalf: It’s time for Gov. Brown to face facts: there is no defense for fracking in California – no environmental or economic rationale and it’s a huge waste of water.
Better to accept the notion, as President Obama has explained, that in order to combat climate change to the extent we can, we must leave two-thirds of the oil that’s available to mankind in the ground. That means stop fracking for the hardest-to-extract oil and move away from fossil fuels.
Or else explain why you’re so set on selling yourself to the oil companies.
The worst post in the history of Calbuzz.
The Obama administration supports fracking as just another heavy industry that can be made safe with proper regulation.
http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2015/01/02/interior-secretary-local-fracking-bans-are-wrong-way-to-go/
So is Obama a “fracking whore” too?
Then there’s the fact that fracking has been used for 70 years, and greens only decided it was the devil when it became much more efficient the past decade because of information technology.
If you guys oppose fracking because you think the world needs to get away from fossil fuels, that’s one thing. But inventing an environmental case against fracking after tolerating it for decades is farcical. You don’t have the intellectual high ground.
Fracking is to the left what global warming is to the right.
I can be convinced that the fracking industry can be properly regulated so that the risks of environmental dangers are properly managed. Secretary Jewell is working on that and I hope he gets it right. The tougher argument is that we have plenty of water and have no need to turn off the spigot for oil companies. That we fracked 70 years ago means nothing.
I you’re that upset, Chris, Calbuzz must have nailed it.
Right on, CalBuzz! You’re exactly on point. Allowing fracking, let alone supporting it, is insane. It jeopardizes our water supply and our agriculture economy. When — not if, but when — there is a fracking disaster, we will learn that there is no way to get down that deep to deal with the problem. Brown isn’t just wrong. He’s put the state in great danger. Thank you for this piece. I’ll pass it all around.
This piece of political outrageousness against Gov. Brown, President Obama and the backers of fracking must have been written and cheered by the Hillary crowd’s pro-environment brigade. This is how they hope to elect Hillary?
They could care less about the millions of commuters saving over $1 per gallon of gas because of fracking driven oil of planty. And all because of outrageously unscientific global warming predictions that make the average t.v. weather forecaster look brilliant in comparison.
As Brown attempted to obscure his answer to Todd’s question, he rambled off over-used rhetoric…California’s been fracking for 70 years, blah, blah, blah. Then he went on to say that California’s fracking is vertical, unlike what’s happening with gas fracking, and that was a blatant lie.
No, oil fracking is not unlike gas fracking in the Marcellus gas shale play, and just as scary, California also engages in well acid stimulation using highly toxic hydrofluoric acid. Whether vertical or horizontal, every time a well is bored, a large amount of CH4 escapes into the atmosphere, which has been proven to be even more catastrophic in terms of contributing to global warming.
Furthermore, horizontal hydraulic fracking does not promise high yields, and historically does not produce high yields, being the impetus to bore more and more wells. That’s the reason oil fracked wells are encroaching into residential areas; next to schools, homes, hospitals, and institutions for the elderly.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization that keeps very close tabs on fracking in California:
Horizontal fracking has been documented in 10 California counties — Colusa, Glenn, Kern, Los Angeles, Monterey, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Sutter, Kings and Ventura. Oil companies have also fracked offshore wells hundreds of times in the ocean near California’s coast, from Seal Beach to the Santa Barbara Channel.
In Kern County, California’s major oil-producing county, 50 percent to 60 percent of new oil wells are fracked, according to estimates by Halliburton. And fracking may have been done elsewhere in California, since state officials haven’t monitored or tracked the practice until recently.
Fracking can release dangerous petroleum hydrocarbons, including benzene, toluene and xylene. It can increase levels of ground-level ozone, a key risk factor for respiratory illness. The pollutants in fracking water can also enter our air when that water is dumped into waste pits and then evaporates. Air pollution caused by fracking may contribute to health problems in people living near natural-gas and oil drilling sites, according to a study by researchers with the Colorado School of Public Health.
Either Jerry Brown has a serious case of cognitive dissonance or he’s just a liar who has taken $2.5 million form the oil industry. You pick.
This is a silly article. Fracking uses a comparatively tiny amount of water; about 300 acre feet in total for all of 2013, according to the State. Some of this is non-potable formation water, to boot. The many millions in GDP and tax revenue produced as a consequence of using that water dwarfs any kind of agricultural production.
