Thomas J Shepstone's Blog – August 2013 Archive (32)

Outdoor Life Goes Rogue

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,…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 31, 2013 at 8:14pm — No Comments

The Pied Piper

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 30, 2013 at 7:59am — No Comments

Methane Leakage Not What It's Hyped to Be

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 29, 2013 at 8:07am — No Comments

SWPA Environmental Health Project Just A Community Organizing Event

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 28, 2013 at 1:18pm — No Comments

Fractivist Mob-ocracy

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 28, 2013 at 7:23am — No Comments

Hippycrites Do More Brown Jugging

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 27, 2013 at 7:07am — No Comments

Overheard: Cuomo on Fracking

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:…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 26, 2013 at 5:19am — No Comments

Fracking Now A Bummer for Fractivists

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 25, 2013 at 6:08am — No Comments

How Special Interests Influence Natural Gas Debate

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 24, 2013 at 8:18am — No Comments

Vestal Does Scholarships

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 22, 2013 at 6:01am — No Comments

Obama to Southern Tier

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,…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 21, 2013 at 10:12pm — No Comments

More Elitist Special Interests at Work

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 21, 2013 at 7:40am — No Comments

Dear President Obama

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 20, 2013 at 9:26am — No Comments

Gasland Narrative Collpases

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 19, 2013 at 5:04am — No Comments

Environmentalism?

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 18, 2013 at 7:09am — No Comments

Fox Tells Whopper

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 17, 2013 at 7:41am — No Comments

CNG Fuels Future of Sustainability

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 16, 2013 at 10:47am — No Comments

Fracking Shouldn't Be Political

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 15, 2013 at 8:54am — No Comments

Golf More Than Fracking?

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 15, 2013 at 8:22am — No Comments

Waiting for Godot

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…

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Added by Thomas J Shepstone on August 14, 2013 at 5:55am — No Comments

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