The Boom (34 page)

“Or the biggest question of all, and the one for which we have generational responsibility, is this one: that is the global environmental impact, and that refers to the question of should we even do it,” he said, drawing murmurs of agreement from the crowd. “How do we get from where we are today, which is not sustainable even with shale gas that is a nonrenewable resource, and it won’t get us past our grandchildren, our grandchildren’s generation? How are we going to get to that golden era when we stop kicking the can down the road to our kids and grandkids and suck it up—or as they say nowadays, man up—and solve the damn problem now?”

John Trallo moderated the three-hour debate. It helped crystallize his thinking about fracking. He moved up to Sullivan County from Philadelphia in 2001, not long after his wife died of breast cancer. He doesn’t consider himself an environmentalist, but his wife made him promise to move somewhere away from chemicals to raise their son. He chose Sullivan County because he remembered camping there in the 1970s. A music teacher and sometime recording session guitarist, he found clients who wanted music lessons or to record a demo. One of his students made it to the top five on the TV talent show
American Idol
in 2010.

He turned down offers to lease his 1934 house, which sits on eight-tenths of an acre in the village of Sonestown. “They made me an offer to industrialize my property. I said, ‘That’s not why I moved here, and I’m not interested,’ ” he said. The industry settled all around him. Down the street, a dilapidated schoolhouse was fixed up and turned into housing for twenty-eight oil-field workers. During the summer, he keeps his windows closed and runs his air-conditioning to keep out the smell of diesel wafting from a nearby two-lane road that has become the primary way for trucks to get into Sullivan County. He finally offered to sell his house to an energy company, but didn’t get any takers.

Eighteen months after the Engelder-Ingraffea debate, he said his most vivid recollection of the night was his reaction to Engelder calling on Sullivan County to make a sacrifice for the good of the country. “No one asked me to make that sacrifice, and I think I’ve sacrificed enough,” he said. “It is very easy for those not living here to ask us to make a sacrifice.”

On my drive out of Sullivan County, back to Philadelphia, Trallo stuck in my mind. Most of the farmers I met signed a lease and agreed to take bonus checks drawn from Chesapeake’s treasury in exchange for letting wells be drilled. Like the Reibsons, some ended up feeling steamrolled by the changes. Trallo never signed a lease or took any money. He chose Sullivan County as a bucolic place to live and raise his son. The arrival of fracking blindsided him.

I also thought about what a longtime resident had told me. One afternoon I ate lunch with the Shoemakers. The father, “Doc,” was a longtime veterinarian known around the county for his skillful care for heifers. More recently, residents got a chuckle when, in his nineties, he chased a black bear near his house in town to get a good photograph. His son John owned and edited the
Sullivan County Review
, the local weekly paper. Both embraced the jobs created by Marcellus drilling and saw it as a much-needed boost to the local economy. Over sandwiches at Pam’s Restaurant, John said he was having trouble understanding fracking opponents. All the gas being drilled in rural Pennsylvania was headed to the big cities near the coasts. The city dwellers were getting all of the benefits of this new source of energy, while the locals were the ones who had to wait at the county’s only traffic light behind large eighteen-wheelers carrying fracking equipment and watched as their landscape was crisscrossed by pipelines. Shoemaker said most locals were willing to make the sacrifice because of the economic opportunity being created. The strongest antifracking sentiment came from the cities, he said, where people weren’t being asked to give up anything. “Our gas from Sullivan will go from here to New York and Philadelphia and lower the electricity rates of the people protesting against us,” he said. It was an irony he had trouble swallowing.

I thought about his point as the miles rolled by. Philadelphians didn’t have to choose whether to lease their land. The Marcellus formation ends before the city’s western suburban sprawl begins. But they did use a lot of energy and expected it to be available to keep them warm. Consuming energy while protesting against energy production seems hypocritical. What were the growing antifracking protests against? Who was right?

