New York Post: Facing Frack Hysteria, Pa drilling is cleaner than ever
More in the battle for hearts and minds of the people.
John Hanger is described in the article as:
There are real environmental concerns about gas drilling, says John Hanger, an environmental activist, former Pennsylvania environmental secretary and sometimes sharp critic of the gas industry — but the concerns have little to do with fracking.
Who is John Hanger? Depends on who you ask, it seems. A quick search for John Hanger reveals a variety of those who think highly, and not so highly of him. The above quote is from the NY Post.
Yet elsewhere on the internet...
In a documentary about natural gas development that premiered this week on HBO, Pennsylvania’s secretary of the environment receives a decidedly unflattering portrayal at the hands of Josh Fox, who made the movie Gasland.
Fox portrays Hanger - a liberal who spent years in the mainstream environmental movement - as an equivocating tool of the natural gas industry. In one of the film’s signature moments, Fox pulls out a bottle of water he says was polluted by a Marcellus Shale gas well and challenges the state’s top environmental regulator to drink it.
As usual, it seems to depend on who you ask. A search for Hanger reveals this line of tags from Energy In Depth http://www.energyindepth.org/tag/john-hanger/ They seem to think fairly well of Mr Hanger.
For what it’s worth, Energy In Depth describes itself as…
Launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) in 2009, Energy In Depth (EID) is a research, education and public outreach campaign focused on getting the facts out about the promise and potential of responsibly developing America’s onshore energy resource base – especially abundant sources of oil and natural gas from shale and other “tight” reservoirs across the country. It’s an effort that benefits directly from the support, guidance and technical insight of a broad segment of America’s oil and natural gas industry, led in Washington by IPAA, but directed on the ground by our many affiliates — and IPAA’s more than 6,000 members — in the states.
Can think tanks sponsored by organizations devoted to the usage of one type of fuel be counted on to provide sincere and insightful criticism to that fuel? Is that a conflict of interest?
Nothing new in the realm of energy debates for NY’s hydrofracking decision.
