For the basics (and more) on fracking, the Society of Environmental Journalists refers reporters to its database of related stories, and suggests Daily Climate as another good source for solid reporting on the topic. ProPublica, too, has done strong reporting on this issue.
2. Track legal maneuvers to ban fracking
In response to concerns about fracking, counties, cities and citizens are taking the issue into their own hands. Colorado communities have instituted fracking bans and environmentalists are considering a statewide referendum for the 2014 Colorado ballot. Earlier this month, Boulder city officials approved a one-year fracking ban, including not allowing energy companies access to city water for fracking operations.
The Los Angeles Times recently reported about Mora County, NM, the first county in the nation to ban hydraulic fracking. The Times’s Julie Cart offered this background:
In embracing the ban, landowners turned their back on potentially lucrative royalty payments from drilling on their property and joined in a groundswell of civic opposition to fracking that is rolling west from Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania in the gas-rich Marcellus shale formation.
Pittsburgh became the first US city to outlaw fracking in November 2010 after it came to light that an energy company held a lease to drill under a beloved city cemetery.
Since then, more than a dozen cities in the East have passed similar ordinances.
The movement leapfrogged west last summer when the town of Las Vegas, NM, took up the cause, calling for a halt to fracking until adequate regulations protecting public health are adopted.
It has now reached California, where communities are considering similar bans.
Environmental groups are also working another angle to curtail oil and gas drilling: lobbying the White House to designate tracts of public land national monuments. As The Hill’s energy and environment blog reported recently:
Environmental lobbyists are pressing President Obama to turn more western lands into national monuments to prevent oil-and-gas companies from drilling there.
The Sierra Club is leading the charge and is sweetening its message with political sugar, saying Obama could thereby help Democrats win House and Senate seats in midterm elections year.
3. Speaking of lobbying: follow the politics, money, and influence stories
This is rich, complex terrain—with state-by-state variations. Some of the online resources CJR has written about previously may come in handy here. As far as specific reporting models, Bloomberg’s Jennifer Oldham in Denver and Jim Snyder in Washington recently did a lengthy piece on the politics of—and money behind—fracking in Colorado. Wrote Oldham and Snyder:
Stan Dempsey, an oil and gas lobbyist, raced from one committee hearing to another in Colorado’s statehouse this spring, defending the industry against an onslaught of bills.
While only one of 10 measures passed, the flurry of activity is one of several worrying signs to Dempsey and others in the industry that Colorado, an oil-patch state long seen as friendly to energy producers, is becoming a battleground over hydraulic fracturing, the drilling process fueling the nation’s energy boom.
…At stake for developers is access to resources that have made Colorado the nation’s fifth-largest producer of natural gas and the ninth-biggest oil producer. One group — the Western Energy Alliance, which represents about 400 oil and gas companies — says it plans to increase its lobbying budget four-fold to meet the threat.
…
Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat who has a master’s degree in geology, joined the industry in opposing many of the measures pushed by Democrats in the General Assembly. The only one that passed sets new requirements for companies during a spill.
4. Understand both the public and private oil lease process
Unlike agricultural use where water evaporates, used water from oil and gas drilling is not put back into the natural hydrological system. In most cases, the polluted wastewater from fracking is pumped into deep wells, below the water table.
Thats not true and your sources certainly dont corroborate that.
6. Use public records as foundations for basic beat stories
Anyone else see the irony in an article that links to a story quoting Robert Kennedy Jr when another CJR piece specifically warns reporters not to take his calls because he such a flakey crackpot?
