Newfoundlanders Aren’t Getting The Fracking Truth

[Anonymous]

Shame on the St. Johns newspaper for posting this bloody hoax. The Fracking revolution is the best thing that has ever happened to our environment, for consumers and for industry. It is displacing dirty coal as a feed source for power and cheap abundant gas is making power much cheaper than for our silly European counterparts.

Last week the Telegram newspaper in St. John's published a column entitled "Some truth about fracking wouldn't hurt," written by an oil and gas engineer from Calgary named Syd Peters.



It was a devastating personal confession by a fracking industry insider who said he had spent 28 years polluting the environment across the U.S. and western Canada, and then "coercing landowners" and "silencing" towns to keep the industry's dirty secrets. "This is what is coming to Newfoundland if fracking is allowed," he wrote.



Except there is no oil and gas engineer from Calgary named Syd Peters. APEGA, Alberta's association of professional engineers, has no record of him. He's not in the Calgary phone book. His stories were fake, just like he is. After I raised these questions, the Telegram acknowledged they did not follow standard editorial procedures, and could not verify the author.

But the identity of "Syd" as an evil oilman was essential to the whole column. If anyone else — say, a professional environmental protester — had made the shocking allegations, he would have been asked for proof. By creating "Syd," that credibility problem was solved. It was his personal confession. It was like that



60 Minutes bombshell from the 1990s when Jeffrey Wigand, an executive with the Brown and Williamson cigarette company, "switched sides" and dished dirt on the industry. The story was so compelling it was turned into a movie starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.



But Wigand was real. "Syd" is fake. "Syd" said fracking leaks into "your source of drinking water" and "people are sick from the contamination and the chemicals." But what does someone real say — a real expert, like Lisa Jackson, the director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during Barack Obama's first term?



She was called before Congress and asked, point blank, if fracking can contaminate ground water. "I am not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself affected water," was her answer. More than one million oil and gas wells have been fracked in the U.S. since the 1940s, and hundreds of thousands more in Canada. But the EPA, and its state counterparts,