Should government policies be based on sound scientific evidence or fear-mongering? I’m sure most people would say sound scientific evidence. In fact, you often hear liberals saying that conservatives ignore science when it comes to global warming. However, when it comes to environmental issues, both liberals and conservatives have their blind spots. Thomas Schaller’s recent column on natural gas drilling proves this point.

Schaller’s interest in this subject seems prompted by the “documentary” called Gasland, which was nominated for an Oscar. I put the word “documentary” in quotes because usually documentaries are nonfiction movies. Gasland, however, is essentially a work of fiction, given the numerous inaccuracies contained in the film.

John Hangar, the former environmental protection secretary of Pennsylvania (who served under a Democratic governor, by the way) notes in his detailed blog post on the movie:

…the film presents a selective, distorted view of gas drilling and the energy choices America faces today.  If Gasland were about the airline industry, every flight would crash and all airlines would be irresponsible. In Gasland, the gas industry is unsafe from beginning to end and is one unending environmental nightmare with no benefits.

Gasland seeks to inflame public opinion to shutdown the natural gas industry and is effective. In pursuing this goal, Gasland treats cavalierly facts both by omitting important ones and getting wrong others. 

Unfortunately, Schaller seems inclined to take the documentary at face value.

If he had taken the time to look into the history of hydraulic fracturing, the process used to get most of the U.S.’s natural gas out of the ground, he’d find that it has been used since 1947 and there is little evidence that when the process is done right it harms the environment.

Certainly there are accidents and sloppy drillers. However, you don’t condemn the entire industry based on a few anecdotes of harm – anecdotes that in many cases have yet to be verified.

In fact, many of the things Schaller complains about in his column are really non-issues. For instance, he mentions the New York Times series on hydraulic fracturing. He fails to mention that the state of Pennsylvania investigated the allegations made by the Times. When looking into the assertion that natural gas drillers were dumping radioactive waste into Pennsylvania rivers, they couldn’t find any evidence of elevated radioactivity.

Schaller also notes that a group of Congressmen, including a couple from Maryland, sent a letter in January to the Department of the Interior calling for the public release of the list of fluids used in hydraulic fracturing. A simple Google search would have shown him that Halliburton has already released such a list.

Schaller ends his column by saying, “People smart enough to design sophisticated systems to retrieve natural gas from thousands of feet below ground should be able to devise ways to do so not just profitably, but safely too.” They have already done this. I’m sure Schaller will be pleased to find this out if he starts actually investigating the facts about natural gas drilling.