The Catskill Chronicle

To the Editor:

Millions of people who listened to President Obama’s State of the Union speech last Tuesday found themselves speechless after hearing what he had to say about shale gas extraction.  His remarks were by turns reckless, suspect and flat out wrong.

Flat Out Wrong: “We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years.”

In fact, America’s proven gas reserves (272 trillion cubic feet) are only enough to last around eleven years at the current rate of consumption (24 tcf per year).  Even the much more speculative estimate of “unproved technically recoverable reserves” (482 tcf according to the US Department of Energy) is only enough to last around twenty years.

Suspect: “Experts believe this [the natural gas industry] will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.”

Apparently the “experts” the president is referring to are industry shills, not staff at the Bureau of Labor Statistics which predicts that the oil and gas industry will employ only 136,000 people by 2018. And the president, like the industry, fails to estimate how many jobs will be lost as other economic sectors such as agriculture and tourism are crowded out by high-impact industrial development.

Reckless: “…America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk. Development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”

There’s no way around it. We do have to choose – between a sustainable, healthy future and a destructive industrial practice that will fuel climate change, contaminate drinking water and leave American taxpayers on the hook for uncounted billions in environmental cleanup and health care costs.

The science is in Mr. President, there is nothing “clean” about shale gas; it’s not a bridge fuel, it’s a bridge to nowhere.

Bruce Ferguson

Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy