“Fake news” has a partner in the seething mire of environmental politics. It’s the fake issue.
To resist pipeline construction or hydraulic fracturing of wells drilled horizontally into shale, pressure groups warn of threats to air, water, health, wildlife, landscapes, or other categories of physical goodness about which most people legitimately care. But those are fake issues. They usually dissolve once concerned members of the public recognize limits to the supposed threats and learn about measures planned to mitigate them.
The real issue—always—is future production and use of oil and natural gas, which environmental groups, unlike the public, fanatically oppose.
Proposition 112
Fake issues swarmed around Proposition 112, which would have severely limited oil and gas drilling in Colorado but was sensibly defeated by voters on Nov. 6.
“Grave risks clearly linked to the toxic emissions from fracking [sic] include cancer, respiratory problems, endocrine disruption, low birth weight babies, birth defects, high infant mortality, and more,” warns the web site of Colorado Rising, the group whose petition drive pushed Proposition 112 onto the ballot. “Over 1,300 peer-reviewed public health studies have shown negative health and safety impacts from fracking too close to people, which is why states like New York and Maryland and countries like Ireland, France, and Germany have banned it outright. Fracking fouls our air, water, and climate and deteriorates home values.”
If any of that were even partly true, Coloradans would have been justified in not just increasing the distance required between oil and gas developments and occupied buildings but in banning hydraulic fracturing altogether. As a majority of Colorado voters saw, however, the warnings are wildly exaggerated. They are, in fact, fake issues.
Yet they have knee-jerk appeal. People, after all, should be kept safely distant from “grave risks” and “toxic emissions.” That seems obvious. Within that narrow context, in fact, Proposition 112’s 2,500-ft setback minimum might not have been enough. That might seem obvious, too.
Yet assertions of what seems obvious are better at launching issues than they are winning them. Analysis happens. The hyperbole in activists’ gloomy predictions becomes evident. Voters know people aren’t dying from exposure to fracing. Most know the operation, which can be annoying up close, doesn’t last long—certainly not long enough to make exposure to the work seriously threatening. Eventually, fake issues melt away and reveal motive.
With Proposition 112, as with opposition to other oil and gas work elsewhere, the motive clearly is to restrict drilling and production to the extent possible. It’s central to the push by climate activists to leave oil and natural gas in the ground, which they believe is essential to the prevention of catastrophic global warming.
In July, the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission estimated that imposition of a 2,500-ft setback requirement would make 54% of the state’s total land area and 85% of nonfederal land unavailable for new oil and gas development (OGJ, July 16, 2018, p. 16). The effective land withdrawal would have been greater in the top five oil and gas-producing counties: 61% of total area and 94% of nonfederal area. For resource development in Colorado and the service businesses and communities it supports, passage would have been devastating.
Apparently, most Coloradans who voted on Nov. 6 discounted the fake issues and rejected the core motive. This happens regularly. Economic sacrifice demanded in response to environmental doomsaying consistently fares poorly in elections. That’s why so much of the activist agenda starts with fake issues.
Not first effort
Proposition 112, a statutory measure, wasn’t Colorado’s first 2,500-ft setback proposal. A constitutional amendment containing the poison pill for drilling failed in the 2016 election. As OGJ Washington Editor Nick Snow suggested in his Watching Government column last week, other such efforts will follow (OGJ, Nov. 12, 2018, p. 20).
Coloradans, therefore, should expect another round of fake issues designed to frighten them out of prosperity. By now, they should be accustomed to the ruse.