Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in “Gambing with the planet”, about the nature of calculated risk and unexpected catastrophic events, ‘black swans’, and the effects not only on the global economy but the very health of the planet. How many other ‘black swans’ like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are out there and are they in fact rare events or are they, as is the case of water contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing, happening every day?

Before the Great Recession, America’s economic gurus – from the head of the Federal Reserve to the titans of finance – boasted that we had learned to master risk….
These wizards of finance, it turned out, didn’t understand the Intricacies of risk, let alone the dangers posed by “fat-tail distributions”- a statistical term for rare events with huge consequences, sometimes called “black swans.” Events that were supposed to happen once In a century – or even once In the lifetime of the universe – seemed to happen every ten years. Worse, not only was the frequency of these events vastly underestimated; so was the astronomical damage they would cause – something like the meltdowns that keep dogging the nuclear Industry.

Jeff Bishop, CEO of the Port of Coos Bay in his recent ‘open letter to port district residents‘ writes, “…recent technological advances utilized in natural gas production are resulting in significant new volumes of gas throughout North America”. He is talking about hydraulic fracturing a process in which huge amounts of water and sand mixed with a cocktail of chemicals is used to break up shale deposits thousands of feet below the surface to release trapped pockets of methane gas. The sand holds the fractures open to allow the gas, the water and the chemicals to rise to the surface. It could be said that hydrofracking is an elaborate way of forcing the earth to fart.

Hydrofracking is actually not new technology but has become much more prevalent and is used in the drilling of both oil and gas and is a prime suspect in the contamination of ground water and even of causing earthquakes.

The two injection wells are used to dispose of wastewater from natural-gas production. One is owned by Chesapeake Energy, and the other by Clarita Operating. They agreed March 4 to temporarily cease injection operations at the request of the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission.

The commission said preliminary studies showed evidence potentially linking injection activities with nearly 1,000 quakes in the region over the past six months.

The link between hydrofracking and drinking and ground water contamination is so great the city of Philadelphia has banned the practice in watershed areas feeding the city water supply.

This devastating effects of natural gas drilling is not news to Bishop or the Port. During a January, 2010 Coos County Urban Renewal Agency Board Meeting , staff member Martin Callery brought up an Oregonian article about natural gas imports in the US.

“…Mr. Callery added that the article in the Oregonian was a very short snapshot in time over a 5-year period. One of the factors that they didn’t deal with is the fact that the Chinese are working hard to access natural resource assets in far west China which includes a lot of natural gas and right now they are a big buyer of LNG. They are building facilities but once they get access to their own resources, they will put gas back into the marketplace. That is where a facility like this which is available to take gas is going to get some use. The other thing, which the Oregonian did not deal much was everyone talks about this tremendous natural gas resource which is coming on line in the US or North America, but it is shale gas. Despite everyone’s contention that it is a huge resource, the production costs are astronomical compared the sweet gas coming out of a gas deposit. If you want to get an idea of what the economic and environmental impacts are, there was a great article earlier in 2009 in National Geographic. They showed one of the shale operations in Northwestern Alberta. The environmental impacts are just unbelievable. Mr. Bishop shared that in one of his former jobs, he had to inspect oil and gas drilling operations. He said putting in a well is nasty. If you rely on ground water for drinking water; once you start pumping stuff down in the ground, it doesn’t know where the boundaries are, it goes everywhere. There are literally stories in Oklahoma where people say you can turn on the tap water and light it.”

Bishop says “putting in a well is nasty…If you rely on ground water for drinking water ” but that was when he was promoting Jordan Cove as an import terminal, where presumably it is satisfactory to ruin drinking water in foreign lands. Now that he is promoting the use of the terminal for export (not that he has any say in this whatsoever) he appears to believe it is okay to destroy the quality of life for rural American’s homesteaded above gas rich shale.

It is precisely this type of flip flop, saying whatever sounds good at the moment, that causes distrust of the Port. Companies like Jordan Cove or Oregon Resources gallop into economically distressed rural communities promising jobs all over the country and always find local champions to help promote their aims. All too often, the promises fall flat and a recent study of the coal industry, says these companies bring fewer jobs than promised and the costs to the communities are enormous.

Chattanooga’s Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies has completed a first-ever report to compare the number of jobs promised by coal-fired power plants to the actual jobs brought to a community where one is built.

And the jobs are few, especially when compared to the environmental and health concerns that accompany coal-fired plants, according to the study.

In four of the five areas where coal-fired power plants came on line from 2005 to 2009, construction and operations delivered only a fraction of the jobs projected by officials touting the power plant benefits to local residents and county officials, said Ochs Center President and CEO David Eichenthal.

“There are clear costs in terms of environmental and health risks, but the thing that always sells local communities [on siting the plants] is the promise of jobs,” Eichenthal said. “What we found is that the costs are clear, but the benefits are not what they’re cracked up to be.”

Jordan Cove and the Port of Coos Bay have tried to sell the public on natural gas claiming it is cleaner than other fossil fuels but this is untrue. Dr. Anthony Ingraffea of Cornell University School of Civil and Environmental Engineering explains, “Natural gas burns cleaner than any other fossil fuel but it is not cleaner in its life cycle. Studies that are being done at Cornell University right now that are going to be released soon in peer reviewed journals will show conclusively that the life cycle cost in terms of carbon dioxide emission and methane emission from the development of gas from unconventional sources like shale is at least as dirty as coal.”
UPDATE: The Cornell study has been pre-released Methane and the Greenhouse-Gas Footprint of Natural Gas from Shale Formations

Those who stand to profit from natural gas extraction may turn a blind eye to the harmful effects upon people’s lives and future generations and ignore the known damage to the environment when it suits their purpose. It says volumes about their character and taking out a half page ad in a newspaper does nothing to improve it. Betting that geological time is on your side is gambling with lives.

Below is the full video Fracking Hell, from which many of the clips above are taken. It is well worth watching in full. The CBS clip used is available here

For more info watch Gasland