The Republican Brain (41 page)

No one is saying, then, that fracking has never directly polluted an aquifer. In fact, there are several alleged cases of this actually occurring—one in 1984, in West Virginia (long before the current Gas Rush), and another in Wyoming that emerged as this book went to press. At the same time, however, this hardly seems the most likely route to contamination.

When you consider the weight of the evidence, then, it seems likely that most of the cases of water contamination that get blamed on fracking are actually the result of poor surface drilling practices—well cementing and casing—as well as leaking containment structures and poor disposal practices for flowback water. These are, after all, precisely the things that companies have been repeatedly cited for. The idea that fluids are regularly traveling vertically through what is sometimes over a mile of rock, is more implausible.

To be sure, no one can rule out that it may occur in some minority of cases. That possibility surely ought to be studied further. For the moment, though, the evidence above suggests that those liberals and environmentalists who position themselves as anti-fracking are either unaware of the nuances of the issue or, if they are aware, exploiting a semantic ambiguity. They're really opposed to reckless and inadequately regulated unconventional gas drilling—the entire Gas Rush—but not to a technology that, in and of itself, may be one of the least risky parts of the whole process.

So why not just say as much? Well, as the fracking fight goes on, becomes more familiar, and garners more attention, that's precisely what is starting to happen.

My colleagues at
DeSmogBlog.com
, a site dedicated to tracking misinformation about global warming, are very critical of gas drilling in general. While we do not always agree, it is notable that their chief report on this subject does not treat deep underground fracking as the key problem—rather, it lists an array of problems, such as poor drilling and casing practices, and indicts the industrial process of “unconventional gas drilling” as a whole.

Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, acknowledged that in 2011 there were no known cases of fracking directly polluting groundwater (as of that time). In the meantime, the agency has launched a comprehensive study of fracking to make sure of this.

Not waiting for the EPA, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation has already weighed the science and come to the same basic conclusion: that the most publicized threat from unconventional gas drilling is actually fairly unlikely. The department is moving forward on allowing fracking in New York State—with a bevy of new regulations to address the causes of concern that have arisen in other states. But the department wants to address actual risks, not hypothetical ones that seem unlikely to manifest themselves.

On fracking, then, the nuanced position, the deliberatively complex one, would run something like this:

While there are certainly risks (and inadequately regulated companies have made a lot of careless mistakes in Pennsylvania and other states) natural gas is still a better fuel than oil or coal if you're worried about greenhouse gas emissions. What's more, fracking itself is likely not the main source of groundwater contamination—it's doubtful that fractures a mile beneath the surface will connect back up to groundwater—so most instances of contamination are probably the result of shoddy well construction at the surface, surface spills of flowback water, and cutting corners. Therefore, natural gas and drilling companies need to be more tightly regulated, so that safe drilling can continue—even as more scientific research continues so that we can more precisely delineate all the risks involved.

Not exactly a troop-rallying message, perhaps; and not what you're going to get in an email from most environmental groups. But this nevertheless strikes me as a proper adjustment of one's views to the current reality of the situation. And it's a position increasingly being taken by mainstream liberals, Democrats, and environmentalists—and the Obama administration—because it is a position that science and the facts
allow them to take.

For the most part, these liberals won't lose sleep if the most prominent charge against fracking doesn't pan out. There are other charges to be reckoned with, and an industry that still has to be better regulated—although not shut down entirely.

And there are many other worthy ways to try to save the world.

And that, in miniature, helps explain why the left doesn't cling to misinformation in the way that the right does. Far too many liberals simply don't
need
to. They're flexible: They can move on to other concerns, and they can adjust their arguments in the old areas of concern. Meanwhile, even the most ideological and emotional among them remain allied with scientists, who just aren't going to put up with any nonsense in their fields of expertise. It is hard, psychologically, for liberals to buck what scientists say, and to withstand the intellectual beating that is sure to follow if they do.

That is not to say that on such issues, particular individuals or organizations on the left never misstate science or facts, or make wrong claims, or cling to them, for emotional and motivated reasons. This does indeed happen. And it is happening right now on fracking.

