Nick Grealy
Administrator of NoHotAir/ReImagineGas Blog

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Josh Fox is a charlatan who’s made a career for himself staking out a radical position of fracking. Did he help elect Donald Trump in the process?

Which noisy New Yorker, product of a privileged family, blocked Hillary Clinton’s route to the Oval Office? No, not that one.

Josh Fox was director of Gasland, a documentary on the effects of US fracking filmed in 2009. The film spawned the anti-fracking movement first in the US, and then in Europe, most especially in France and the UK. He certainly helped elect Trump by energizing the anti-fracking forces around the Bernie Sanders “no fracking at all” supporters to either stay home or vote for Doctor Jill Stein the Green Party candidate.

Until Gasland, few people had no idea what fracking was, but the childish connection with the other “f” word soon came to be shorthand for being pro clean water and air and against fossil fuels. No one seems to have much of a problem consuming the light, heat, power, mobility and connectivity energy provides, but for complex reasons, the idea of producing energy scared enough people that by the time of the Democratic Primary in 2016, Bernie Sanders came out against fracking. He was notably silent on the local impact of reducing gasoline from $4 to less $2. Hillary made reasonable enough noises about regulation and reducing methane emissions but according to Wikileaks, she was frustrated during the campaign by anti-fracking activists who she advised to “get a life.”

The hard core anti fracking forces unleashed by Fox found a standard bearer in Jill Stein, Presidential candidate of the Green Party.  After Ralph Nader handed the White House to George W. Bush by a wafer thin electoral majority in 2000, one would expect those who wanted to cast a protest vote might think carefully. They didn’t and today we have Trump as President-Elect.

Hillary Clinton, according to results at 0300 EST on November 13 at the New York Times won the popular vote by 638,750 but lost the Electoral College 290 to 228. Yet Clinton lost Wisconsin by a majority less than Jill Stein’s votes. It’s noteworthy that Clinton conceded after the AP gave Wisconsin to Trump. The same thing happened in Michigan, which is still not officially called, where Trump is ahead by 12,000 votes but Stein took over 50,000.

In other words, if there was no Green candidate, and progressive female votes went not to Stein but to Clinton, Donald Trump would probably be ahead in the Electoral College but at a far smaller gap. This is apart from the many who stayed home because Hillary wasn’t perfect on fracking. It”s even more complex if even a small number of the Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson’s  four million voters were originally Sanders voters.

The Green Party party describes itself as “eco-Socialist and anti-war, propagating environmentalism and social justice” It is hard to conceive that those values would appeal equally to Trump and Clinton voters. This year Stein had a big improvement over her 2012 tally of 469,501 votes at  over 1,200,000. Trump could still have a razor thin Electoral College lead, but have lost the popular vote by millions – hardly an advertisement for a democratic mandate and especially ironic considering his pre-election rigged election claims.

This horrifying possibility caused a guilt ridden Fox to reply to a Twitter post from me for the first time in years:

A far more talented film maker than Fox is Ethan Coen who wrote this in the New York Times under the headline  2016 Election Thank You Notes. I’ve underlined what I think is the key message green opponents of fracking should learn. Too bad it’s too late.

2016 Election Thank You Notes.

Such a surprise! So many people to thank!

Jill Stein voters: You helped elect a man who pledges that he will, in his first hundred days, cancel contributions to United Nations programs to fight climate change. If your vote for Ms. Stein did not end up advancing your green agenda, it did allow you to feel morally superior to all the compromising schmoes who voted for Hillary Clinton. And your feelings about your vote are more important than the consequences of your vote. So — thank you!

Josh Fox alone didn’t put Trump in the White House. But, he certainly gave him a leg up.

Editor’s Note: Nick and I have quite different political views, but we agree on shale and his analysis is on the money in this case, however one might feel about the candidates. The petulant Josh Fox is the face of the fractivist movement and he forced Hillary Clinton to utter some very anti-fracking things in public; things like this at one of the Democrat debates:

“I don’t support it when any locality or any state is against it, number one. I don’t support it when the release of methane or the contamination of water is present,” she said at the forum in Flint, Michigan. “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place, and I think that’s the best approach.”

Clinton, of course, said other things in private, which is, perhaps, the much bigger point here, but she felt the pressure from Josh Fox types to pander to their cause, so she did for the cameras and it hurt her badly. How badly is revealed by what happened in Pennsylvania, where she lost the rural areas with shale gas by huge margins including adjacent areas such as Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre area) that heretofore reliably voted Democrat but went 58% for Trump this time (due in no small part to the rallying efforts of shale supporters). It went 52% Obama in 2012.

2016 Pennsylvania election results by county

Bradford County went 71% Trump after voting 61% Romney in 2012. Greene County went 70% versus 58% Romney in 2012. Lycoming County (Williamsport) went 71% Trump compared to 66% for Romney. It was 73% in Sullivan County (63% Romney), 69% in Susquehanna County (60% Romney), 75% in Tioga County (where Fox hangs out on occasion) as compared to 67% Romney, 61% in Washington County (56% Romney) and 67% in Wyoming County (55% Romney). These are all prime shale areas that Clinton lost badly. Catering to the charlatan certainly didn’t help her.

Meanwhile, in the Empire State, the land of Governor Corruptocrat, he has decided to double down, coming out with an astoundingly radical statement saying he was “soul sick” about the way these red areas voted. Seeking to outdo himself he even resorted to this hateful statement, calling out his own upstate areas as racist based on a single incident of someone spray-painting something ugly (as if such things haven’t been repeatedly faked by haters on all sides):

“We cannot unhear what we have heard. The voices of the Ku Klux Klan, white nationalism, authoritarianism, misogyny and xenophobia. A generally disdainful view of American ideals.”

It was, in a word, pathetic; so political one can only conclude it was the launch of the Cuomo 2020 campaign, which says a lot about the arrogance of the man. He, of course, bragged that “While the world struggles to come to consensus on how to combat climate change, we in New York have banned fracking and set a renewable energy standard requiring 50% of our electricity to come from renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2030.”

Good luck with all that, as they say. His campaign will have little leadership given how many Cuomo sycophants are headed to jail. His fracking decision has condemned upstate to poverty, while leaving him standing alone among the states with shale resources. His renewable program is will cause further skyrocketing of electricity rates and speed up the exodus from the state.

What Governor Corruptocrat doesn’t seem to grasp is this; it is precisely this nonsense and the slobbering over Josh Fox types that caused Pennsylvania to go Trump in 2016. That particular New York State of mind doesn’t play well outside the Manhattan, but a rough-cut guy raised in Queens who went to the Marcellus Shale Coalition “Shale Insight” conference this year to promote fracking did pretty darn well, didn’t he? There’s a lesson here, it seems.