Amyhoo … if reporters are going to use public records, as you suggest, perhaps they should really dig into them instead of relying on press releases from plaintiff attorneys. The Bloomberg article you cited the case of Chris and Stephanie Hallowich who successfully sued Range Resources for damage to their water supply. While the Pennsylvania DEP couldn’t tie gas drilling activities on the Hallowich property to their specific claims of contamination, the only compound above the MCL was manganese, Range would have eventually lost their court case. The 1984 Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Compact states that any contamination is automatically assumed the be caused by O&G activities unless it can be demonstrated that O&G activities were not at fault. O&G companies routinely get baseline water quality samples to protect themselves, Range didn’t perform these baseline tests (might be interesting to ask Range why they didn’t) on the Hallowich property, and that’s why they settled, not because the Hallowichs proved their case.
In Pennsylvania nearly all claims of water well contamination are rejected by the DPE precisely because the drillers take samples before they begin work and have the data to present to the DEP in case a complaint is made. In fact, it has become common practice around the country for drillers to take baseline water samples. Why no one knows about this aspect is puzzling.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 12 Jun 2013 at 04:21 PM
I suppose it's not surprising that CJR sees it as the reporter's role to oppose fracking. Note, for instance, how reporters are encouraged to investigate the lobbyists opposing anti-fracking bills, but the lobbyists on the other side -- the sources of support for those anti-fracking bills -- go unmentioned.
#2 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Thu 13 Jun 2013 at 08:28 AM
Oh look, a fracking article on the internet. I guess it won't be long until MikeH shows up..
Whoops! He's already posted. The guy's fast.
"Thats not true and your sources certainly dont corroborate that."
MikeH is right. There are waste water pits where vaporizers spread waste water, and the volatile chemicals within into the air where they evaporate.
They also sometimes dump the water into the rivers when they can get away with it.
So yeah, waste water has made it way back into the natural hydrological cycle by contaminating it. Good Point.
But I don't see how your point makes the gas industry look better Mike, maybe you should reconsider your attempts to help?
But anyways, so the author might have overgeneralized about how waste water is treated, but did he do it by much?
What does the gas industry do with its water?
Well, they do occasionally inject the water into another well for fracking (this is what they call 'recycling', but it still leaves a lot of tainted water needing disposing of). So once they pump that water out of however many wells it takes for the water to get unusable, what then do they do with it?
Well, (excuse the wording) we can look at a columbia u article for the answer there.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/wastewater-injection-spurred-biggest-earthquake-yet-says-study
So again we can either consider this waste water removed from the 'natural hydrological cycle' through deep well injection or we can consider the idea that waste water will make its way back into the cycle through cracks and fissures in the injection wells, eventually contaminating the systems they come in contact with.
http://www.propublica.org/article/injection-wells-the-poison-beneath-us
So, how are you helping?
"Anyone else see the irony in an article that links to a story quoting Robert Kennedy Jr when another CJR piece specifically warns reporters not to take his calls because he such a flakey crackpot?"
Where's the link and the offending quote. If you want people to take your case seriously, point to your 'Exhibit A' and display the evidence.
PS. when you consider all the libertarians and republican crackpots who are proponents of things like "rape can't possibly result in pregnancy", are journalists suposed to not rely on them for comment on other subjects?
I thought you guys complained of bias when we dismissed flakey crackpots for the crazy crackpot things they say. There would be no conservative left on tv if we applied that standard the way you'd like it applied to others.
Yes RFK is a goof, but that doesn't discredit every subject he speaks on; just like David Vitter is a diaper wearing pervert, but that doesn't mean his "End too Big to Fail" bill was a bad idea.
Can you find a new hobby, Mike?
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 13 Jun 2013 at 11:38 PM
Tom T., great point.
#4 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Fri 14 Jun 2013 at 12:09 AM
Yeah, great point you guys.
Because the real story isn't how many millions are being spent one way:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/nyregion/hydrofracking-debate-spurs-huge-spending-by-industry.html
or how much environmental damage they are posing to cause with whatever chemical compounds they are sending into the wells beneath our drinking water.
The story is how Yoko Ono is spending her time and money:
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/03/19/celebrity-anti-fracking-activists-will-register-as-lobbyists-if-necessary/
Lay off the Breitbart, guys.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 14 Jun 2013 at 04:44 PM
By the by, since we're talking about 'anti-fracking lobbyists' and how their failure to register as a lobby should
distract frombe the main story how is what 'Artists Against Fracking' different from say what tea partyprostitutestax exempt social welfare organizations do with their corporate donated money?http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/us/politics/31liberty.html
"Mr. Langer can seem disarmingly candid when discussing his work. In a recent interview, he explained how the institute pitched its services to opponents of the Obama health care plan, resulting in a $1 million advertising blitz.
“A donor gave us some money, and we went out on the ground in five states in the space of like six weeks,” he said.
He would not identify any donors, and, as a nonprofit “social welfare” organization, the institute does not have to release such information. Because the institute is a tax-exempt group, its I.R.S. filings are supposed to be publicly available, but Mr. Langer said returns for the last couple of years were being amended and refiled. The last available filing showed it took in $92,500 in 2007 — a fraction of what it has spent since on several major campaigns."
This is about citizens rightly concerned about their water access vs corporate powers who are only concerned about extracting resources and banking profits.
And you guys appear to be on the side that is anti-citizen. Big surprise, I know.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 14 Jun 2013 at 04:58 PM
Gotta love this:
http://capitalresearch.org/2012/12/the-environmental-movement-vs-the-marcellus-shale-green-disinformation-campaign-pits-fake-david-vs-fake-goliath/
So, when it's a 501c3 environmental group like the Park Foundation, conservatives want the IRS to scrutinize and investigate their activities:
"Under the tax laws, Park Foundation is permitted to operate under the guise of a 501(c)(3) designation. Technically this means it is a charity and so not permitted to engage in direct political funding and activism, yet according to Shepstone, “The Park Foundation is creating the issues, using them to sue and then reporting on the results. They have the right to do all these things, but not in the guise of a nonprofit corporation, the public purpose of which is not politics, but charity. Funding opponents of natural gas is not a legitimate function of a 501(c)(3) organization. Let them declare themselves a 501(c)(4) organization if that’s what they wish to do, but they shouldn’t be parading around as a charity when they’re really doing politics.”
But looks funny at the blatant politicking of the tea party it's all, "HOW DARE THEY! HOW DARE! WORSE THAN WATERGATE!"
And yes, this is not a new psychosis:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/05/republicans_angry_at_irs_targeting_tea_party_gop_defends_501c3_and_501c4.html
What a bunch of loons.
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 14 Jun 2013 at 05:48 PM
Hey, look at that, its the answer to a question no one asked: Thimbles.
#8 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Fri 14 Jun 2013 at 06:37 PM
Shouldn't you be off somewhere defending the free market's right to kick puppies?
Propublica needs you, Obi-Mike!
#9 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 15 Jun 2013 at 12:04 PM
Hi. I hate to distract from the ideological debate here, but I have a suggestion as a reporter who covers this a lot. For reporters starting to cover this debate, or just dipping in for one story, it is important to understand what you and your source mean by the term "fracking." Some people apply the term to all drilling, some only to one specific aspect of the production process. Needless confusion results when both parties to an interview don't have the same understanding.
#10 Posted by Mike Soraghan, CJR on Mon 17 Jun 2013 at 03:42 PM
Mike:
Great comment and great tip for reporters just wading into this. I would definitely distinguish drilling and hydraulic fracturing in interviews and conversations. I appreciate the fact that the reporters I interviewed used the term "hydraulic fracturing" when speaking to me noting that, in some cases, the term "fracking" itself seems to have negative connotations. I think the NatGeo video is as a good a visual explanation as I have seen on fracking. I would appreciate links to any other web sites or explanatory visuals. If you want to respond to me outside of this forum, I would also like to add you to my reporter resource list on the topic. Best,
Joel Campbell
foiguy@gmail.com
#11 Posted by Joel Campbell, CJR on Sat 29 Jun 2013 at 04:40 PM