Reuters is among the world’s most respected news organizations and with good reason, but when it comes to covering hot environmental issues, the reporting can sometimes be worthless.
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Especially when one of its journalists wittingly or unwittingly echoes a key myth being propagated as widely as possible by Big Green propagandists.
Take a recent piece by Ayesha Rascoe reporting the tremendous surge in Big Green activism sparked by President Obama’s decision in November to delay his resolving the future of the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election.
Critics claim the president put off the decision out of fear of alienating at least one of his most important campaign backers. If he approved the pipeline, it would anger Big Green environmentalists who provide huge amounts of campaign funding and assistance. If he rejected the pipeline, it would anger Big Labor, which wants the estimated 20,000 new jobs the project would create.
Rascoe focuses on how Big Green redoubled its campaign aided at stopping hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the process that has opened up vast new oil and natural gas resources in the U.S.
In fracking, a mixture that is typically 99 percent water and one percent chemicals is injected into shale rock formations thousands of feet below the earth’s surface. Combined with horizontal drilling, the practice makes it possible to produce billions of new barrels of oil and trillions of new cubic feet of natural gas.
But in describing fracking, Rascoe makes the following statement:
“The companies employ the controversial ‘fracking’ drilling process, that involves fracturing rock formations by shooting vast and often secret cocktails of water and chemicals deep underground to free a trove of hydrocarbons. (emphasis added)”
Claiming energy companies keep the fracking solution content “secret” is among Big Green’s most frequently repeated claims. But it’s false. And Rascoe would have known that with a little basic reporting, including a check with the Ground Water Protection Council’s 2009 report prepared for the Department of Energy.
There, Rascoe would have found that of the 27 states where 99.9 percent of oil and gas activity takes place:
- 25 of those states require a detailed well treatment report to be submitted to state regulatory agencies;
- 18 states require the submission of a list of materials used (water, sand, additives) in the process;
- 19 states require the volumes of those materials to be disclosed; and
- 10 states demand a list of specific additives the service company intends to use on site.
So why did Rascoe say energy companies use “often secret cocktails of water and chemicals”? A cynic would say because that’s what the Big Green “experts” told the Reuters journo. A more charitable, but hardly more complimentary, explanation might be reportorial laziness.
Either way, the biggest losers from such inadequate reporting are the readers.