The author cites no specific instances of groundwater being polluted in California during the 40 or so years that fracking has been practiced here. That is because there are none.
If you want to halt all oil and gas exploration in our state, just say so honestly. See how the idea goes over with the general public.
And here I thought Calbuzz was friendly to our Governor Brown or are you folks becoming frisky against him to simply help Hillary keep the Governor from running for President?
Brown has a great tool to use against the anti-fracking enviro wackos weather or not Hillary is among them! Our commuters currently save over $1 a gallon of gas on their commutes because of mostly U.S. fracking which has brought the world cheaper oil.
And these anti-frackers don’t use their brains or geology 101 info as they predict environmental disasters. They claim unscientifically that pumping back into the ground fracking wastewater about 10,000 feet deep is environmentally dangerous. If any portion of such brackish water were ever to creep back up to the ground, it would not harm a single soul or animal living today for such creep would take thousands of years. Second, the act of such creep through the earth over time would filter out much if not all of the harmful ingredients. Therefore the claims of future harm coming from fracking are driven by irrational fears and not by science. Fortunately, our Governor has not been captured by those fears. Go Jerry go!
Good sirs,
I gotta defend Jerry and his so called word salad here. Chuck Todd asked (and yes the full context is important):
“Well, speaking climate change, some environmentalists are not happy with you because of fracking, that you’ve allowed fracking to go on in California. I know you have a study coming out later in the summer where you may make a final decision on that. But considering how much water, by the way, is used for fracking, isn’t that alone, your water crisis in California, isn’t that alone enough reason to prohibit fracking or temporarily stop it?”
How much water? Seriously? It’s something like 10 million gallons a year of water for fracking (from KQED). That’s roughly 3.84615385e-7 % of the water used in urban environments (according to SWRCB) or the amount of water 650 typical homes use a year.
So Brown was absolutely correct to say “no not at all” and move on to the part of the question with you know actual legitimacy — the question of environmental values. Calbuzz argues for the following position in that regard:
“It’s time for Gov. Brown to face facts: there is no defense for fracking in California – no environmental or economic rationale and it’s a huge waste of water.”
What’s your alternative? Do you want to import more oil from the Middle East and other destabilized parts of the world? Do you really want to criticize Jerry for not doing enough to support renewables when California is a world leader in this space? Do you not want to use clean burning, economically viable natural gas?
And yes natural gas is much better than coal and oil — a simple fact stemming from CH4 (aka natural gas) having less carbon than C (aka coal). That’s just like basic chemistry.
Of course, the real issue isn’t all these facts and figures about how trivial the water used in fracking is or the relatively low amount of carbon produced by natural gas.
It’s a question of values. And here there’s always been two major strands in the environmental movement. There’s the school of thought that lusts after a pure pristine environment completely untouched by the hand of man. Exhibit A deep ecologists and the environmental outrage industrial complex.
Then there’s the pragmatic school of thought that values the inherent beauty and long run societal value of California’s environment but understands that the real world demands tradeoffs. That’s the sort of thinking Jerry’s showing here and I couldn’t agree more.
Cheers,
Patrick
California fracking does use less water than horizontal fracking for natural gas in the Eastern US, but far more than you are citing. According to a Ceres report (and California’s data are far from adequate and largely dependent on oil companies), fracking in California from Jan. 1 2011 to May 31, 2013 consumed 113 million gallons of water and 98% of the wells were in areas of high or extreme water stress during drought conditions. This doesn’t even address the chemical and other pollution of ground water that caused state regulators to shut down a number of wells. http://www.ceres.org/resources/reports/hydraulic-fracturing-water-stress-water-demand-by-the-numbers/view
So let’s say the oil companies are deflating their water use numbers by 10x and let’s use your number as the baseline. That’s still roughly 0.0000007 times CA’s urban water use.
Your point about groundwater pollution is valid though I’d note the Governor is right to say this is a proven technology that’s been used for the past 50 + years.
Cheers
Phil, Obama supports fracking. Here’s a Huff Post piece calling him out. So Obama’s a whore too?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-ruffalo/stop-fracking_b_3786370.html
“Five Ways to Stop President Obama’s Plan to Frack America”
Whoa hot topic! To calm things down let me propose that we all simply agree that politicians everywhere are whores, but that calling them such is unfair to hard working prostitutes worldwide.