Nick Grealy suggests shale gas cynics and pessimists such as Art Berman are latched onto by green ideologues as straws to be grasped in a last desperate struggle to forestall the change, but what cannot be stopped won’t be.

It’s been a theory of mine for a while that the industry should present the sudden emergence of shale gas and oil as a product not only of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, but also as a tech issue. That could be one way of raising people’s hopes and…

Contributor, Jim Willis, at Marcellus Drilling News (MDN), has laid out over time just how the NIMBY world was able to temporarily deny UGI and cost us all. Here are four excerpts from his continuing coverage of what should have been a non-issue.

PA Utility Announces Second NatGas Rate Cut This Year

May, 2012: On March 1, a little over two months ago, UGI Penn Natural Gas, a utility which serves approximately 158,000 customers in 13 counties in northeastern and central…

Bryant LaTourette says Governor Andrew Cuomo has surrendered New York State’s future out of fear of big fracking lies being told by a combination of amateur and professional propagandists, demonstrating he’s a leader unwilling to lead.

Not even Snake Plisskin could save our governor today. He’s an incurable appeaser. And, he’s running scared of big fracking lies; sacrificing our pride, our land, our youth, our spirit and the greatest economic opportunity New York State ever had in a…

Outdoor Life Magazine has done something completely inexplicable, signing on with the Delaware Riverkeeper, an organization that attacks gun clubs and the owners of hunting land who are its readers and the customers of its advertisers. It’s suicide by self-strangulation.

Last week the collective world IQ dropped a few points after former “child star” Miley Cyrus introduced “Twerking” to the general public on national TV. This week John Haughey, Blog Editor at Outdoor Life Magazine,…

Piped Piper Vera Scroggins has now led several New York State Senators throughout Northeastern Pennsylvania to see natural gas development, as they have relied upon a vile-mouthed individual, with some very strange revolting ideas, to help make the case for their own anti-fracking crusades. Do they know who they are dealing with or what they are seeing? Jim Willis wonders.

A small group of anti-drilling New York State lawmakers from Westchester County and New York City came to…

Shale gas opposition hyperbole of the sort generated by Cornell Professors Bob Howarth and Tony Ingraffea doesn’t get as much play in the U.S. as elsewhere these days, but our friend Nick Grealy reaches back to the U.S., to the very same university, to find the answer from their Cornell colleague Larry Cathles.

Green purist opponents to shale, quite rightly reject the cherry picking of data by climate change deniers, but are often only too happy to be selective in their choice of…

The Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project is no objective research organization and its recently announced health study isn’t anything of the sort. Rather, it’s a community organizing project – against natural gas development.

If I issued a research report proclaiming that natural gas development only rarely resulted in cases of methane migration, what do you think the chances are the news media would report the results without mentioning my long-standing role as an…

Bob Tiberio says fractivists have been practicing what is, in effect, mob rule in their attempts to impose their will on towns and states. They don’t always win but where they it is a corruption of what our nation’s founders wrought.

Anti-gas activists (fractivists) have claimed hard-working town boards across the Southern Tier that support natural gas development, or wish to wait for state guidance, are ignoring the wishes of the “majority.” I have witnessed them lecture my elected…

Dimock continues to be the battle cry of the hippycrite fractivists who, more than a year after the EPA cleared the water (and the air), still seek to revive the story for purposes of demagoguing natural gas development.

Dimock is the story Sandra Steingraber is frantically trying to revive as she running out of other falsehoods to spin. She desperately needs new material with which to convince people why fracking, properly known as hydraulic fracturing, is dangerous. She is morphing…

Humor can a highly effective tool for making a serious point and that applies to fracking and natural gas development. Steuben County Land Owner Coalition leader Jeff Heller employs some in imagining a conversation between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

It's short, it's funny, it's insightful and it's a must read:…

Fracking, a term co-opted by the natural gas opposition as a stand-in for a battle against everything, is losing steam.  Reality has intruded on the crude humor, which was always destined to have a short half-life anyway.



Last month 8,500 neighbors dropped in on the Cabot Oil & Gas picnic in Susquehanna County. That’s Dimock country, partner, and yet thousands walked the runways, stopped at the booths to chat with exhibitors, checked out drilling equipment…

Special interests aligned against natural gas have clever ways of creating controversy and shining the spotlight on their cause by creating phony issues and using stand-ins.

One of things our friends on the other side of the natural gas debate are very good at doing is maneuvering themselves into the spotlight. Sometimes they use eccentric behavior (e.g., dressing in hazmat suits, doing a puppet show as testimony, reading poetry at hearings), other times they simply try to take over a…

Reviving the Southern Tier of New York is one of the reasons the Vestal Gas Coalition exists and why it also sponsors a scholarship program to help citizens understand the role of natural gas development.

The Vestal Gas Coalition gives back to the community in many ways. One of the great things it does is sponsor scholarships for local high school students to win. This year they sponsored two scholarships. The winner of the essay contest won a scholarship worth $1,000 and second place…

Whatever happens in New York with natural gas will have a bearing on development of our natural gas resources nationwide. That’s why it’s so important for natural gas supporters to turn out and show their support when President Obama visits (and Governor Cuomo doesn’t).

This Friday, August 23rd, President Obama will be visiting the East Coast including both Northeastern Pennsylvania and Upstate New York. It is an outstanding opportunity that we must use to our advantage. Fortunately,…

There is yet another attempt by New York’s high society to frustrate natural gas development for upstate residents and landowners who so desperately need it. This one comes from the Grace Communications Foundation, still another Rockefeller family affiliate.

The more we learn about the natural gas opposition, the more obvious it becomes the fractivist universe is little more than a group of pawns. Every time I say this, I get hate-mail from some who insist their opposition is as real…

LAST EVENING THE FLARE WAS OUT AFTER BURNING FOR SEVERAL WEEKS. DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY NEWS ON THIS WELL.

President Obama is scheduled to visit the region this week and Vera Scroggins is out with a gimmicky video invitation to tour the gas fields. Vic Furman says he should do a tour and in a letter to Obama tells why.

Dear President Obama,

I know it’s highly unusual, but I recommend you consider an invitation from one of our opponents on the other side of the fracking debate. Vera Scroggins a/k/a Vera Duerga, has done a video invitation to come and see Northeastern Pennsylvania for…

The Gasland background story has now collapsed with Fox’s admission it was a NWPOA lease depicted in the movie. Every aspect of the story about a $4,750/acre signing bonus that came in the mail from a gas company turns out to be a falsehood.

Here is Josh Fox, speaking at the very beginning of Gasland, offering the story line subsequently picked up, without challenge, by literally thousands of reviewers and media outlets:

One day I got a letter in the mail. It was from a natural…

Self-described environmentalists reveal the big lie about so much of the movement when it comes to natural gas and fracking. They couldn’t care less. The cause is the cause and there is no environmental logic required.

Editor’s Note: This an edited combination of two related pieces featured on Marcellus Drilling News, where our friend Jim Willis notes the hollow character of the Finger Lakes Action Network, which is more about protest than the environrment.

It would be…

Josh Fox continues to spin yarns about the natural gas industry but this time he got caught by Aspen Public Radio, no less, when a fair-minded actual journalist asked him an innocent but forbidden question.

Well, it finally is getting the attention it deserves. Josh Fox’s phony story about getting a $100,000 lease offer is now exposed for the falsehood it always was. Josh Fox never owned any land in Milanville, never got a $100,000 offer and didn’t get the lease he flashed on the…