But when this occurs, scientists, journalists, bloggers, and liberal political elites invariably strike back, keeping us honest, defending scientific accuracy and the weight of the evidence. For these folks, it isn't about obedience, or group solidarity, or sticking up for those on your side of the aisle—it's about getting it right, dammit. We don't have Ronald Reagan's “Eleventh Commandment”:
Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.
We will tear those on our own side to bits if they're wrong.

In this, whether we know it or not, we fractious liberals and scientists are also acting on behalf of the core values to which we are deeply and emotionally attached—in this case, the Enlightenment belief that if you can't get the facts right, you can't solve the problem and make the world better. And in doing so, we're satisfying our own psychological needs, which often include the need for cognition and the need for accuracy, as well as the need to distinguish oneself from others and stand out, to be unique rather than part of the herd (a characteristic of the Open personality).

And how do you do that? Often, it means criticizing one's own peers, taking them to task.

On the left, then, you certainly do encounter some who attack science and the facts. But you also see them devastatingly rebutted by their own presumed allies—especially scientists and other academic experts, but also liberal journalists, and science journalists. That makes it very hard for the political mainstreaming of denial and factual intransigence to occur.

Fracking isn't the only issue where we see this pattern. Another such case is nuclear power, where the left has long been accused of being dogmatically anti-science, even though many scientists and liberal policymakers today, including President Obama, are pretty solidly pro-nuclear. That's because they realize that while the risks certainly aren't nonexistent, in the broader scheme of things they're not all that terrible, either. When all the information gets integrated together in their heads, liberals and scientists often wind up being nuclear power
supporters
—especially if they are more mathematically and scientifically attuned.

Yet another such issue is vaccination, where liberals and celebrities who overstated the science—like Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—have been absolutely pilloried by scientists, science journalists, science bloggers, and now just liberals in general. In this last case, precisely because anti-vaccine claims are so incredibly weak, and also because the greater harm to children and society comes not from vaccines but from the failure to use them to protect against deadly diseases, we're now at the point where these claims are anathema to any thinker who wants to be taken seriously—much like claims that humans don't cause global warming. Childhood vaccines
do not
cause autism. And while some highly emotional parent autism activists refuse to give up on this claim—and hotbeds of Internet denial and wagon-circling around the issue remain—the notion that they do has, at this point, been all but vanquished from the realm of polite discourse.

I won't spend as long on the nuclear and vaccine case studies as I did on fracking—in part because they're simpler to explain. But let's dive in.

Even more than fracking, nuclear power is
scary.
The alleged risk is invisible and one you simply can't protect yourself against:
ionizing radiation
, sometimes traveling over very long distances. It can pose a risk of cancer later in life, even though you'll probably never even know you were exposed to it.

Nuclear power is also another corporate story—private utility companies like Exelon and Entergy reap large profits off it—which makes the egalitarian-communitarian left inherently distrustful. In two separate ways, then, nuclear power pushes liberal buttons.

No wonder there is a long history of left-wing anti-nuclear activism, going back to the very early days of the industry, and closely tied to the left's wartime and draft-time fight against the “military-industrial complex” during the 1960s and 1970s. No wonder public opinion surveys suggest that liberals, more than conservatives, tend to oppose the building of more nuclear reactors. We would therefore expect the left, more than the right, to react strongly and emotionally on the nuclear issue, especially in the wake of a disaster like the one seen at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in March of 2011.

But here's the thing—worrying a lot about nuclear power puts liberals at odds with
scientists
, who tend to think the risks have been overblown, especially in comparison to other risks that inevitably arise from the need to power our societies (like the greenhouse gas emissions that result from burning fossil fuels). “Amongst nuclear experts, you get a distinct sense that society has overestimated these risks, overplayed them, wasted in some cases resources in pursuing reductions in risk where money would be better spent elsewhere,” says Hank Jenkins-Smith, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma who studies scientists' views on the nuclear issue, and why they diverge from those of the public.