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…

CNG will fueling the future with cheaper costs, fewer emissions and its contributions to a sustainable economy for rural America. Cabot Oil & Gas featured these many contributions of natural gas at a special event this week.

Cabot Oil & Gas celebrated the opening of its compressed natural gas (CNG) station in Springville, Pennsylvania this week with a fantastic event that was educational, hands-on and, most important of all, interesting, There were not only Cabot officials…

Can any one tell me if the Melvin Khale and the Tim Minch pads in Ohio County have been put on line? I own 54 ac between them and have moved from the area. It has not been easy getting any information from the drilling companies.

Natural gas development is an issue that should not be political but, rather, be based upon common sense, logic and science. Energy policy is too important an issue to be mired in petty partisan gamesmanship. What we need is education on the facts.

After years of hearing about the contentious issue of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in our local newspapers, in township meetings, and on the news, the debate has been considered through the lens of many different polarities: urban…

A golf course water withdrawal sufficient to frack a well every 8 days gets an environmental pass by the New York DEC, which has sat 5 years on fracking.

The amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” is often raised as an objection to the process and reason to subject it to rigorous regulation by such agencies as the states, the EPA and contrived special purpose agencies such as the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC). Knowledgeable folks know the actual amount of…

Governor Andrew Cuomo has well earned the “Hamlet on the Hudson” title inherited from his father; indecisive in all but one thing – his determination to avoid decision. But, perhaps another playwright captured the scene even better in “Waiting for Godot.”

In the political psychodrama that is the natural gas debate in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has owned the role of Hamlet and played it to the hilt. His soliloquies of silence have kept audiences guessing and confounded the…

Realville is a place all too few energy dreamers seem to have visited. They mistake heavily subsidized energy as a practical alternative on a large scale to real energy. Wind has its place but…

I recently read that Tammy Reiss of Unadilla took a biking trip through wind country in Lewis County, NY. She talked to friendly, well paid employees of the Iberdrola wind farm complex and observed tidy farmsteads existing in harmony with a local energy source. She contrasted that with fossil…

The battle for upstate New York over natural gas is highly personal, as pro-gas activist Vic Furman demonstrates by telling his own story. He offers a unique insider perspective on how the struggle has evolved and what’s at stake.

What if you lost your wife suddenly to a quick and deadly cancer? What if, as a nurse, she was making the majority of the household income even though you worked for a Fortune-500 company like IBM? Then, what if, less then two years from the day she died and…

The efforts of anti-gas activists to impose their special interest agendas on others and thwart natural gas development in upstate New York are pathetic replays of the e-mail scams we all receive from time to time.

Most of us have received one of those e-mails trying to lure us with the promise of wealth left by an unknown relative who has passed away in some third world country. The letter tells of a great fortune awaiting us, if we’ll only help. The scam depends on us believing in…

The Hallowich case in southwestern Pennsylvania keeps producing headlines for our fractivist friends but they always turn out to be little more than smoke and mirrors when one digs into the facts and circumstances.

Google “Hallowich Children” and you’ll get 2,140 responses mostly consisting of wildly misleading headlines such as “Big Oil Places A Gag Order On 2 Children” but few, if any, of the articles provide access to the actual transcript from which come the quotes and references…

A company appropriately called Lush Cosmetics is funding an anti-fracking campaign in the UK, all the while blithely ignoring the fact its products are hydrocarbon based. Its US operations also help the Rockefeller family fund 350.org.

Our good friend Nick Grealy of No Hot Air has a phenomenally good story regarding the funding of fractivist activity in the UK by a company that prides itself on being attached to every imaginable cause but markets products made from the stuff it…

Fractivists are busy doing a touchdown dance with the release of a PowerPoint presentation supposedly revealing suppressed data showing contamination in Dimock, but the document is attributed to no one and isn’t even dated, to say nothing of the fact it is little more than speculation based on very limited and isolated data.

Apparently the Los Angeles Times has a friend in the radically left DeSmogBlog and so has shared the famed, single…