7/27/2019 Klein-Why US Fracking Companies Are Licking Their Lips Over Ukraine

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Why US fracking companies are l icking their l ips over Ukraine

From climate change to Crimea, the natural gas industry is supreme at exploiting crisis for private gain what Icall the shock doctrineBy Naomi Klein

A large field of fracking sites in a Colorado valley. 'The industrys singular solution to the climate crisis is todramatically expand an extraction process that releases massive amounts of climate-destabilising methane.'Photograph: Ted Wood/Aurora Photos/Corbis

The way to beat Vladimir Putin is to flood the European market with fracked-in-the-USA natural gas, or so theindustry would have us believe. As part of escalating anti-Russian hysteria, two bills have been introduced intothe US Congressone in the House of Representatives (H.R. 6), one in the Senate (S. 2083)that attempt tofast-track liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, all in the name of helping Europe to wean itself from Putin's fossilfuels, and enhancing US national security.

According to Cory Gardner, the Republican congressman who introduced the House bill, "opposing this legislationis like hanging up on a 911 call from our friends and allies". And that might be trueas long as your friends andallies work at Chevron and Shell, and the emergency is the need to keep profits up amid dwindling supplies ofconventional oil and gas.

For this ploy to work, it's important not to look too closely at details. Like the fact that much of the gas probablywon't make it to Europebecause what the bills allow is for gas to be sold on the world market to any countrybelonging to the World Trade Organisation.

Or the fact that for years the industry has been selling the message that Americans must accept the risks to theirland, water and air that come with hydraulic fracturing(fracking) in order to help their country achieve "energyindependence". And now, suddenly and slyly, the goal has been switched to "energy security", which apparentlymeans selling a temporary glut of fracked gas on the world market, thereby creating energy dependenciesabroad.

And most of all, it's important not to notice that building the infrastructure necessary to export gas on this scalewould take many years in permitting and construction a single LNG terminal can carry a $7bn price tag, must be

fed by a massive, interlocking web of pipelines and compressor stations, and requires its own power plant just togenerate energy sufficient to liquefy the gas through super-cooling. By the time these massive industrial projectsare up and running, Germany and Russia may well be fast friends. But by then few will remember that the crisis inCrimea was the excuse seized upon by the gas industry to make its longstanding export dreams come true,regardless of the consequences to the communities getting fracked or to the planet getting cooked.

I call this knack for exploiting crisis for private gain the shock doctrine, and it shows no signs of retreating. We allknow how the shock doctrine works: during times of crisis, whether real or manufactured, our elites are able toram through unpopular policies that are detrimental to the majority under cover of emergency. Sure there areobjectionsfrom climate scientists warning of the potent warming powers of methane, or local communities thatdon't want these high-risk export ports on their beloved coasts. But who has time for debate? It's an emergency! A911 call ringing! Pass the laws first, think about them later.

Plenty of industries are good at this ploy, but none is more adept at exploiting the rationality-arresting propertiesof crisis than the global gas sector.

For the past four years the gas lobby has used the economic crisis in Europe to tell countries like Greece that theway out of debt and desperation is to open their beautiful and fragile seas to drilling. And it has employed similararguments to rationalise fracking across North America and the United Kingdom.

Now the crisis du jour is conflict in Ukraine, being used as a battering ram to knock down sensible restrictions onnatural gas exports and push through a controversial free-trade deal with Europe. It's quite a deal: more corporatefree-trade polluting economies and more heat-trapping gases polluting the atmosphereall as a response to anenergy crisis that is largely manufactured.

Against this backdrop it's worth rememberingirony of ironiesthat the crisis the natural gas industry has beenmost adept at exploiting is climate change itself.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:H.R.+6:http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:H.R.+6:http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:H.R.+6:https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s2083https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s2083https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s2083http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/05/fracking-water-america-drought-oil-gashttp://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/05/fracking-water-america-drought-oil-gashttp://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/05/fracking-water-america-drought-oil-gashttp://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/05/fracking-water-america-drought-oil-gashttp://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/05/fracking-water-america-drought-oil-gashttp://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/05/fracking-water-america-drought-oil-gashttps://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s2083http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:H.R.+6:

7/27/2019 Klein-Why US Fracking Companies Are Licking Their Lips Over Ukraine

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Never mind that the industry's singular solution to the climate crisis is to dramatically expand an extractionprocess in fracking that releases massive amounts of climate-destabilising methane into our atmosphere.Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases 34 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbondioxide,according to the latest estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And that is over a100-year period, with methane's power dwindling over time.

It's far more relevant, argues the Cornell University biochemist Robert Howarth, one of the world's leading expertson methane emissions, to look at the impact in the 15- to 20-year range, when methane has a global-warmingpotential that is a staggering 86-100 times greater than carbon dioxide. "It is in this time frame that we risk lockingourselves into very rapid warming," he said on Wednesday.

And remember: you don't build multibillion-dollar pieces of infrastructure unless you plan on using them for atleast 40 years. So we are responding to the crisis of our warming planet by constructing a network of ultra-powerful atmospheric ovens. Are we mad?

Not that we know how much methane is actually released by drilling and fracking and all their attendantinfrastructure. Even while the natural gas industry touts its "lower than coal!" carbon dioxide emissions, it hasnever systematically measured its fugitive methane leaks, which waft from every stage of the gas extraction,processing, and distribution processfrom the well casings and the condenser valves to the cracked pipelinesunder Harlem neighbourhoods. The gas industry itself, in 1981, came up with the clever pitch that natural gas was

a "bridge" to a clean energy future. That was 33 years ago. Long bridge. And the far bank still nowhere in view.

And in 1988the year that the climatologistJames Hansen warned Congress,in historic testimony, about theurgent problem of global warmingthe American Gas Association began to explicitly frame its product as aresponse to the "greenhouse effect". It wasted no time, in other words, selling itself as the solution to a globalcrisis that it had helped create.

The industry's use of the crisis in Ukraine to expand its global market under the banner of "energy security" mustbe seen in the context of this uninterrupted record of crisis opportunism. Only this time many more of us knowwhere true energy security lies. Thanks to thework of top researchers such as Mark Jacobson and his Stanfordteam,we know that the world can, by the year 2030, power itself entirely with renewables. And thanks to thelatest, alarming reports from the IPCC, we know that doing so is now an existential imperative.

This is the infrastructure we need to be rushing to build not massive industrial projects that will lock us intofurther dependency on dangerous fossil fuels for decades into the future. Yes, these fuels are still needed duringthe transition, but more than enough conventionals are on hand to carry us through: extra-dirty extractionmethods such as tar sands and fracking are simply not necessary. As Jacobson said in an interview just thisweek: "We don't need unconventional fuels to produce the infrastructure to convert to entirely clean andrenewable wind, water and solar power for all purposes. We can rely on the existing infrastructure plus the newinfrastructure [of renewable generation] to provide the energy for producing the rest of the clean infrastructure thatwe'll need ... Conventional oil and gas is much more than enough."

Given this, it's up to Europeans to turn their desire for emancipation from Russian gas into a demand for anaccelerated transition to renewables. Such a transitionto which European nations are committed under theKyoto protocolcan easily be sabotaged if the world market is flooded with cheap fossil fuels fracked from theUS bedrock. And indeedAmericans Against Fracking,which is leading the charge against the fast-tracking ofLNG exports, is working closely with its European counterparts to prevent this from happening.

Responding to the threat of catastrophic warming is our most pressing energy imperative. And we simply can'tafford to be distracted by the natural gas industry's latest crisis-fuelled marketing ploy.

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