Wednesday, 09 March 2016 00:00
By Mike Ludwig,
Truthout | Interview
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35146-filmmaker-josh-fox-to-hillary-clinton-be-real-about-fracking-and-climate-change
In the most recent Democratic
presidential primary debate, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were asked if
they support fracking for oil and gas. Clinton answered first, explaining at
length that she doesn't support fracking where it has been banned, or where it
leads to water contamination and methane leaks. She called for tougher
regulation of the industry, and for new rules that would require fracking
companies to disclose the chemicals they pump underground.
"So, by the time we get
through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in
America where fracking will continue to take place," Clinton said.
Bernie Sanders had a
different response.
"My answer is a lot
shorter," Sanders said. "No, I don't support fracking."
The statement brought cheers
from fracking opponents, who quickly took issue with Clinton's answer. Josh
Fox, the director of Gasland, the documentary that helped spark the anti-fracking
movement, posted an online
rebuttal, pointing out that Clinton's own website states
that domestically produced natural gas plays a role in the transition to clean
energy.
Fracking facilitated a gas
boom during much of the Obama administration, and natural gas production is
central to the current president's plan to reduce the nation's climate-warming
carbon emissions. Sanders says he would "accelerate" a transition
away from fossil fuels, but would anything change under President Hillary
Clinton?
[…]
Mike Ludwig: Watching the
debates the other night, we got two very different answers from the candidates
on fracking. One sounded like "restrict and regulate," and then
Bernie just said that he is against fracking. How did you react to those two
different answers?
Josh Fox: I'm just going to
say, I can't think of a more perfect answer than what Bernie said. There were
three aspects to his answer. The question was, "Do you support
fracking?" and he just said, "No." [Laughs] That was pretty much
the perfect answer right there, and then he talked about climate change and how
important it is to prioritize climate change and have a comprehensive plan to
eliminate fossil fuels. Which I thought was incredible. And then, much to my
astonishment, Anderson Cooper comes in and he goes, "But what about all
these Democratic governors? They say that fracking can be done safely, and they
say that it's a boon to their economy. Are they wrong?" And once again,
Bernie hits it out of the park. He just says, "Yes, they're wrong."
Which is true.
And normally you don't see
that kind level of just, candor, honesty, on the political stage in support of
the truth and against wrong ideas. What you heard from Hillary Clinton was
exactly the kind of mealymouthed response that you hear from these Democratic
governors who are in the pocket of Big Oil and Big Gas. And she was very
equivocal in her answers; it's a similar type of thing that we heard from
Barack Obama in 2008 when he said: These companies should abide by the Safe
Drinking Water Act. But then he didn't do anything to reregulate fracking under
the Safe Drinking Water Act.
So, what Hillary Clinton said
was four things. She said, I will support a ban wherever there already is a
ban. So [that's a signal] to her home state of New York that says, New York
banned it, they are the people who are responsible for my political career, I
have to acknowledge the fact that this is something they should be able to do.
And then she says, number two, that wherever there is methane leakage, fracking
should not occur. This is kind of a dumb statement because there is methane
leakage everywhere fracking occurs, and anyone who knows anything really about
fracking knows that there's methane leakage, not only everywhere fracking
occurs, but at every single part of the natural gas system.
So, if you take her words at
face value there, it's actually quite amazing because it means you have to
phase out natural gas altogether in every application, which is of course what
we have to do. When we talk about going 100 percent renewable, it means phasing
out natural gas. Because methane leaks out of the fracking wells, out of the
transmission lines, out of the delivery systems, out of the compressor
stations, out of the power plants and LNG [liquid natural gas] terminals
themselves, fracked gas is the worst fuel we can use with respect to global
warming and climate change. It's interesting that she pointed that out as the
number one issue on her radar about fracking, because this was something that
the natural gas industry tried to hide for a very long time, that they were
leaking so much raw methane into the atmosphere, that their practices are so
sloppy, that their pipelines are so shoddy.
Our major cities are just
leaking gas out into the atmosphere. Boston is leaking 4 percent of all gas
delivered to Boston; Philadelphia, 3 percent; New York, 2 percent; Washington,
DC, 5 percent. When you look at Los Angeles, where they both mined for and
delivered the gas, 17 percent. Look at what just happened in Aliso Canyon, where you had this
enormous geyser of methane exploding out of the ground. That was the single
largest point source of emissions in the world, and this is not just carbon
dioxide. This is methane. Methane is 86 times the global warming potential of
carbon dioxide. It's a hugely potent greenhouse gas. So to say you have to
stop all these leaks, it basically means, "Let's just get rid of this
system, because we have to phase it out anyway."
