A fracking sell-out by MLAs and NGOs (Whitehorse Star Oped on December 18, 2015)

 

A fracking sell-out by MLAs and NGOs, 

Whitehorse Star Oped on December 18, 2015

They claim the Yukon government (YG) does not follow its own adopted 21 frack while talk recommendations of the legislature’s select committee report, signed by all parties and lobbied for by the NGOs, and in deed fully complied with by YG in all its oil and gas measures.

Yes, the opposition Liberal and NDP caucuses together with Yukoners Concerned about Oil and Gas Exploration and Development and the Yukon Conservation Society (YCS) are selling us out to the master plan of YG.

Betrayal and structural complicity by opinion leaders, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, has degraded their no-frack sentiment to a softheaded notion, hanging by a thread at best. Northern B.C. and Synergy Alberta copycat strategies have been used.

Let’s follow the chronological order, while touching on a range of formulaic phrases by which Merchants of Doubt and Synergy Alberta (Synergy) talk has permeated and co-opted the message tracks of Yukon friendlies among officials.

First part of unpacking the 21 points and their endorsements is a look at where the advice originally came from. Evidently, it was much derived from the tobacco industry’s PR expertise on regulating crime versus outlawing it.

Everything and everybody are sucked into a vortex of misleading language frames onto a one-way frack track. B.C. Tap Water Alliance (http://goo.gl/w3XEwS) and Public Accountability Initiative (http://goo.gl/iC6RoI ) uncovered tricks and networks.

Yukoners resist, but some have been gulled from no-frack into go-slow signs.

In May 1994, 4,000 pages of internal tobacco industry documents were sent to the office of Prof. Stanton Glantz, University of California, who had been after Big Tobacco for 16 years before successfully exposing their criminal conspiracy suppressing science information.

In the 2014 documentary Merchants of Doubt, Glantz explains that you generally can’t get away with saying that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, or that oil and gas expansion is environmentally clean.

The Merchants of Doubt method is not at all about raising doubt to the benefit of research, as anybody might expect, but pseudo skepticism that attacks facts with green little lies.

Glantz cites, quotes and summarizes from the tobacco industry trove of documents:

“And Hill & Knowlton [H + K PR consultancy, now the frack brain of Big Oil] said to the heads [of Big Tobacco], you can’t deny the evidence. But what you can do is cast doubt. Doubt is our product.”

Infiltrating the local scene are the Environmental Defense Fund, Pembina Institute, Synergy Alberta, Resource Works and other outside front groups orbiting a black hole of false doubter words.

Glantz again: “The only way these guys are actually effective is if the public thinks they’re an independent voice.”

How about the 21 frack while talk recommendations from the all-party select committee?

“The committee did agree that the following [21] recommendations should be addressed before hydraulic fracturing is considered.”

6, full text: “THAT baseline ground and surface water data be collected for an appropriate period of time, in order to ensure that comprehensive data is available.”

It’s B.C.-style soft legalese, but no trust building, as in complete baseline work must be carried out beforehand and completed.

This inevitably brings on best practices, as announced often by YG.

Those nowhere and never have included comprehensively concluded baseline water testing before fracking started.

There is reason and logic to it. Alberta, Pennsylvania, British Columbia are examples, which will include the Yukon with frack procedures already permitted and initiated.

Industry-controlled regulators claim especially high levels of methane toxicity in the water of fracked regions are supposedly naturally occurring and pre-existing.

10 recommends to require to make public the frack chemicals. The entire 25-page frack report hides Fracfocus by making no single mention of this centrepiece of best practice regulations.

There is no excuse. Duty of care aside, on several occasions I had made sure all committee members are aware.

It is almost certain that the Fracfocus chemical disclosure registry will in time be implemented, as it is in place across North America, including in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Fracfocus is a Kafkaesk masterpiece of deception and nihilism.

It requires disclosure reports, but not until 30 days after frack operations have ended and all specific individual compound disclosures are voluntary.

Medical associations complain that Fracfocus pushes back even those patients’ rights, disclosure obligations, legal remedies and liabilities that existed before Fracfocus.

Herding everybody into establishing a single-issue regulatory focus of water management really manages control of community.

It disallows effective resistance against destroying the fullness of natural and economic life support systems.

Yukoners Concerned accommodates this government strategy by overplaying the message track : “It’s all about the water.”

11, full text: “THAT research be conducted to demonstrate whether well integrity can prevent migration of liquids or gases in the long term.”

Such research is not available. Supporting these recommendations retells government’s misleading statements, which can only get us fracked.

During the January 2014 Yukon legislature presentations/hearings, U of A. Prof. Bernhard Mayer had expressed doubt on industry claims regarding well integrity.

The Merchants of Doubt chutzpah by which his talk hid reality and statistics of the rate of well failures was remarkable.

The author of Sustainable Fossil Fuel Mark Jaccard, a former advisor to former prime minister Stephen Harper, together with Royal Dutch Shell's face for leaky carbon storage drilling, Rick Chalaturnyk, led the Merchants of Doubt charge during the hearings.