11

BLESSINGS OF THE POPE

It was a beautiful fall day for a protest. A few hundred people marched through downtown Philadelphia chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, hydrofracking’s got to go.” By the time they arrived outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center, the crowd had swelled. Many carried “Ban Fracking Now” posters. One woman wore a “What the Frack” T-shirt. A Lutheran pastor in full vestment addressed the crowd, a rabbi blew a ceremonial ram’s horn as a “wake-up call.” Filmmaker Josh Fox, in his trademark baseball hat and thick-framed glasses, told the crowd that “fracking is a disaster unfolding across Pennsylvania.”

Inside the convention center, more than a thousand energy executives were attending a conference on the Marcellus Shale. The keynote speaker, Aubrey McClendon, took the stage and called the protesters naive. “Their real game plan is to use political pressure to force Americans to pay exorbitant energy costs for the so-called ‘green’ fuel sources that they prefer,” he said. But what would happen if we followed their lead? he asked. Wind and solar power can’t power the US economy. If we ban fracking, natural gas prices would skyrocket. Crops that require natural-gas-based fertilizers would cost more. Homes and business and factories would lose their heat and power.

“What a great vision of the future! We’re cold, it’s dark, and we’re hungry. I have no interest in turning the clock back to the Dark Ages as our opponents do,” he said. It was typical McClendon: a provocative, in-your-face attack. To the protesters outside, he was the face of fossil fuels and a man bent on destroying the environment.

Carl Pope doesn’t agree. “I think Aubrey McClendon will undoubtedly turn out to be one of the major contributors to giving the world a shot at protecting the climate,” he told me in an interview. Pope ran the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest environmental group, for eighteen years. The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, has been at the forefront of fights to preserve wilderness and clean up the environment. During his tenure, Pope began to believe that protecting the environment in the twenty-first century meant fighting climate change.

“The function of the environmental movement is to enable local people to defend local places from immediate threats,” he said. “But the science is telling us these places aren’t even going to be here. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is going to be underwater. So what are we talking about? Forget protecting it, let’s just stabilize the climate. Without a stable climate, the whole idea of protecting places with ecosystems and critters becomes impossible.”

In a perfect world, he knew fracking had an environmental impact. But the world that Pope saw wasn’t perfect. It was facing a dire threat. To stop the planet from heating up meant stopping new coal-fired power plants from being built and shutting down existing coal plants. In that fight, Pope and McClendon became improbable allies. The natural gas that Chesapeake and others were finding became an invaluable tool. “I thought, and still think, that Aubrey was a perfectly reasonable environmentalist, but that wasn’t what motivated him. What motivated him was he needed markets for his fuel,” said Pope.

The unusual partnership between Pope and McClendon began in 2006. Pope had recently guided the Sierra Club toward a greater emphasis on energy and shutting down coal plants. A couple friends had suggested that he meet with McClendon, who they said was also interested in fighting coal. The men had different motivations but a common goal. They met first in Connecticut, near an energy conference where McClendon was speaking. The energy executive began explaining to the environmental leader about fracking and how the once-scarce natural gas was about to become more abundant. McClendon explained that a lot more gas was going to be available to replace coal to make electricity.

Hearing this was a revelation to Pope. “It is going to run a few power plants and heat a bunch of homes—that was what we thought natural gas was for, and that was fine,” he recalled. McClendon continued his pitch, explaining that a kilowatt-hour of electricity generated from gas released half as much carbon into the atmosphere as the same kilowatt-hour from coal. Pope was intrigued. He had never heard of fracking before and shared the conventional wisdom, at the time, that gas would remain scarce. Toward the end of 2006, the two men soon met again, in Washington, and then a third time, in Oklahoma City.

