Anti-Gas Politics of Fear

Bryant LaTourette discusses the politics of fear used by so many anti-natural gas interests and he offers some great examples of what it all means:

http://eidmarcellus.org/marcellus-shale/a-love-affair-with-fear-the...

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Permalink Reply by Thomas J Shepstone on May 29, 2012 at 11:29am

Well said!

Permalink Reply by Tom Copley on May 29, 2012 at 7:42pm

I wonder if this approach to dispel the fear factor will ever prove realistic. IEA seems like a rather high powered group. Most of the countries in Europe belong to it as well as the U.S. Its Executive Director, Maria van der Hoeven, is a former Minister of Economic Affairs of the Netherlands.

She says:

“If the social and environmental impacts are not addressed properly, there is a very real possibility that public opposition to drilling for shale gas and other types of unconventional gas will halt the unconventional gas revolution in its tracks,”

and
“The industry must win public confidence by demonstrating exemplary performance;governments must ensure that appropriate policies and regulatory regimes are in place.”
Is chicken little gaining ground here? Can a group like this "save us"?
Permalink Reply by Tom Copley on May 30, 2012 at 8:26am

Problem -> reaction -> solution = IEA, and groups like them. Isn't that the recipe that they're trying to follow with their campaign of half-truths and exaggeration? Were there never any problem to start, then they'd simply have to invent one.

Perhaps like any good salesperson, van der Hoeven is merely "assuming the sale." She speaks quite confidently. We'll have to see if there's anything to her "social and environmental impacts."

There are a lot of people running scared right now. That, in itself, is a social impact. Or, is all this supposed fear only my big imagination merely running wild? That's been known to happen before, like when I got so excited about preparing for Y2K.

Repeat after me now, "there's nothing to fear, but fear itself." Ah, I do feel much better, because I repeated that mantra over and over. Don't you?

I am very positive that I am no longer scared. Hmm....

Permalink Reply by Moe on May 30, 2012 at 1:13pm

Tom,

I like the description of fear that uses it as an acronym: "FEAR = False Evidence Acting as Reality"

Permalink Reply by Jack Straw on May 30, 2012 at 9:06am


The advantage that those who belong to the Church of the Wholly Holy Anti-Gas have over the Righteous is that they freely challenge us to “prove a negative”.

Those who worship at the altar of the gods of Anti-Gas use “argumentum ad ignorantiam” to shift their burden of proof in a manner in which their protagonists are hobbled by the challenge to “prove a negative”.

Additionally they can resort to loaded questions - Yes or no, do you still beat your wife?

The Anti-Gas congregation have become experts in the practice of Logical Fallacy to further their twisted agenda (through twisting of their supposed “facts”).

Below is a nice description of the numerous tools in their repertoire:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

 

All IMHO,

                   JS

Permalink Reply by Thomas J Shepstone on May 30, 2012 at 9:22am

Hah!  Very good.

Permalink Reply by Jack Straw on May 30, 2012 at 4:16pm

Thanks for your encouragement and vote of confidence.

But, you still have much to learn.

Did your copy of "Logic for Dummies" arrive yet?

 

JS

Permalink Reply by Jack Straw on May 30, 2012 at 5:06pm

Pas probleme.

Pour moi, Descartes et Malebranche – aussi Camus.

Rappeler; tout les Monde, toujour le mene chose – toujour le merde!

 

Jacque Paille

Permalink Reply by Tom Copley on May 30, 2012 at 5:54pm

I think this is a better analogy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_finger_trap

The more you struggle against the Church That Is Full of Gas, the more you establish that fracking and gas drilling in general are controversial. People wouldn't be arguing over facts and logic were there nothing controversial about it. Once you can establish that these techniques are "controversial" then it shifts the burden of proof to the producer to prove its safe. As you mention, that involves necessarily trying to prove a negative. When you find yourself digging a hole like this, sometimes the best thing to do is to stop digging.

Permalink Reply by Thomas J Shepstone on May 31, 2012 at 2:55am

Yes, but ignoring a controversy someone else has generated also allows the latter's version of the "truth" to become the accepted narrative.  This is a classic problem and the industry, for far too long, ignored the building anti-gas effort and allowed it to develop legs.  It's all different now, but we're still dealing with the impacts of initially unchallenged lies.  Some things are best ignored and others are best challenged, but the decision as to which is which is never easy.   

Permalink Reply by Tom Copley on May 31, 2012 at 8:16am

I won't deny sometimes there is a need to fight fire with fire, and perhaps challenges from the environmental fringe were ignored too long for fear of breathing too much life into the controversy. That's not for me to say. However, constantly bashing enviro-crusaders gets tiresome after a while and has unintended consequences such as building a reputation for shale gas drilling as "controversial." Now it is. Before it wasn't. That seems like a form of blow-back worse than leaving a few unchallenged lies out there. I agree with you that these decisions are difficult to make, and the consequences to forecast. Glad someone else has to make them. It's more fun being an arm-chair general. ;-)

Permalink Reply by Moe on May 31, 2012 at 8:46am

I don't think it would matter what kind of gas drilling, or exploration for any fossil fuel, or any environmentally-friendly refinement of fossil fuels, is the subject, if it would interfere with or prevent the further development of their darling wind and solar energy sources. From their ivory tower, they see the development of our new-found natural gas resources as a huge, unwieldy torpedo headed directly at their ideology and they can only respond as they have historically done, with half-truths, pseudo-science, and all of the other nefarious tools that they employ to scare the uninformed public and government into following their mis-guided and, in many cases, illegal efforts to thwart such development.

I continue to maintain and fervently hope that one or more enterprising attorneys will enter this fray and drive a 'stake through the hearts' of these vampires who are sapping communities and the economy of the nation of a potentially major component of their life-blood.

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