One of our readers and supporters from Western Pennsylvania sent me a remarkable article the other day. It’s titled “Down the Fracking Hole” and is authored by Tisha Schuller, founder and principal of Adamantine Energy who serves as Strategic Advisor to Stanford University’s Natural Gas Initiative. She is also the former the president and CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association and has written a new book you can read about and buy here. The article bares Schuller’s soul on dealing with fractivist types and offers some great insights for all of us.
It’s a rather lengthy article, but well worth reading in total. Schuller talks about the difficulties of having a rational discussion when everyone has preconceived ideas and peer group relationships drive us all into competing tribes. What I found most interesting was her honest assessment of how many things simply don’t work to break down the barriers of communication, yet she ends on a hopeful note for having opened the mind of one person at least. That takes a degree of optimism that not only rings the bell at one of those carnival test of strength attractions but sends the bell itself into orbit.
y entire identity was based on traditional green environmentalism. Back in California, I had protested the early ‘90s “war for oil.” I registered to vote first with the Peace and Freedom Party and then the Green Party. I loved and took solace in nature. I still do.
In Colorado, I matured, got married, had children, and life became more complicated. I eventually worked as a consultant to the oil and gas industry and later ended up representing the industry in various forums and media across Colorado…
I spent years trying to create peace. Most disputes over energy development ended badly, usually in a highly charged stalemate. Much of the conflict was rationalized by each protagonist referring to their own body of scientific work. I came to understand that, in reality, we were each choosing to believe the science that conformed with our own worldview…
People must engage in building relationships built on empathy and trust before scientific explanations will have any effect…
Five years ago, I regularly found myself in contentious town meetings representing the oil and gas industry as the CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, commonly known as COGA. The trade association represents oil and gas companies and their interests in the political, regulatory, legislative, and media arenas.
I went to COGA from my pleasantly busy but relatively boring job as a mid-level manager for an environmental consulting firm. I went for the crazy reason that I felt called to do so. I got to know oil and gas workers as my clients while permitting facilities and conducting environmental trainings. I thought I could help tamp down the conflict that was building over fracking throughout much of the West. That proved to be optimistic…
For me, going to work for COGA was a way of acknowledging my own consumption and our societal dependence on oil and gas. Further, as an environmentalist, I was excited about the potential for natural gas to be a meaningful part of curbing greenhouse gas emissions by displacing coal. Going to COGA was a strange compromise between joining the perceived “enemy” of my tribe and acknowledging that our tribe needed them.
Before I took the job, my husband and I discussed the risks and the implications in detail. We were both clear that if I ever felt I was compromising my values, I was prepared to leave. By my second year on the job, the fracking controversy was raging, and I regularly sat in community meetings explaining—or even debating—the merits and safety of oil and gas development. Communities had heard of fracking and were often certain that it would poison their groundwater. A furious debate ensued over which chemicals were added to the fracking fluids that were used a mile or so underground to create microcracks in rocks to release oil and gas. Many of the people who came to community meetings had never encountered oil and gas development directly before. And they were alarmed.
My hippy roots and background in environmental science and geology were not building the communication bridges I had naively anticipated. I was unnerved by the anger and fear I met in meeting after meeting, fueled by scary and misleading information, but also representing very real issues and concerns. I would metaphorically wave my research references as I presented to an agitated audience squirming in their seats. One by one, they would give public comment and ask angry questions referencing their own sources of frightening information about fracking.
I spent five years in that role, first focused on educating the public about fracking, and later, based on my trail of failures, convincing the industry that an education campaign alone would never work to build public confidence. Even the most thoughtful educational forum created a firestorm of anger and distrust…
We all seek harmony between our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. When we see evidence that creates a conflict with what we already believe, we preserve our values. For example, when I read a newspaper article about fracking that I feel unfairly and unconsciously casts an oil and gas company in a bad light, I immediately seek harmony by dismissing the fairness and underlying intention of the story.
Similarly, when I present myself in a community meeting as an environmentalist and mother who is explaining the science of fracking, it can create its own cognitive dissonance. An attendee may in fact feel that she is the environmentalist and mother, and she does not believe that fracking is safe. The automatic response is to find a reason to dismiss me and my underlying intentions, usually by saying that I’m a shill for the industry…
To prevent the emotional discomfort of cognitive dissonance, we surround ourselves with like-minded people. The informational echo chambers allow us to experience more day-to-day harmony. By feeding ourselves news and intellectual conversations that reinforce our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, we create a cycle that further exacerbates the certainty of our own perspective.