When Pope first met McClendon, each man was at a turning point in his life and career. McClendon was still on his way to enormous wealth and success that was built precariously on debt and the most volatile of commodities. If Chesapeake and the rest of the industry overshot and produced more gas than needed, prices could collapse. One way to prevent this glut was to get more industries, power plants, and people to burn natural gas—even if this meant denigrating coal. Pope was trying to steer the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest, most influential environmental group, away from its historic focus on protecting places and endangered creatures. He wanted to focus on the climate. Enemy number one was coal. Traveling very different paths, Pope and McClendon had arrived at the same place.

Before they met, McClendon had already begun to develop his own plan of attack against coal. The first salvo was unleashed on February 4, 2007.

Ken Kramer was at home in Austin doing what he usually did on Sunday morning: reading the newspaper while sipping his coffee. For nearly two decades, Kramer had the often thankless job of being director of the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club. His years at the helm of the state’s Sierra Club made him the state’s unofficial top environmentalist. He knew just about everyone in Texas who fought to save state parkland, protect endangered species, and lower industrial emissions.

As he flipped through the pages of the
Austin American-Statesman
, he came across a full-page ad that caught his attention. Staring out from the page was an enormous close-up photograph of a beautiful young woman with azure eyes. Her face was covered with dark smudges, evoking midcentury images of sooty coal miners. “Face it. Coal is filthy,” the ad read. “Texas needs clean skies. Not black skies. Stop the filthy coal plants.”

“Where did this come from?” he asked himself. Then another thought, “This cost a hell of a lot of money.” Who had the money to pay for this giant ad? Certainly not the Sierra Club or any other environmental group that came to mind. He scanned the ad, and his eyes landed on the name of the group at the bottom of the page. What was the Texas Clean Sky Coalition? The ad encouraged people to attend an anticoal rally the following Sunday that Kramer had organized. It was as if he had just learned he had a rich, generous uncle, he thought. The uncle’s name was Aubrey McClendon.

The rally protested a proposal to build several new coal plants wending its way through regulatory agencies. Texas’s largest electricity utility, TXU Energy, was a century-old pillar of the state’s business establishment. It had been around, in one form or another, since the first forty streetlamps were installed in downtown Dallas. In the early 2000s, the company had made an ill-conceived investment in European power plants. The move had gone poorly. A new chief executive was hired to clean up TXU’s balance sheet and restore it to profitability. After studying the market, John Wilder came up with a simple back-to-basics plan: burn coal and generate electricity. In April 2006 he unveiled his ambitious plan. TXU would spend $10 billion to build eleven new coal power plants. The protesters wanted to stop him.

Sitting in his one-story Austin home, Kramer wondered about the Texas Clean Sky Coalition. He figured it was one of the new ad hoc groups that had popped up to fight TXU’s coal plants. Whoever it was had a big checkbook, he thought.

The reason Kramer didn’t know anything about the Texas Clean Sky Coalition was that it had come into existence only a couple weeks earlier. The name was misleading. The coalition was one company—Chesapeake Energy—and the unfolding campaign was underwritten by Aubrey McClendon. He had decided to get into a scrap with coal. Over the next few days, Kramer got calls from Sierra Club activists in other parts of Texas. The ads were running in Dallas and Houston and elsewhere. The ads varied—there was a young white girl, a Hispanic male, an older white woman—but the message was consistent. Coal was deadly. “Live longer. Live better,” the ads stated. “No new coal plants.”

It was a stunningly effective campaign and marked a significant turning point in US energy history. Energy companies can be fierce competitors against one another in the marketplace, but there was a gentlemen’s agreement that they didn’t attack one another publicly. They might battle to win allies on state utility commissions and in Congress, but these skirmishes took place behind closed doors or in obscure regulatory meetings in state capitals. McClendon hadn’t just disregarded this deal, he had torn it up into a thousand pieces, doused them in lighter fluid, and lit them on fire. The head of the National Mining Association, the Big Coal lobby in Washington, later sniffed that a McClendon-backed attack on coal “marks a disturbing departure from the understanding we tacitly share in the energy sector to avoid denigrating competing fuels.” Perhaps the lobbyist didn’t understand. That was McClendon’s goal.