The PLAYBOOK 

In the 10 plus years we have been observing and experiencing for ourselves the strategies, messaging and tactics used by the Unconventional Oil and Gas Industry (UOGD also known as fracking) has been operating in the shale region, we have identified the various misleading and oftentimes downright damaging ways in which the industry operates. We characterize many of them here, and welcome your stories and examples and descriptions to add to this list. Our elected officials are ignorning our complaints, and we blame them for allowing the industry to run roughshod over those who protest and seek better protections for themselves, their communities and their environment and public health. Please contact us to document examples and more ways in which the industry operates that are unethical, immoral and undemocratic. From the beginning with the Halliburton Loophole, the people who have not profited from fracking are the ones who are now suffering the worse. Even so, property values have plummeted, and clean, safe air and water are becoming increasingly scarce. Our elected officials need to listen to us and right these wrongs instead of looking the other way!

How the fracking industry gets away with taking profits while leaving externalized costs to the public:

1) Get the Halliburton Loophole through congress so your toxic, radioactive waste will be falsely labeled as non-hazardous along with many other special exemptions that mean the industry can profit with very little accountability for pollution. 

2) Get all the subsidies from the federal and state government that you can, edging out other industries with your massive number of lobbyists to continue business as usual, even under the guise of “clean” (like blue hydrogen and gas as a “bridge” fuel, which fracked gas has been shown to be dirtier than coal.

3) Get with the local officials and entice with “jobs” (no mention of the kind of jobs and who gets them) and promise them a new school and give a little bit of money to the senior center, the fire department and the ballpark to buy off all dissent.

4) Advertise jobs that people desperately need but keep them as contractors so you don't give them pension and health benefits so there is no liability for the toxic exposures to workers.

5) Punish those who speak out so that everyone else is too afraid to say anything because they know someone who works for the industry. Prey upon those desperately in need of jobs so they will take what is offered without complaint.

6) When the damage becomes evident, the LLC's can dissolve. Large corporations like Chevron and Exxon purchase and subcontract to LLC's so they are removed from future collection claims and liability for cleanup.

7) Deny any contamination, pollution or health impacts. Spend money on lawyers rather to disclaim harms, and even if you do lose, get a gag order so no one knows. This discourages the plaintiffs and even their lawyers from attempting to take on the industry because they will be punished severely by “trial by pile” and getting court cases to drag on for too long. Make enough examples of this punishment so that it has a chilling effect for anyone who has been harmed to speak out or to find a lawyer to help them. Deny responsibility for contamination so that expert witnesses are needed because no one can afford them, either. Bankrupt lawyers, gag the harmed. sanction lawyers, drag it out, threaten and depose all those possible - whatever you can think of to frighten and punish those who oppose.

8) Discourage any kind of resistance through the justice system by making sure judges and politicians friendly to the industry have money to get elected so that people cannot be sure they will find a way to protect their human and civil rights from the industry by any means. Even if damages are awarded, files appeals and ensure cases get strung out in court to discourage others from filing lawsuits.

9) Deny all contamination and all research papers that show the industry is polluting and causing health harms. Purchase research and influence the media to plant plausible deniability so that any liability has to be proven and will be too costly to do so with lawyers on staff.

10) Get legislators and regulators to pay for opposition to industry accountability using our tax dollars against us – for instance, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources has hired outside law firms to oppose legal appeals. Public funds are used to defend the industry why we have to pay out of pocket for claims. Make sure cases are only heard one at a time rather than addressing overall industry contamination as a whole.

11) Indoctrinate the kids. Publish coloring books, have floats at the county fairs with kids wearing hard hats, glamorize the industry to the children like Disney’s pro-fracking elementary school tour – have teachers go to training camps to support the industry.

12) Make people feel guilty for using fossil fuels to quash dissent instead of acknowledging that the industry itself is discouraging alternatives and opposing renewable energy incentive programs while promoting fossil-fuel-based solutions like chemical “recycling” and blue hydrogen.

13) Oppose any legislative move to increase bonds or severance taxes so that there is not enough money to pay for clean up and plugging wells, which then become externalized as government programs like the funding allocated to plug conventional wells.

14) Make sure there is no accountability for the lack of regulatory oversight, monitoring and protections by underfunding the agencies to be able to hire the resources needed to enforce the deficient laws there are. Make sure the regulations say “may” rather than “will” so there are no real requirements to regulate and no accountability for the ensuing environmental and public health harms.

What else?  What have you experienced? 

We keep seeing this playbook play out. Why don’t our elected officials see it? Because they look the other way at the facts of what is happening. They want the short-term revenue at our long-term expense. Obviously, they would rather look the other way than address the growing problems caused by the lack of regulations

And now our air, water and soil are contaminated, our freshwater is  being destroyed and turned into a toxic, radioactive waste, and our health is damaged while our elected officials let us pay for clean up, plugging, testing and remediation (if done). Just like the frack waste that is being buried and covered up, the pollution will remain and eventually come to the surface. The truth always comes out, unfortunately, too often when it is too late, and the industry’s short-term profits cost the taxpayer in long-term costs.