Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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The hypocrisy of fractivists isn’t new, of course, but preaching abstinence from gas when most homes are heated with it and it lowers emissions isn’t smart.
Watching the video of Tri-County Landowners Coalition folks announce their formation the other day, I was struck by the naïveté of the gang. They were robotic, if anything, mindlessly repeating the shibboleths of fractivists of yesteryear. They had nothing interesting, nothing new and nothing valid to say; no grasp of the facts, nor any passion for that matter. My own research indicates they’re serial protesters, so perhaps they were simply tired. What’s most amazing, though, is their failure to do the most basic research, even with respect to the residents for whom they purport to speak.
One might expect a group focused on the prohibition of natural gas production in an area to have some knowledge of natural gas use. The Tri-County Landowners Coalition (which might better be called the Tri-County Losers Coalition given their obvious intent to discourage economic development) simply doesn’t think that way, though.
Chalk it up to being more focused on ideology than needs. If they had focused instead on reality, they might have noticed natural gas use within Ashland, Holmes and Richland Counties, Ohio. Check out the Census data:
The Tri-County area the coalition says doesn’t need or want gas, heats 58% of its homes with it and nearly all that gas is produced using hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Moreover, much of the electricity (the second largest heating source) is made with shale gas, such that we can safely say natural gas is already heating two-thirds of Tri-County homes.
The reason is simple; the cities of Ashland and Mansfield have access to natural gas utilities and dominant the population of the region. Given the choice, these people have chosen gas because it’s inexpensive and clean. Good luck selling them on abstinence.
These protesters should call their gas supplier and have them remove their gas line (pipeline) from their property. Then they can burn wood, or paper, or trash for warmth. Or move to NY where they can pay 3X what they could pay in PA. Or move to New England where they are importing Russian LNG.
I bet they themselves use natural gas for heat. They should practice what they preach and give up everything that is made from natural gas as well as their heat.
Don’t be short sighted; we want more people to use gas not less. Do not waste your time on the hard core anti’s; they will never come around. There is a mass of people that use gas and don’t want to change that because change has a cost to them. Convince them that the anti’s want to disrupt there lives and finances with virtually non-existent solar and wind installations, mandates and other stunts that will raise their taxes, rather than lower them with the ad valorem taxes paid directly to local governments and school districts and cheaper domestic fuel.
The anti’s are making a critical mistake by trying to sell what they don’t have (renewables and storage) and disrupting the everyday lives of ordinary, mostly uninvolved, people by frustrating gas development and distribution. Until now the anti’s regarded existing gas infrastructure as a sunk cost they couldn’t eliminate; they hoped it would age out in the future and be replaced with renewables gradually. Now we see that their hubris is costing regular people serious money and making us dependent on the Russian for fuel.
Marcellus and Utica gas is the only fuel that can make up the short falls in decommissioned coal and nuclear plants in the Northeast. If you can’t, won’t or don’t get these natural allies to our side, you don’t appreciate the struggle in front of us and how much time you’ve wasted.
Documented activists should be denied access to the pumps at gas stations, utilities should have the right to shut off and lock out the domestic gas meters of activists, fuel oil delivery trucks should refrain from trespass on activist driveways. It is a free country and businesses should not be obligated to serve those who publically make defamatory statements or file legal challenges against them or any part of the value chain essential to that business.
Nice job pulling those publically available energy use demographics, we need more of that.