A review of research published last year indicates that fracking fluids and wastewater contain toxic, radioactive, endocrine-disrupting and carcinogenic chemicals. Credit: Shutterstock / LHBLLC

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

It should surprise no one that people who owned other people as property in the early 19th century passionately argued against banning the transatlantic slave trade. Our Constitution explicitly forbade Congress from imposing such a ban until the year 1808, and even after that date lax enforcement allowed illegal smuggling to persist up until the Civil War.

One line of defense offered by apologists for slavery may surprise you, however. They argued that, if the United States stopped trafficking in Black lives, slaves would simply end up on the vast sugar cane plantations of Cuba or Brazil, where their life expectancy was shorter than in the U.S. and treatment more barbaric. So, purely out of heartfelt concern, the U.S. should continue to mass abduct benighted Africans, the claim went. For their own good, you see.

Today we, the woke, are unlikely to be duped by such obvious rationalizations. But professedly liberal arguments based on a similar template haven’t gone out of style.

In 2015, after years of admirable and relentless activism on the part of environmentalists, President Barack Obama rejected the infamous Keystone XL pipeline, citing concerns that the project’s transporting of sludgier-than-average crude oil would undermine the U.S.’s global leadership on climate change.

Just five days before Obama’s announcement, Houston Chronicle business columnist Chris Tomlinson, whose work is also carried in sister paper the San Antonio Express-News, called efforts by environmentalists to halt the pipeline “futile.” He reasoned that “stopping the oil from reaching the cleanest, most advanced refineries in the world in Houston does not keep the oil in the ground, it just sends it elsewhere,” presumably expecting China to buy from Canada and carry away our black gold by sea.

Note the similarity? Both arguments cling to the notion that we ought to continue to do something terrible because, otherwise, less virtuous countries will fill the vacuum.

“The key lesson is oil will find a way to refineries as long as there’s a customer,” Tomlinson wrote. “Foes spent six years trying to persuade the White House not to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline to prevent Alberta oil from reaching the Gulf Coast, but did nothing more than delay the inevitable. … Opposition to the Keystone pipeline has always been quixotic, confused and argued with emotion over logic.”

Is such opposition as “quixotic,” one wonders, as the opposition of those who fought to end slavery — an institution that at one time was near-universally considered inevitable? Until it wasn’t.

Well, after Obama’s decision, Tomlinson naturally had some ‘splainin to do.

“Rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline will do nothing to help fight climate change,” he remarked three days later. “All Obama did was require companies to use more dangerous and costly forms of transportation.”

He further counseled: “If you want to do something about climate change, then use public transportation.”

Except, focusing on one’s personal “carbon footprint” as a substitute for collective mobilization and binding international accords, is its own feel-good form of climate defeatism.

The saga isn’t over. The unabashed climate denier who succeeded Obama as president re-approved the pipeline permits, only to watch Joe Biden re-deny them his very first day in office. Now, President-Elect Donny Drill-Fingers, in an August interview with Elon Musk — who, oddly enough, owns an electric car — praised the project as “environmentally friendly.”

“It’s probably better that the U.S. provides that than some other countries,” his billionaire lackey Musk chimed in.

Strangely, post-Obama, I couldn’t find Tomlinson ever mentioning the Keystone XL pipeline again in print. But his characteristic liberal realism, echoed by Trump and Musk, has kept pumping unabated.

On Sept. 15, in a fair-and-balanced criticism of both Trump’s and Harris’ respective energy policies for the Sunday Express-News, Tomlinson went out of his way to denigrate climate activists anew.

“Environmentalists called on the federal government to stop fracking, falsely claiming that it contaminated water wells and triggered earthquakes,” he wrote.

Wait, fracking doesn’t contaminate water wells or trigger earthquakes?

The studies cited in a review of available research published last year in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology show “an estimated 1-4% of [fracking] wells have reported spills.” And because, in the U.S., “there are approximately 150,000 active UOGD wells, and more than 9 million people rely on drinking-water sources located within 1 mile” of one of those wells, water contamination, while not widespread, rightly “remains a major community concern,” the authors explained.

That’s because “fracturing fluids and wastewater may contain toxic, radioactive, endocrine-disrupting, and/or carcinogenic chemicals.”

Two years earlier, writing in the journal Science, researchers had already put together a large geocoded database to analyze the effect of hydraulic fracturing on surface water quality. They found a small but measurable increase in chloride, barium and strontium in nearby water sources, especially right after a new well is drilled and fracked.

Another study added thallium to the list as exceeding Environmental Protection Agency limits. Considering the sheer scale of the fracking boom, that’s not nothing. And in one disquieting study of more than a million births in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2013, babies born within half a mile of a fracking site were 25% more likely to suffer low birth weight.

As for seismic activity, the Frequently Asked Questions section of the US Geological Survey (USGS) website contradicts Tomlinson’s categorical disavowal. “In Oklahoma, which has the most induced earthquakes in the US, 2% of earthquakes can be linked to hydraulic fracturing operations.”

Over the summer, three quakes hit Scurry County, Texas, outside Lubbock, one of which clocked in at magnitude 4.9 — the largest temblor known to be fracking-induced in our state’s history.

“We can say with confidence these are related to oil and gas extractions,” a geophysicist with the USGS told USA Today. Even the Chronicle ran a story in July with the headline “Rash of recent earthquakes in Texas could be related to fracking.”

Does Tomlinson not read his own newspaper?

If he’s falsely accusing others of false claims, how can we trust Tomlinson’s assessment of the compromises necessary to balance sustainable energy and environmental risks?

“Some Harris supporters still want to ban fracking, but that would force the U.S. to reopen coal plants,” Tomlinson wrote.

Says who? I accessed the online version of his column, expecting a hyperlink to a credible source that would support this supposed Faustian tradeoff. To no avail, it turns out.

Last month, Robert Howarth, a biogeochemist and ecosystem scientist at Cornell University, published a paper that’s been making the rounds in publications from The Financial Times to Forbes — periodicals I’d expect a business writer to at least occasionally peruse. Howarth’s work adds to existing literature that exposes intentional venting and unintentional leaks as substantially undercounted in official government statistics that rely on industry self-reporting. When Howarth factored in processing and shipping, he concluded that shale gas is as bad as coal is, with so-called liquefied natural gas a full 33% worse, pouring a fuckton of methane — a more potent heat-trapper than carbon — into the atmosphere we all share.

“It’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions,” Howarth told The Guardian.

What’s a synonym for “wishful thinking”? Oh right, “quixotic.”

This country’s original sin may have been slavery, but its most enduring one may well be the oppressive ecological devastation we’re leaving the future. And yet some are still making liberal excuses for a dirty business.

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This article appears in Nov 13-26, 2024.