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No Fracking Way! Industry Says Word 'Frack' Has Been Co-Opted
"It's Madison Avenue hell"
"Hydraulic fracturing" is more commonly known as "fracking."
During this week's State of the Union address, President Obama said:
"It was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock, reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground."
But he never said the F-word, no doubt pleasing industry lobbyists.
From the Associated Press:
“When you hear the word ‘fracking,’ what lights up your brain is the profanity,” says Deborah Mitchell, who teaches marketing at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Business. “Negative things come to mind.”
But a growing number of Americans believe the real profanity is fracking itself. Ellen Cantarow writing on Common Dreams last Monday:
Fracking uses prodigious amounts of water laced with sand and a startling menu of poisonous chemicals to blast the methane out of the shale. At hyperbaric bomb-like pressures, this technology propels five to seven million gallons of sand-and-chemical-laced water a mile or so down a well bore into the shale.
Up comes the methane -- along with about a million gallons of wastewater containing the original fracking chemicals and other substances that were also in the shale, among them radioactive elements and carcinogens. There are 400,000 such wells in the United States. Surrounded by rumbling machinery, serviced by tens of thousands of diesel trucks, this nightmare technology for energy release has turned rural areas in 34 U.S. states into toxic industrial zones.
Tonight's Associated Press report:
No Energy Industry Backing for the Word 'Fracking'
NEW YORK (AP) -- A different kind of F-word is stirring a linguistic and political debate as controversial as what it defines.
"It was created by the industry, and the industry is going to have to live with it" -- Kate Sinding, Natural Resources Defense CouncilThe word is "fracking" - as in hydraulic fracturing, a technique long used by the oil and gas industry to free oil and gas from rock.
It's not in the dictionary, the industry hates it, and President Barack Obama didn't use it in his State of the Union speech - even as he praised federal subsidies for it.
The word sounds nasty, and environmental advocates have been able to use it to generate opposition - and revulsion - to what they say is a nasty process that threatens water supplies.
"It obviously calls to mind other less socially polite terms, and folks have been able to take advantage of that," said Kate Sinding, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who works on drilling issues.
One of the chants at an anti-drilling rally in Albany earlier this month was "No Fracking Way!"
Industry executives argue that the word is deliberately misspelled by environmental activists and that it has become a slur that should not be used by media outlets that strive for objectivity.
"It's a co-opted word and a co-opted spelling used to make it look as offensive as people can try to make it look," said Michael Kehs, vice president for Strategic Affairs at Chesapeake Energy, the nation's second-largest natural gas producer. [...]
The word does not appear in The Associated Press Stylebook, a guide for news organizations. David Minthorn, deputy standards editor at the AP, says there are tentative plans to include an entry in the 2012 edition.
He said the current standard is to avoid using the word except in direct quotes, and to instead use "hydraulic fracturing."
That won't stop activists - sometimes called "fracktivists" - from repeating the word as often as possible.
"It was created by the industry, and the industry is going to have to live with it," says the NRDC's Sinding.
Dave McCurdy, CEO of the American Gas Association, agrees, much to his dismay: "It's Madison Avenue hell," he says.
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25 Comments so far
Show AllHere is the more relevant information regarding the clean water act:
http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/class2/hydraulicfracturing/wel...
The 2nd paragraph begins:
"Several statutes may be leveraged to protect water quality, but EPA’s central authority to protect drinking water is drawn from the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The protection of USDWs is focused in the Underground Injection Control (UIC) program, which regulates the subsurface emplacement of fluid. Congress provided for exclusions to UIC authority (SDWA § 1421(d)), however, with the most recent language added via the Energy Policy Act of 2005:
The term ‘underground injection’ – (A) means the subsurface emplacement of fluids by well injection; and (B) excludes – (i) the underground injection of natural gas for purposes of storage; and (ii) the underground injection of fluids or propping agents (other than diesel fuels) pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities.”
There you have it. Those who voted for the Energy Policy Act of 2005 killed the Clean Water Act with regards to fracking our water supply using agents other than diesel fuels. (From the poisonous chemical list in this article I'm surprised nothing comes from diesel fuels.)
What should not be surprising is that Barack Obama voted in favor of this Act, see:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=s2005-158
A total of 36 Democratic senators voted for this bill including Boxer, Feinstein, John Kerry, Edward Kennedy, Harry Reid, Richard Durbin, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Carl Levin, Leahy, Specter, Robert Byrd, John Rockefeller, etc.
- Leftist for Ron Paul
By the way, Commondreams and most of its readers are USAn, but Canadians are very nearly as car-addicted as USAns. Toronto's obese right-wing mayor was elected on a platform of ending an imagined "war on the car".
My state governor Tom Corbett (Pennsylvania), who is for all practical purposes, a well-paid employee of the gas drillers, wants to institute a program of converting trucks and buses to run on natural gas in order to keep demand up. Natural gas is subject to price booms and busts becasue it cannot be stockpiled in large amounts, and large seasonal fluctuation in demand becasue becasue 90 percent of it is used for winter heating. Worse, between the much warmer winters from global warming, and the replacement of old furnaces with high-efficiency furnaces, gas demand is going down. This is a very bad thing for the frackers. Our bridges and highways, are crumbling, our public schools are closing, our welfare and public health programs being ended, and public transportation is being dismantled, due to the gas being extracted from Pennsylvania completely tax and governent royalty-free. But, our governor is taking quick action to stop this decline in natural gas demand!
I suspect that the DOE did do some research on fracking methods, but it was probably a minor contribution
"The word does not appear in The Associated Press Stylebook, a guide for news organizations. David Minthorn, deputy standards editor at the AP, says there are tentative plans to include an entry in the 2012 edition.
He said the current standard is to avoid using the word except in direct quotes, and to instead use "hydraulic fracturing.""
Tentative plans? Who's the "industry whore"? And this outlines exactly how the media is operating from an "industry approved" guidebook. The fact that our current president uses the same "playbook" is reason enough to replace him.
I can't be the first to say that the word "fracking" was used during the Vietnam war for killing one of your own. You can hear it being said in many of the older movies made about Vietnam. You will hear that someone was "fracked" or in danger of being "fracked". It was very common to hear in the sixties, as well. It was slang for fracturing someone into pieces and was done to sociopathic leaders in the field taking extreme risks with his men or sometimes soldiers cracking up when hiding was essential to staying alive.
It is kind of a strange coincidence to me that the term is being used for this new process of getting gas. For the reason that destroying the water is like killing one's own people and lands.