Guaranteed frack harms were hidden consistently behind fixable or to be regulated “risks” by silver-tongued charmers with mediocre science credentials throughout the hearing.

They received frequent affirmation from all MLAs and the NGO crowd.

Synergizer methods were explained and anticipated by short video docs on world-leading fracture engineer Tony Ingraffea that I had made and also embedded into a PPT (http://goo.gl/Oy8CtZ ).

During this Yukoners Concerned PPT presentation to the committee, I had alerted the fracking committee members specifically to the Mayer/Jaccard type sleight-of-hand by carefully unpacking it.

In the PPT video material, Ingraffea strongly emphasized that engineers never use the word “prevent” when it comes to well failures.

His professional and poignant advice was critical, yet was totally suppressed and censored out from the report.

12 deals with air quality baseline testing as fraudulently as # 6 does to water.

Merchants of Doubtpiece #13 recommends research on greenhouse gases’ impact but ignores the U of Colorado report with total mass measurement data of fugitive emissions of about nine per cent in a Utah frack field, I had referred to and linked to in the Yukoners Concerned PPT.

The remaining 16 frack implementations are mostly filler and fluff that provide a false sense of security while being screwed, diverting attention from the killer portion that has holes big enough for 210 points to fall through.

The Merchants of Doubt advice details the committee put in its frack report come from somewhere.

In 2012, the China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), which own most of Northern Cross Yukon hired the PR consultancy H + K, based on expertise lying about cigarette harms.

Following in the footsteps of Stanton Glantz and Patricia Callahan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking reporter, the Scientific American online from Feb. 17, 2015 quoted former tobacco industry executive Peter Sparber: “If you can do tobacco, you can do just about anything in public relations.”

Yukoners didn’t have much time to find out for themselves.

Like other oil and frack outfits before, in May 2012, CNOOC/NCY hired H + K.

YCS and NCY sign a consultation agreement on Oct. 5, 2012 offering improved government access for YCS in exchange for sidelining community voices against fracking (https://goo.gl/hTEHC8).

It’s divisive and full of template recruiter language that also introduced the image of a “polarized spectrum” to Yukon. It smears frack critics as extreme and ignorant, when really their concerns are typically well-informed and middle of the road.

Triumphantly, the premier waved a copy of the YCS-NCY deal in the legislature’s question period.

On Nov. 22, 2013 the YCS, in the conclusion of its PPT presentation, advised to the frack committee “ … regulations to reduce the chances of negative [frack] impacts …” against even their own presented and valuable enviro science (http://goo.gl/ZW8Pn7 ).

In their second conclusion, YCS is hoping that fracking would not be viable in Yukon. YCS defied their own sources again by falsely suggesting that the industry has economic viability elsewhere.

During those winter months of 2013/14, Yukoners Concerned came under sustained pressure, mostly behind the scenes, to give up their resolute stance against frack implementing regulations. The Yukoners Concerned executive buckled; I didn’t.

Yukoners Concerned never reprimanded the unfair representation in the report of the Yukoners Concerned presentation, as if happy to see their once evidence-based positions gone.

Yukoners Concerned spokespeople forgot Oct. 9, 2013, when we had highlighted to the committee substantial data sets.

We had never noted a relevant lack of data, as the report put in our mouth.

Generally, enviro science had been appreciated but not predetermined outcome science.

The Yukoners Concerned website recommends the frack report without a word of criticism on it.

Yukoners Concerned hides an almost complete censorship of the committee against the peer-reviewed evidence context of jurisdictions with moratoria, contained in the Yukoners Concerned PPT.

In short, the report edits Merchants of Doubt spin into the Yukoners Concerned presentation which it did not have.

Yukoners Concerned is fine with that now. Their latest endorsement for the 21 frack invitations came in a media release in the Star from Oct. 30, 2015.

With the Yukon Party government discredited for some time, the NDP caucus plays a lead role introducing preconceived bias by replacing clean language with validations for false language.

They claim YG doesn’t have a “social licence” for fracking.

Paradoxically, this gives it to them as political operatives, and consulting firms had already printed the social licence during their fracking dog and pony shows. I expect one can get a fishing licence and a social licence in North Korea.

Why does it work that way? It is the kind of thing one receives from Miss Manners who is less so concerned with the democratic mandate.

The “social licence” term is a control group-tested think tank mockery of people’s will that anesthetizes democratic imagery of “consent by people”, “public support" or “approval”.

Social licence arrives by obedience to the term and process it stands for, stating yay or nay to having one is meant to be irrelevant.

The NDP caucus discouraged any discussion on a committee title less ideological, more evidence-based and in balance with firm enviro-science and economics data, such as “Select Committee On Harms and Costs of Hydro Fracking”.

Another of their Merchants of Doubt specialties is abusing the venerable “Precautionary Principle”, away from its meaning in the dictionary of dealing with risk.

The NDP caucus has infected others with this bastardization of language use that deflects from the evidence for certainty.

Frack Merchants of Doubt show conniving silence on the April 22, 2014 letter from the City of Whitehorse to the frack committee that expresses a time-limited concern against fracking into the Whitehorse aquifer, only until a well protection plan is in place (https://goo.gl/YVr5oa).