Editor’s note: Charlotte resident Rebecca Foster is a member of the town’s energy committee and writes this column, Carpe Greenum, for The Citizen, a weekly newspaper for Charlotte and Hinesburg. The views expressed are her own.
Several months ago, Vermont Public Radio’s Jane Lindholm pressed Don Gilbert on the fracked gas that Vermont Gas Systems (VGS) sells to Vermont. She pointed out that a year ago Vermont protected itself against hydraulic fracturing by banning it in the state. “The assumption in some of these questions,” the president of VGS responded, “is that there’s a problem with it, but the reality is there have been hundreds of thousands of wells drilled using this new technology, and they’ve been drilled in an environmentally sensitive manner without creating problems.” His logic goes that the Vermont ban on fracking was entirely senseless. No problems.
When I first heard the interview, I was struck by Gilbert’s bold contradiction of the well-documented reality that fracking is ravaging swaths of North America, including the province of Alberta, Canada, whence hails the gas that VGS markets to Vermonters some 2,500 miles away. Alberta, from all I can tell, is like the Wild West, but instead of cowboys and Indians wreaking havoc on each other, thousands of miles of gas and oil pipelines crisscross the land and spill, according to Global News Canada, an average of 60,000 times a year, contaminating the groundwater. So intensely, some say, that it’s killing the wildlife, the ecosystem, and the people of Alberta.
Vermont’s ban on fracking does not absolve it from responsibility for the fracked gas it consumes, with a carefree skip in its step and a smug embrace of the green.
The second time I listened to Gilbert’s interview, I picked up something else. He sidesteps the word “fracking” and instead calls it “new technology.” Since the beginning of time, perhaps, people have been enthralled by The New. Very often The New enables great advancements. The wheel and antibiotics come to mind.
But the nuclear bomb also comes to mind, and innovations during the Stone Age that made hunting more efficient, which in turn led to the extinction of the megafauna. Oops. The “progress trap,” as defined by Ronald Wright, refers to the creation of a New Thing that appears to advance civilization, but then undermines it or even demolishes it.
If cutting down a tree for fuel is the equivalent of a schoolyard fistfight, tapping conventional natural gas reserves is a switchblade. The fracking of shale gas is an AK-47. The cost to the Earth of extreme energy extraction is exponentially more than any previous technology.
Our current progress trap is, bundled as one, the technological innovations that allow us to get extreme, unconventional energy out of the ground. In this category we have an arsenal of civilization deal-breakers: tar sands, deepwater drilling, mountaintop coal removal, and fracking. If cutting down a tree for fuel is the equivalent of a schoolyard fistfight, tapping conventional natural gas reserves is a switchblade. The fracking of shale gas is an AK-47. The cost to the Earth of extreme energy extraction is exponentially more than any previous technology.
For a year now Bill McKibben and climate activists across the country have been making the argument that we cannot afford to transfer all of the hydrocarbon resources in the ground to the atmosphere without scorching the planet. We’ve been given a carbon quota of just how much we can burn (565 more gigatons out of the 2,795 gigatons that exist.) Following this analysis, we have to bring down fossil fuel use immediately and sharply. Just because we can burn more doesn’t mean we should. Think megafauna.
Wright is concerned about the viability of civilization. “The reform that is needed,” says the Canadian in his book, “A Short History of Progress,” “is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.” Easier said, perhaps, than practiced.
VGS and all who support its plan to expand the use of fracked gas by extending a pipeline 43 miles further into Vermont through Chittenden and Addison counties, are suffering from a case of progress trap — an “ideological pathology,” Wright calls it.
Progress trap #1: Natural gas is a clean fuel. Natural gas burns cleaner than many other fuels, true, but actual independent (non-industry-funded) researchers, such as those at Cornell University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have found that the lifecycle emissions of natural gas are somewhere around as bad as coal. The Conservation Law Foundation presented expert testimony in June that the Vermont pipeline expansion would increase greenhouse gas emissions “more than three million tons over 100 years and bring environmental costs [to the state] of an additional $76,000,000.”
Progress trap #2: Natural gas is good for the economy. No doubt it’s good for the Canadian-owned multinational VGS. “But as a neighbor from Monkton, Renee McGuiness, pointed out in the Addison Independent, while Vermont’s unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, was 4.1 percent in March, the states with the most dense interstate natural gas transmission lines are Ohio and Pennsylvania, with 7.1 and 7.9 percent unemployment respectively during the same period. There is no positive correlation for natural gas and employment. Congressional testimony reveals that shale gas reserves are not as large as claimed, and production costs are higher than the market, which means that the cost of natural gas will go up, inevitably, and not too far in the future. If folks along this pipeline eagerly invest in new gas technology rather than in conservation they’ll be out of luck. “The energy I don’t use is the cleanest energy,” goes the signoff on a friend’s email. It’s also the cheapest.
The recklessness of the progress trap is driving extreme energy extraction and the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. VGS’s proposed pipeline would last 100 years and, once in place, you can bet VGS would find a way — a new way! — to run fossil fuels through it, helping to quickly overrun our global carbon quota and scorch the planet.
For more information see vpirg.org/fracking.
Clarification: This commentary has been edited to reflect that information on unemployment rates in Vermont, Ohio and Pennsylvania originally was provided by Renee McGuiness, not Ross Conrad and Alice Eckles, who cited the information in a letter in the Addison Independent.
