New York Times Looks Like Industry Shill in Latest Story on Gas Drilling

By Adam Federman, Earth Island Journal. Posted June 25, 2009.

"When it comes to protecting the public's health, it's not unreasonable to require these companies to disclose the chemicals they are using in our communities – especially near our water sources," said DeGette in a June 9 statement. "Our bill simply closes an unconscionable Bush-Cheney loophole by requiring the oil and gas industry to follow the same rules as everyone else.”

In just a year the industry's hopes have taken a sharp turn. As congress moves to increase oversight, the price of natural gas has plummeted from record high levels last summer when the rush was at its peak. Today the price of gas per thousand cubic feet is just above $4. For extraction to be profitable the price needs to be somewhere between $4 and $6. A year ago it was hovering around $13.

"The best thing in our favor is the economic downturn because this is not a cheap process," Bruce Ferguson, a member of Catskill Citizens, told me a couple of months ago. "Hydraulic fracturing is a very expensive way to extract gas. You're not putting a straw into the ground and sucking out the gas. If the price of gas remains low enough, if alternative technologies come online quickly, the incentive to go ahead with this could diminish. In the meantime public awareness is growing by the day.”

Even as public awareness grows, however, the gas industry is pushing hard to convince Americans that natural gas is the solution to our energy problems and that closing the Halliburton Loophole will have potentially devastating consequences. It's clean, they say, and it's ours. We reduce our dependence on foreign oil and at the same time "battle global warming," as the NYT puts it in rather grandiose fashion.

Rather than explain to its readers why the Potential Gas Committee (or its member volunteers) might have a vested interested in encouraging hydraulic fracturing as a new energy policy is hashed out in congress, the paper of record simply states that for "advocates of the gas industry, the report vindicates the potential of natural gas in the economy." Then they close by quoting the managing director for policy analysis at the American Gas Association, Chris McGill, failing to mention that it is one of the institutions listed among the Committee's volunteer members. Not only that but McGill himself, according to Committee program assistant Linda D'Epagnier is an observer with the PGC and, in his role (he's been involved for several years), handles all press releases and acts more or less as a PR official for the organization. He's also a Director on the board of the Potential Gas Agency. That's a fact the Times should have pointed out.

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