Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Frack this NIMBY

A few years ago I wandered back into journalism for lack of something better to do. It had been almost 20 years since I had worked in that milieu and a lot had changed. On one of my first nights there I came across the term NIMBY and had to ask what the hell is that. Rather condescendingly I was informed it meant "not in my back yard;" in this case it involved a bicycle/ski trail that many people wanted except for those who lived along the proposed route. I also learned that this was an acceptable term to use in a news story without explanation. You know, the Wall Street Journal at least used to explain what the prime rate is whenever it came up in a story even though probably everyone who read the Journal knew what that is.

Anyway I filed that away.  At the time I didn't associate it with the fact that Exxon had spilled a whole lot of oil in MBY and how it might apply in 2014, but it does.

Now comes fracking or hydraulic fracturing, a way to obtain petroleum by injecting a concoction of chemicals into the ground to create pressure that forces the gas to where it can be brought to the surface.  By the time it has become an issue, people were reporting tap water you could set on fire, petroleum odors from water, nests of earthquakes in areas where fracking is common, like Oklahoma, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  And like with every other attempt to gain profit from petroleum Exxon was right at the apex of those employing the procedure.

That was until this year when someone had the nerve of begin fracking near Houston, home of Exxon and other oil profiteers. More specifically the fracking began near the $5 million property owned by Exxon's CEO, Rex Tillerson. It seems a fracking company wants to build a water tower right next to the property and Tillerson joined a lawsuit to stop it.

Now being the head of the country's leading natural gas producer which draws a whole lot of its product from fracking near other people's property the company’s CEO couldn't possibly be objecting to the process itself, could he?  Of course not.  His objection in joining the suit is stated as the project will reduce the value of his property.  Fracking on its own self is harmless, right?  It is if you ignore contamination in the water table and the cancer risk. Still he can't object to that given the extent of Exxon's use of the process.

Long a proponent and defender of fracking, Tillerson reportedly has no involvement in the legal matter. That is a form of Exxon legal mumbo jumbo. A responsible member of the oil industry once told me the way Exxon does business is they come to work in the morning, figure out who could sue them and if they haven't been sued by the end of business it has been a good day. Of course they aren't going to allow their CEO to be named in a lawsuit that attacks fracking, but they will go after a company that is ruining the neighborhood around that CEO's property. It's NIMBY, just on a more ethereal scale.

Another aspect of this that is particularly bothersome is I have not seen one story about this in what is considered the mainstream press. It has shown up on several news sites on the Web but never have I seen it on any of the main news pages.

As far as it goes, Exxon and Tillerson should not be allowed to have it both ways. They can frack in your back yard, poison your water, expose you to cancer, create earthquakes, in fact frack anybody they want to, excluding, of course, Exxon and Tillerson themselves. In recent years adding the word "extreme" to things makes them sound more exciting, i.e. extreme sports. This takes NIMBY to a new level of extreme. 

And isn't it nice to know without being told to, they have begun to frack themselves?

EcoWatch: Exxon CEO Joins Lawsuit Against Fracking Project 


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