The Boom (37 page)

The issue came to a head in January 2010. Cornell University was holding a ceremony to inaugurate two natural gas–fired turbines to provide power and heat for the school, located three counties west of the Ross #1. Cornell had relied on coal to generate heat, but as part of an effort to reduce its carbon emissions, it switched fuels. Bruce Nilles, the head of the national Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign, was there to congratulate the school. So was Kate Bartholomew, a high school biology teacher who was the volunteer chair of the Sierra Club’s local group. She confronted Nilles about the Sierra Club’s tolerance of natural gas and had what she later described as a tense moment. A month later, National Public Radio interviewed her about her opposition to fracking. “I don’t want to walk out and see five-acre drill pads all over my hillside. Yeah, and I don’t want my water to be contaminated,” she said. The reporter also interviewed Carl Pope for the segment, who conceded there was some friction with local New York chapters.

He went on to make a statement that was a step too far for many Sierra Club members in New York. “What’s happening with the new discoveries of natural gas is that parts of the country that historically didn’t pay any environmental bill for energy production because they didn’t produce energy are going to start paying a bigger share of the bill,” he said. When Roger Downs heard this on the radio, he became upset. Carl Pope was betraying his members, he thought. “That is a pretty stark thing for an environmental leader to say, to think we have an obligation to despoil our own turf. It is a hard pill to swallow,” he recalled. Pope seemed to be saying that to use more gas—and therefore less coal—people in New York and elsewhere had to suck it up and accept the wells and the pads. “It was a real turning point,” Downs said. “Carl got a beating from that point on.” Pope had already said he was stepping down as executive director but would remain as the club’s chairman. By late 2011, the national Sierra Club’s board of directors had decided he would need to leave this post as well and cut all ties with the organization that had been his home for eighteen years.

With Pope no longer at the helm, local antifrack activists began to dismantle the Sierra Club’s endorsement of natural gas. At the time, other environmental groups were also backtracking. Prominent environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, hailed the “revolution in natural gas production” in 2009 and said that it “has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight.” Two years later, he changed his view, saying the gas industry and government regulators weren’t doing enough to protect the environment and safeguard communities. The antifracking movement grew as events raised questions about the competence of the energy industry. In April 2010 the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. For nearly three months, the industry failed to cap the steady torrent of oil flowing out of the damaged well. An undersea camera broadcast a live feed, which played around the clock in the corner of cable news channels. It was the first oil spill given a close-up in the era of reality television. The industry’s futile attempts to shut down the well eroded the public’s trust of energy companies and their promises that they could drill wells in an environmentally sound manner.

As this infamous well dominated cable news from late April until mid-July, a driller lost control of a gas well in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, sending a geyser of gas, water, and chemicals into the air. A blowout preventer failed to contain the well, just as the blowout preventer had failed to shut down the Macondo well that the Deepwater Horizon was drilling. Three weeks later, in June 2010, Josh Fox’s documentary
Gasland
premiered on television. It showed striking images of residents near gas wells lighting their faucets on fire, a claim later contested credibly by the energy industry and state officials. Fox emerged as a skilled provocateur, challenging the industry’s statements that they were responsible operators, and a leading figure of the antifrack movement.

His documentary was like a match struck in a bone-dry forest. It aired amid daily doses of the Deepwater Horizon and BP’s inept attempts to shut down the well. And distrust of the fossil-fuel industry grew with every report of the rapidly melting Arctic ice. Communities in upstate New York were split between people who wanted the economic benefit of drilling and those opposed who had moved there because it was quiet and bucolic. A
New York Times
article about the actor Mark Ruffalo captured the split. Ruffalo lives on a forty-seven-acre former dairy farm in upstate New York where the industry wanted to drill wells into the Marcellus Shale. Ruffalo led a crusade to keep out the rigs. His neighbor, dairy farmer William Graby, was quoted as describing him as an outsider with a big bank account. “We need industry and jobs so we can send our kids to college,” he told the reporter.

While this conflict played out in the communities above the shale, opposition grew in cities and on college campuses. “The fracking issue has become a huge grassroots issue. You haven’t seen anything like it since the antinuclear movement in late 1970s and early 1980s in terms of real, community oriented, grassroots activism,” said Alan Nogee, who headed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ clean energy and climate program for twelve years.

By the end of the summer of 2010, the antifracking movement had coalesced and gained strength. Embracing natural gas as a fuel that could help reduce coal consumption and enable the growth of renewable energy became difficult for environmental groups without losing their grassroots supporters. “National environmental groups really don’t have a choice if they are going to remain viable,” said Nogee. Only the Environmental Defense Fund, among the large national environmental groups, remained committed to natural gas and worked hard to get the industry to adopt better drilling practices.

In Albany, Downs grew increasingly leery of any potential benefits of natural gas. He worried that fracking allowed too much natural gas, itself a greenhouse gas, to escape into the atmosphere. He also wondered if natural gas was really a bridge fuel, connecting the coal-dominated present to a renewable energy future. The gas industry was doing such a good job of finding gas that it was creating a glut and driving down prices. Gas wasn’t just pushing coal off the power grid. It was also making it harder for new wind and solar plants to compete. “The glut of cheap natural gas was directly competing with renewables. As much as we enjoyed the notion it was thrashing coal, it also provided a new barrier to wind and solar plants,” he said.

Over time, Downs kept an eye on the Ross #1 well, an hour southwest of Albany, where his personal opposition to fracking had begun. He got to know local landowners and obtained numerous documents. Eventually nine residents claimed that their water wells had been contaminated and that some horses had died. But these claims bothered Downs. Gastem and the state had tested the water wells extensively before drilling had begun—and continued testing afterward. “There was not a whole lot of difference in terms of water quality,” he said. The rural water wasn’t pristine to begin with, and there were no signs that fracking chemicals had entered the nearby well water. “The battery of tests wasn’t exhaustive,” he said, “but you would assume some of the chemicals would turn up.”

He felt certain the residents weren’t fabricating their claims, and none ever brought a lawsuit or sought compensation. “There was something really genuine about the community distress and the loss of quality of life. The truck traffic, it is a very rural area, dirt roads. It would keep them sleepless. The noise, the smell was very traumatizing. And this was touted as a completely successful, environmentally safe experience. I have to say the testing confirmed that. Yet universally, the neighbors complained of health problems,” he said. “I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t sense they were lying. It has been difficult for me to reconcile. I want empirical proof, yet I can see something really bad has happened to these folks. But I can’t prove it. That’s a really hard position for me with my science background.”

With the appointment of Michael Brune as executive director, the Sierra Club’s position on natural gas changed. He believes that support of fracking isn’t a tenable position for the country’s largest environmental group. “Fracking has exploded around countries, hundreds of thousands of new wells being drilled in regions or communities that haven’t had that industrial production of energy. . . . People are confronted with the process of energy production in a way that they haven’t in the past,” he said. “There is great concern about the degradation of key ecological landscapes. There are also concerns about the impact of fracking on water supplies air quality and on greenhouse gases.” By 2011, the Sierra Club had overhauled its energy policy and produced a document significantly more critical of natural gas. The new policy goal was to “develop and use as little natural gas as possible.” The Sierra Club’s new preference was to replace existing nuclear and coal plants with renewable energy, not natural gas.

Brune said this change is partly because of a rise in confidence about renewable energy. In 2007, when Carl Pope first accepted Aubrey McClendon’s donations, electric power from wind, solar, and plants that burned biomass made up 2.7 percent of the US power supply. By the fall of 2012, when Brune made these comments about fracking, the figure had risen to 3.7 percent. Electricity from coal, which the Sierra Club viewed as the number one threat to climate change, had dropped from 48.9 percent to 38.7 percent. Natural gas had risen from 23.5 percent to 33.6 percent. Renewable energy was chipping away the dominant position long held by coal. Natural gas was smashing it with a sledgehammer.

I asked Brune if he considered natural gas an ally in the fight against climate change and carbon emissions. “If you were to have asked me does gas help or hinder our efforts to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions and reduce them, I would say yes, it both helps and hinders,” he said. Low natural gas prices are helping speed up the retirement of about one hundred coal plants across the country. “If you think that gas isn’t playing a role in the downsizing of the coal industry,” he observed, “then you are not really paying attention to how the power sector is working. But at the same time, if you think that a large reliance on natural gas to displace coal or replace coal won’t have an adverse effect on our climate and greenhouse gas emissions, then you also don’t know much about how gas actually works, or how fracking actually works, and what the environmental costs of gas are likely to be.”

Imagine you could snap your fingers, Brune said, and speed up the production of shale gas in a way that limits its impact on land, water, and communities. Global use of gas increases by 50 percent over the next couple decades and overtakes coal as the second-most used fuel sources (though still trailing oil). The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based organization that analyzes energy policy for the world’s leading industrialized nations, explored that scenario. It still wouldn’t be enough, Brune said, citing the IEA’s conclusion. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would still rise to 650 parts per million, from 392 parts per million, the level at the time. That “would lock us into 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming, which is catastrophic for the planet,” he said. The only viable option, he continues, is to use wind and solar to meet any new energy demand.

Environmental activist Bill McKibben has an even starker view. Using gas to displace coal might have made a difference twenty-five years ago, he said. “We are so close to the edge now that what we require is the very, very quick conversion not to somewhat cleaner fossil fuels but off fossil fuels altogether,” he said. According to McKibben, natural gas is a half measure, and the crisis is so severe that we can’t waste time with half measures anymore.

Pope sees the situation differently. Natural gas, he said, has made a significant dent in carbon emissions. He calls the collapse of coal “a fantastic success story.”

Back in January 2007, before natural gas production began to surge and just a month before Aubrey McClendon launched his “Coal Is Filthy” ad campaign, US energy consumption released 543 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a single month. That includes coal power and natural gas power plants as well as what came out of the exhausts of airplanes, cars, and trucks. Five years later, in January 2012, the United States sent 479 million metric tons into the air. That’s a 12 percent reduction. If you drill down into the data, you will discover that coal plants released 48 million metric tons less, a 25 percent reduction. Better fuel efficiency from cars running on gasoline and diesel led to a 17-million-metric-ton drop, down 11 percent. Increased use of natural gas to generate electricity, run factories, and heat homes led to a 14-million-metric-ton increase, or about 11 percent.

The United States is one of the few places in the world that decreased its carbon output—and decreased it dramatically. It never ratified the Kyoto Protocol—a United Nations effort to enact greenhouse gas emission reductions—but is on pace to exceed the targets anyway, even though many signatory nations have failed to meet their obligations. The International Energy Agency, forecasting ahead a couple decades to a world with more abundant gas, believes the United States and other major industrialized nations will lower their CO
₂
output, although increased energy consumption in China and the rest of the world offset that gain. An increased use of natural gas, by itself, “cannot on its own provide the answer to the challenge of climate change.” That’s the point Michael Brune and Bill McKibben both make. But the IEA looked at an alternative scenario, with less gas and more coal. The result, predictably, was higher carbon dioxide emissions. And more could be done to lower natural gas’s greenhouse footprint: use pumps and compressors with better emissions controls and eliminate gas venting, a practice the industry uses to drill wells quickly. People worried about climate change “may find it difficult to accept,” the IEA report stated, but burning more gas helps limit emissions.