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Above Photo: “If we’re serious about doing anything about climate change, we actually have to get off fossil fuels,” environmentalist Bill McKibben told Common Dreams on Wednesday. (Photo: Elvert Barnes/flickr/cc)

Note: In a very important article in The Nation magazine, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry, Bill McKibben focuses on the deadly impact of fracked gas on climate change. Many activists see President Obama as “the fracking president” who has greatly expanded this extreme extraction method for methane gas and whose administration has allowed massive new infrastructure — pipelines, compressor stations and export terminals — that will keep the nation addicted to methane gas for a generation or all of this infrastructure will have been built for no purpose. The latter is required in order to have a healthy planet.

In the article below, portions of McKibbon’s article focusing on the climate impact of this carbon fuel are discussed. In addition to these points McKibben also focuses on the people who sold fracking to the nation as part of the “all of the above” energy strategy with the rhetoric of “bridge fuel to the future.” This has been a disaster for the global environment.

President Obama was the lead salesman, McKibben writes:

“In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama declared that new natural-gas supplies would not only last the nation a century, but would create 600,000 new jobs by decade’s end. In his 2014 address, he announced that ‘businesses plan to invest almost $100 billion in factories that use natural gas,’ and pledged to ‘cut red tape’ to get it all done. In fact, the natural-gas revolution has been a constant theme of his energy policy, the tool that made his restrictions on coal palatable. And Obama was never shy about taking credit for at least part of the boom. Public research dollars, he said in 2012, ‘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.’”

McKibbon goes on to point to leading environmentalists who were part of pushing this destructive policy:

”Obama had plenty of help selling natural gas—from the fossil-fuel industry, but also from environmentalists, at least for a while. Robert Kennedy Jr., who had enormous credibility as the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance and a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote a paean in 2009 to the ‘revolution…over the past two years [that] has left America awash in natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight.’ Meanwhile, the longtime executive director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope, had not only taken $25 million from one of the nation’s biggest frackers, Chesapeake Energy, to fund his organization, but was also making appearances with the company’s CEO to tout the advantages of gas, ‘an excellent example of a fuel that can be produced in quite a clean way, and shouldn’t be wasted.’”

And, Hillary Clinton played a major role in selling fracking worldwide:

“When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.”

And, there was a revolving door between the Obama administration and the fracking industry:

”Obama’s then–deputy assistant for energy and climate change, Heather Zichal, headed up an interagency working group to promote the development of domestic natural gas. The working group had been formed after pressure from the American Petroleum Institute, the chief fossil-fuel lobbying group, and Zichal, in a talk to an API gathering, said: ‘It’s hard to overstate how natural gas—and our ability to access more of it than ever—has become a game changer, and that’s why it’s been a fixture of the president’s ‘All of the Above’ energy strategy.’ Zichal left her White House job in 2013; one year later, she took a new post on the board of Cheniere Energy, a leading exporter of fracked gas. In the $180,000-a-year job, she joined former CIA head John Deutch, who once led an Energy Department review of fracking safety during the Obama years, and Vicky Bailey, a commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Bill Clinton.”

This kind of corruption still impacts energy policy. FERC is among the most corrupt agencies in the federal government because it is completely funded by the oil and gas industry not tax dollars and it has a rapid revolving door between industry and the so-called regulatory agency. FERC needs to be abolished or radically altertered to being a promoter of clean energy infrastructure and stopping all infrastructure for fossil fuels. As a regulatory agency its mission must be keeping carbon in the ground and putting in place a carbon-free and nuclear-free energy economy.  KZ

‘Benign’ Fossil Fuels? McKibben Says There’s No Such Thing.

‘Far from being a bridge to the future,’ McKibben tells Common Dreams, ‘natural gas turns out to have been a costly detour.’

With a new piece in The Nation, environmental leader Bill McKibben upends widely held assumptions not just about President Barack Obama’s climate legacy, but about the so-called “natural gas revolution” that was once considered a “savior” in the fight against global warming.

The author and 350.org co-founder points to “an explosive paper” published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, in which Harvard researchers “concluded that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities.”

“Fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors.”
—Bill McKibben

As Common Dreams reported at the time, the study showed that methane emissions in the U.S. rose more than 30 percent over the 2002–2014 period, and that increase could account for 30–60 percent of the global growth of atmospheric methane seen in the past decade.

This data, McKibben told Common Dreams by phone on Wednesday, “changes, in profound ways, our own conception about what we’ve being doing about climate change in the U.S.—and the answer is, not much.”

“Far from being a bridge to the future,” he said, “natural gas turns out to have been a costly detour.”

The leaks exposed by the Harvard researchers, he writes at The Nation,

are big enough to wipe out a large share of the gains from the Obama administration’s work on climate change—all those closed coal mines and fuel-efficient cars. In fact, it’s even possible that America’s contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years. The methane story is utterly at odds with what we’ve been telling ourselves, not to mention what we’ve been telling the rest of the planet. It undercuts the promises we made at the climate talks in Paris. It’s a disaster—and one that seems set to spread.

Furthermore, he continues, recently announced efforts to rein in such leaks fail to address “the core problem, which is the rapid spread of fracking.”

In addition to polluting groundwater and undercutting the market for renewables—two of the “nasty side effects” he outlines in his piece—fracking “wipes out as much as three-fifths of the greenhouse-gas reductions that the United States has been claiming,” McKibben writes.

All this belies what he described as “a glib willingness to think of natural gas as benign or relatively benign.”

In fact, McKibben asserts in his article, if “we keep on fracking, it will be nearly impossible for the United States to meet its promised goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2025.”

In other words, he told Common Dreams, this is “just one more of those cases where it’s become clear that if we’re serious about doing anything about climate change, we actually have to get off fossil fuels.”

But that will be difficult, McKibben writes, given that “[w]e’ve become the planet’s salesman for natural gas.” Even worse, he notes, “a key player in this scheme could become the next president of the United States.”

He explains:

When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.

For these reasons, McKibben said Wednesday, “It’s high time for Hillary Clinton tomatch Bernie Sanders’ commitment against fracking.”

“That’s because fossil fuels are the problem in global warming—and fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors,” he concluded in his article. “Coal and oil and natural gas have to be left in the ground. All of them.”