So, does [Hillary Clinton]
really mean that? It's hard for me to imagine, when her website has all these points for how to develop natural
gas, when her State Department was responsible for promoting fracking all over
the world with the Global Shale Gas Initiative, which exported technology and
fracking knowledge to 30 countries worldwide.
[Clinton's] third point was
about water contamination. She said, "I won't support it where there is
water contamination." Well of course, everywhere the industry goes, there
is water contamination at huge rates. The well casings crack underground and
they leak raw methane, volatile organic compounds, oil, fracking fluids. They
leak like crazy under the ground and a very high percentage of leakage gets
into aquifers and contaminates groundwater, as well as fracking and the entire
oil and gas production cycle leads to surface spills. We had 6,000 spills on
the surface of the earth in 2012, which released something like 16 million
gallons of oil and gas and wastewater onto the ground. That's a bigger spill,
an accumulative effect ... that is bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill.
Then [Clinton said] that the
companies have to disclose the chemicals. Well, there is a real mechanism for
chemical exposure - it's called the Safe Drinking Water Act. The Safe Drinking
Water Act says that, when you inject toxic material under the ground, you have
to report to the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. So, fracking in 2005
was made exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act by an act of Congress. Now, it
would take an act of Congress to reregulate fracking under the Safe Drinking
Water Act. So, that is the kind of thing that would require the political
revolution that Bernie is talking about, taking back both houses of Congress,
making sure that we have our political leadership campaigning during the
midterm election and not sitting it out.
The thing that is most
troubling about this is that what [Clinton] said on stage, and what her
positions are historically, and what her positions on her own website ... are
in contradiction.
So what does that mean? It
either means that she has adopted an entirely new platform on stage at the
debate because of the question, and she has to tear down that page on her
website and reduce the whole thing so that it reflects what she said on stage
that night, or that she actually does not understand or mean the implications
of what she did say on the stage. And as, you know, we all have this
understanding of Hillary Clinton who is a person who, you know, often says one
thing and does another. So my challenge to Hillary is to say: If you think
those things that you said on stage are serious, you have to call John Podesta
and all the pro-fracking people that you've known and say, we're revising our
platform. She could come out and say, because of the science on this question,
I don't support this and we have to phase out this fuel right away.
What I heard from her
statement, and you're correct, it is a little bit different from the material
she has on her website ...
It's a lot different. It's
night and day.
It reminded me of what has
already been the policy of the Obama administration, where actually natural gas
production is part of President Obama's plan for tackling climate change.
Natural gas power plants are part of his Clean Power Plan, which is currently
being contested in court, and so I kind of hear a continuation of that in what
Hillary said. I wondered if you want to address this idea among Democrats that
natural gas production could be a transition fuel - could be part of a climate
change policy.
You have to understand a little
bit about climate change and a lot about American energy policy to really
understand this, but it's not that difficult. What Obama's Clean Power Plan
does is ... [it] facilitates a transition away from coal. It retires all the
old coal. That's a really good thing. Coal ... it's a terrible fuel; it
destroys the communities that the coal-fired power plants are in. A lot of
minority communities have suffered incredible environmental justice problems
with having coal-fired power plants in their communities. We got to get rid of
coal.
Unfortunately, however, what
the Clean Power Plan does in its current conception, is it facilities a
transition from coal not to renewable energy, to wind and solar, which we need,
but to gas. Because it creates a ceiling for carbon dioxide that the gas-fired
power plants can actually survive, but the problem with the gas is not just
carbon dioxide. The problem is all these methane leaks - and that offsets the
CO2 savings to such a degree that it actually makes fracked gas a worse fuel,
because of the cumulative impacts. To live next to a coal plant and to live
next to a natural gas-fired power plant, yes, you would rather live next to a
natural gas-fired power plant. However, all the gas pipelines, just as we just
discussed about the methane leakage problem, all the pipelines, the compressor
stations, the well pads, the fracking process itself, its leaking a huge amount
of methane and other chemicals into the atmosphere. So no, you don't want to
live next to any of that stuff.
