Bonnie Hu is a first-year student at Columbia University in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Tanya Heikkila and Chris Weible, professors from the University of Colorado Denver, spoke about the political landscape of shale gas development and hydraulic fracturing in New York at an Earth Institute event on September 18th, 2014. They have been studying this through surveys, media and document analysis, hyperlink analysis, and interviews with funding from the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation, an organization that helps to promote impartial research of fracking in the United States. The three locations that they focused on were Colorado, Texas, and upstate New York.
The lecture started with a definition of “fracking.” Though often referred to as the entire process of drilling, this term refers to a specific part of the process. According to the professors, drilling involves detecting the shale, injecting the mixture of sand, water, and chemicals, and making fractures underground to be able to pump up the natural gas.
Their talk focused on the perspectives of surveyed groups of individuals that they dubbed “policy actors.” The three focus groups were: those that wanted to stop or limit the practice (environmental groups, organized citizen groups), those that wanted to further develop and expand the practice (oil and gas industry), and those that agreed with a balance of both (academics, local government, consultants). In their surveys, New York was the most polarized state out of the three, with almost 40% of the people who were interviewed selecting to “ban the practice.” This was reflected in media content and the comments made during the interviews, which ranged from: “Drill here, drill now in New York; Governor Cuomo has effectively stolen our mineral rights” to “people are concerned that there is a lack of transparency in the Governor’s office and DEC”. The professors summed the tension up in a simple phrase: “There is a complete absence of dialogue and this is a big problem.”
However, there were several aspects of the general conflict that were left out of the picture and were not considered in the findings mentioned above. One of the most important was the prior knowledge of those surveyed. Knowledge of the science behind hydraulic fracturing is key to understand the effects of this practice on local residents and on the environment itself. When asked by several members of the audience to assess the level of knowledge of the participants of the study, the speakers deflected it through comments like, “we were not knowledgeable enough to make a scale to determine the level of knowledge about the issue.” The only measure of knowledge, in their opinion, was the time that each individual involved in particular field.
One of the audience members also inquired about scientific research and its relationship in the political landscape with this issue. Given that they’re professors, I found their words unexpected: “Professors often tell students ‘all we need is more research,’ but that is often not the case. More scientific research leads to more polarization. Popular beliefs on this topic are like religious convictions, or choice of restaurants.” First of all, comparing this large-scale practice to a customer’s choice of restaurants is rather stretching it. Their argument was for the increased communication between the policy actors. If increased research and, therefore, increased knowledge and awareness in this field would make the situation more polarized and progress more difficult, what exactly is the solution? Is ignorance the key to compromise and research the key to clean up the mess later? As one audience member put it, “For the public to decide and vote on questions with a strong influence on global warming without knowing the science behind it is potentially disastrous.”