This makes the exploration of scientific information quite challenging, especially amidst our polarized national politics. Loud, soundbite-spewing voices are needlessly dividing conversations about our environmental, natural, and economic resources. With this backdrop, intelligent conversations about tradeoffs of energy development become nearly impossible…
I decided that COGA would create a voluntary baseline groundwater-sampling program. This was no simple feat. Under our voluntary program, whenever a company drilled a new well, it would take a groundwater sample from a nearby source before drilling, then take another sample one year later. It took months of work, but I ultimately got approval from my board. I then worked the phones for many more months until we had more than 98 percent of oil and gas operators in the state participating in the program.
The voluntary baseline sampling program was a clear success. It demonstrated that operators were willing to be proactive to assuage public concerns. A year later, the program would be codified as a state regulation with official COGA support. Today, tens of thousands of water sampling data are publicly available. The new mountain of data took the question of whether oil and gas development was systematically contaminating groundwater off the table. It was not.
The program, however, did nothing to resolve the conflicts around oil and gas development in Colorado. Public concern about oil and gas development quickly morphed into new issues. Initially, I was surprised. Each time one topic was resolved by a study or a new regulation, the next surfaced seemingly instantaneously. Now I understand the dynamic more clearly: Communities were concerned about fracking in their hearts and their guts, so they would find no shortage of new issues to worry about.
When I was in my early fact-splaining phase at COGA, a study from Cornell University came out declaring that gas was worse than coal in terms of carbon emissions. This study was a full-force slap in my environmental face. The tenuous ground on which I initially justified my defection to the oil and gas camp was the carbon and air quality benefits of natural gas compared to coal.
A research assistant and I went to work dissecting the study. We quickly ascertained that it was a wild exercise in hyperbole. The assumptions, methodology, and calculations were debunked by another Cornell scientist, a federal laboratory, and various other researchers.
That was 8 years ago, yet I continue to be told in both casual and formal conversations about natural gas that science has demonstrated gas is worse than coal. The long-debunked study is still loosely cited as the source of that information…
It’s hard to say who I continue my work for: the people in the industry who struggle to convey the importance and diligence of their work, or the people in Colorado who think the oil and gas industry is out to poison us all in the name of profits. I’ve gotten long letters from both. The most gratifying so far was a woman in her thirties who is a visible and vocal environmental advocate and opponent of fracking. She read the book I wrote about this topic, Accidentally Adamant. We share love for many things in our community, including my children, even as we have always avoided discussing politics.
She told me that the book put her in a quandary. She believed my explanation of energy requirements, tradeoffs, and the benefits of oil and gas. This alone had undermined a fundamental identity for her, a comfort that her tribe was on the side of righteousness. Not only did she need to look deeper at all her beliefs, she explained, but now she was also uncomfortable that she had been taking her previously held assumptions for granted, on which many tiny decisions are based.
Choosing to be open-minded and flexible, opening yourself to different sources that make you ache with discomfort, and finding commonalities with people you disagree with is not for the faint of heart. But whatever your tribe, whatever your starting place, whatever walls and rationalizations you carry, it is possible to move onto the uncertain ground of honest listening and learning that can result in lasting and meaningful change.
Read the whole thing but the message is that no amount of education by the best techs, or PR fluff approved by corporate counsel, ever substitutes for simply listening to the other side and hearing them out with an open mind. In fact, it’s been my experience that the changeable minds (as opposed to those of true believer types) have been fed a lot of malarkey financed by wealthy special interests who our opponents aren’t even aware are involved. The only way to break through that is to listen and patiently explain our own view while honestly respecting their’s and hearing them out.
Likewise, no amount of emotional ranting or use of meaningless slogans (e.g., “water is life” as if pollution was a given) accomplishes a thing in the end. Those with real responsibility seldom take that stuff seriously and the politicians only give it lip service for purposes of feathering their own nests. And, I’m still waiting for the fractivist who gives a damn about property rights or the economic struggles of landowners and rural areas. There’s a whole lot of listening needed in that arena.
Listening doesn’t mean many minds are going to be changed, and perhaps none will be in the moment, but over time things do tend to change and move inexorably toward common sense and the truth. And, yes, I’m absurdly optimistic, too.
Bill desRosiers
K.J. Rodgers
Tom Shepstone
Tom Shepstone