So the question is, can you
create a plan that is so stringent that it phases both coal and gas? And that's
what Bernie Sanders is saying we should be doing. Bernie Sanders is saying,
"I want to make sure that the Clean Power Plan regulations stiffen up about
methane so that we transition from coal and gas to renewable energy."
Now, Hillary Clinton's plan,
on her website, yes, it sounds a lot like that, [but] here's the big problem.
We've already warmed the climate by 1 degree. We have enough carbon dioxide and
methane in the air already to warm us by another half of a degree. That CO2
that's already in the atmosphere will continue to warm the earth for the next
several decades. So we're already, for all intents and purposes, at 1.5
degrees. At 2 degrees warming, huge climate impacts happen. At 2 degrees
warming, we start to engage a process whereby we have five to nine meters of
sea level rise. Five to nine meters of sea level rise means New York goes under
water, Philadelphia goes under water, Boston goes under water, DC goes under
water, Miami, Charleston, I mean, you don't want to get to 2 degrees.
So you basically have to start
to ramp down all of carbon and methane emissions sources now. Right now. Which
means, we cannot build a whole new generation of fracked gas power plants, but
that's exactly what they are proposing. Three hundred new fracked gas power
plants all across America are being proposed and being fought off by the local
communities there. I'm going to protest one Thursday night in Wawayanda, New
York. We fought off a couple of fracked gas power plants last month in Denton,
Texas, the birthplace of fracking. These are not just power plants, but they
are also the pipelines that serve those power plants. The Constitution
pipeline, the AIM pipeline, the NED pipeline, the Pilgrim pipeline, the
Tennessee pipeline expansion, the Millennium pipeline. There are pipelines that
are cutting people all across this nation to pieces. It's like the Keystone XL
fight, times 100.
So, this Clean Power Plan will
create need for a hell of a lot more fracking. That's a huge issue. Two million
fracking wells is what the industry wants to drill, and you're talking about
all these power plants, pipelines, LNG, its another 30 to 40 years of natural
gas. Now, what Lester Brown has told us is that we need to reduce emissions by
80 percent by 2020 if we are going to save the Greenland ice sheet, and save a
huge amount of that sea level rise. Eighty percent of emissions by 2020 means
that you can't build any of those power plants. Period. You've got to go in
another direction. That's why Bernie is saying, and Bill McKibben is saying in
the Solutions Project, and Mark Jacobson at Stanford and myself and Naomi Klein
and all these people are saying, you can't build these power plants. You've got
to phase out natural gas and you've got to do it right away.
I wanted to ask you about your
new documentary because it centers on climate change. You know, for our readers
and even for the people who work at Truthout, this has been a difficult issue
to cover because the situation is getting so dire, and it sounds like there is
a personal aspect to this new documentary that addresses that.
Thank you for mentioning that
it's hard to cover because it's so upsetting. It really is. It's not just so
upsetting; it's so late in the game. When you really start to learn about
climate change, you realize, wow, we really needed to be working on this 20
years ago. And we really needed to be dealing with this, and, you know,
Jimmy Carter was dealing with this, he put solar panels on the roof of the
White House, but you know, we really needed to ramp this up a long time ago
because we are already so far. And a lot of people will say we are at a place
where we are going to have a massive, civilization-wide upheaval. Hundreds of
millions of climate refugees. Cities going underwater. People not having enough
to eat. Extreme weather becoming the norm. Droughts. Floods. Famine. Rate of
infectious diseases going up because of warmer climates in tropical regions,
tropical diseases spreading out of tropical regions. A vision of kind of hell
on earth. When you really study climate change, you have to reconcile yourself
with that very bleak picture, and it's really hard. And that's what the movie
does. I mean the movie sort of rams into the brick wall of climate change at
100 miles an hour.
I think I walk into the
question very similarly to the way I do with Gasland, which is, "oh, here,
let's look at this," and you realize very quickly ... that we're talking
about being too late. And that's a very difficult thing to deal with. At 2
degrees warming we lose 30 to 50 percent of all the species on the planet, you
know, that's a lot of goodbyes. So How to Let Go of the World has a lot to do
with letting go of that "save the world" impulse. It has to do with
letting go specifically of the world that must change, which is the world of
greed and competition.
[…]
