Liar, Liar

Too bad the industry's numbers don't appear to correspond to anything other than, well, the industry's numbers.

by Isaiah Thompson

If there's one great, confounding hang-up of the news media, it's the almost-pathologic fear of calling someone a liar. To be sure, there are good reasons: Lies are hard to pin down, and the act of lying requires that slippery eel of intent — to lie, the liar has to know he or she is lying. Still, it's hard not to wonder if journalists are sometimes a little too comfortable with staring a bald-faced ... mistruth ... in the eyes and deciding, "Eh. Not my job."

Last week, Kathryn Klaber, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition — a trade group that represents the interests of companies drilling for gas in the Marcellus Shale formation — addressed a group of drillers and other gas industry folk at the Developing Unconventional Gas East (DUG East) conference in Pittsburgh.

Exactly what she said we don't know — I wasn't there. But what she PowerPointed I do, thanks to more than two dozen presentations obtained by Mitch Troutman of the scrappy drilling watchdog group Pennsylvania From Below.

Not to say Klaber's bullet points were at all surprising: She appears to have made the same arguments she typically does in endless press releases, endless newspaper quotations, endless rebuttals of the endless findings that the industry's claims appear to run counter to facts. Take, for example, the job-creation numbers she's thrown out there: The industry claims that Shale drilling will create more than 200,000 jobs by 2020, and more than 80,000 jobs by the end of 2010. The figures come from a May Penn State study whose authors failed to disclose that they'd been funded by the gas industry. (Penn State later asked that its logo be removed from the study.) Too bad the industry's numbers don't appear to correspond to anything other than, well, the industry's numbers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor & Industry, by contrast, projects a growth of just over 2,000 workers by 2016. But among Klaber's talking points at DUG East was one bullet point that makes her job-creation figures look as straight as a right angle: a font-enlarged, underlined, italicized sentence which read: "The Fact: There have been no confirmed cases of negative groundwater impacts from hydraulic fracturing."

It's a sentence she's uttered many times before, and a sentence I've picked apart before in this column.

Hydraulic fracturing, the process by which gas is extracted from the Marcellus Shale, has caused numerous contaminations of groundwater, well documented by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which has found groundwater contamination in various cases of spills, explosions, dumping and leaks of toxic drilling wastewater. Point this out to Klaber, or anyone else representing the industry, and they will quibble: These incidents were the result of bad well casing, improper lining technique, poor storage practices — but not the hydraulic fracturing process itself.

Yet even that thin strand of rhetorical gymnastics has been snipped forcefully asunder in the township of Dimock, Pa., where the DEP found that fracturing operations by Cabot Oil & Gas had caused the contamination of groundwater from at least 14 wells. Even as Cabot proposed to supply households whose well water had been contaminated with clean — imported — water, the company denied having had any role in causing the problem, and instead blamed the contamination on natural methane, a claim Klaber repeated publicly.

In response, the DEP conducted a battery of tests and inspections. "DEP has collected ample evidence tying methane found in private water supplies to Cabot's wells," wrote DEP Secretary John Hanger in an open letter issued just weeks before the recent gas conference, adding that, "Sophisticated testing has 'fingerprinted' gas samples and matched gas found in five homes to the gas leaking from nearby Cabot wells." His conclusion: "Overwhelming evidence ... proves the Cabot wells are the source of the contamination."

There has, in other words, been a "confirmed case of negative groundwater impact from hydraulic fracturing" — the very thing whose existence Klaber denied last week. Undoubtedly, she will continue to make the same denial, and undoubtedly the news media will continue to print (but not challenge) her statements.

What are we to make of this apparent conflict with reality?

Eh. Not my job.

For more on the DUG East conference, read Matt Stroud's report, "Texas in Between." E-mail isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net.