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posted by janrinok on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the claims-but-no-evidence dept.

Andrew Higgins reports in the NYT that Romanian officials including the prime minister point to a mysteriously well-financed and well-organized campaign of protests over fracking in Europe and are pointing their fingers at Russia's Gazprom, a state-controlled energy giant, that has a clear interest in preventing countries dependent on Russian natural gas from developing their own alternative supplies of energy and preserving a lucrative market for itself — and a potent foreign policy tool for the Kremlin.

“Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas,” says NATO’s former secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

A wave of protest against fracking began three years ago in Bulgaria, a country highly dependent on Russian energy. Faced with a sudden surge of street protests by activists, many of whom had previously shown little interest in environmental issues, the Bulgarian government in 2012 banned fracking and canceled a shale gas license issued earlier to Chevron.

Russia itself has generally shown scant concern for environmental protection and has a long record of harassing and even jailing environmentalists who stage protests. On fracking, however, Russian authorities have turned enthusiastically green, with Putin declaring last year that fracking “poses a huge environmental problem.” Places that have allowed it, he said, “no longer have water coming out of their taps but a blackish slime.” For their part Green groups have been swift to attack Rasmussen’s views, saying that they were not involved in any alleged Russian attempts to discredit the technology, and were instead opposed to it on the grounds of environmental sustainability. “The idea we’re puppets of Putin is so preposterous that you have to wonder what they’re smoking over at Nato HQ,” says Greenpeace, which has a history of antagonism with the Russian government, which arrested several of its activists on a protest in the Arctic last year.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 07 2014, @06:49AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday December 07 2014, @06:49AM (#123411) Homepage
    You forgot to include a TL;DR. Perhaps "Fracking is perfectly safe when done by true Scotsmen"?
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Sunday December 07 2014, @07:36AM

    by edIII (791) on Sunday December 07 2014, @07:36AM (#123418)

    No, sir. I did not. I did not present you an unreasoned fallacy. What I've presented you is:

    1) Fracking is a technical process and well engineered.
    2) There is considerable dissent about environmental concerns precluded by the engineering associated with fracking.
    3) The concerns can be addressed by transparency and scientific explorations, but are precluded by law protecting corporate secrets.

    My disclaimer was at the bottom where I said that I couldn't prove it. Therefore, at a minimum the No True Scotsman fallacy does not apply. I cannot illustrate or explain the counter example to a good fracking process, as it's wholly precluded by law as well as being nonsensical to every doctor and engineer asked. In fact, I think I strongly implied that it was a fallacy unless I could prove how their fracs are conducted. So in any case, your assertion of the fallacy is pointless. I addressed the issue, AFAICT, in a more or less direct and honest manner.

    Additionally, you seem to be asking for proof that fracking is safe, as if it isn't that strongly supported by the science. Do you really need me to break down the whole process? I already did here before, you can search for it. In a way, I am asking for trust that fracs are safe. Why do I have any credibility? Fair question. I was really just enjoying the catering in the moments I wasn't listening to the engineers. However, all the doctors present in those articles are generally of the same mind and you might want to listen to them. What they say is that fracking can't really hurt anything, but that they couldn't make a statement of fact regarding anything else specific to certain formations or specific operations.

    If you have any specific questions about the process, just ask.

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 07 2014, @03:50PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday December 07 2014, @03:50PM (#123485) Homepage
      How does your "not fracking" differ from "not a true scotsman"?
      How does your "Is what the oil & gas companies doing considered fracking in the technical sense?" "No. It isn't." differ from "Is it a true Scotsman?" "No. It isn't"?
      It's hard to come up with a better match for the No True Scotsman fallacy.

      If what people are doing in the real world is "not fracking", then no amount of proselytising about the safety of "true fracking" is relevant to the real world.
      --
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      • (Score: 2) by edIII on Monday December 08 2014, @02:40AM

        by edIII (791) on Monday December 08 2014, @02:40AM (#123632)

        How does your "not fracking" differ from "not a true scotsman"?

        It differs because the latter represents a logical fallacy and an intent to use it in a debate willfully, and the former is me stating that the fallacy exists and attempting to address the issue.

        How does your "Is what the oil & gas companies doing considered fracking in the technical sense?" "No. It isn't." differ from "Is it a true Scotsman?" "No. It isn't"?

        The true Scotsman represents behavior in a debate and unwillingness to explore the truth by simply saying that it can't be what they are doing. In one sense it's a pedantic clinging to strictly defined terms, but in another it can be to dodge the debate itself.

        I intended nothing of the sort, and did not do such thing in actuality.

        It's hard to come up with a better match for the No True Scotsman fallacy.

        Which is why I'm not slamming you, and in fact, I am even responding to you at all. You have a good point when you bring it up, but it does not apply IMHO. I am attempting to explain what a true frac is, what I believe is occurring when specific exploration companies use the term, and then what may be happening in general from my experience.

        If what people are doing in the real world is "not fracking", then no amount of proselytising about the safety of "true fracking" is relevant to the real world.

        That is *absolutely* not true.

        Back at Slashdot I was having a debate with a user there. My experience with fracking has always led me to support it, but after my conversations with this gentleman, I began to understand that the affected people are not lying. After that, it's just Occam's Razor. Which again, I know that I have to support. I thought I had with my statements about ROI and the actual physics involved. It was a productive conversation that gave me the impetus to really see what may be going on in these fracs instead of just making the assumption that they are correct. Nothing surprised me more than seeing documentation illustrating a continuous water fracking methodology where it was not a simple one-day operation.

        The true Scotsman fallacy is purely an emergent property of the designed information asymmetry. I can't actually bring you to a fracking operation and show you anything. All of that is business data, and very well protected. I can explain what it means by definition, and walk you through an abstracted view of the process. I'm unable to do anything more unless we want to spend millions of dollars performing our own frac to demonstrate water table integrity being well maintained. The laws need to be changed to allow more transparency under the ground. I can honest to God perform some of the most gnarly fracking operations possible where we shake an o-ring lose on you out there. Even with that massive amounts of energy and fluid being slammed into the ground, there will be no damage to the water table.

        Likewise, as I fully admitted from the start, I cannot prove my statements of the counterexample, the anti-frack. If I could prove them, the EPA would get busy assassinating these corporations in a fervor not seen since Prohibition. The anti-frack I was seeing on paper could not be reasonably stated to not have much in common. Not without almost every safety factor removed and what can only be described as a brutish attempt at forceful recovery that could only destroy formations. Not keep them intact.

        Why is it relevant to the real world? So that when people discuss it, the idea is at least in the back of their heads that the information needs to be verified. Stop taking the fracking proponents word for it and demand transparent access to the operations. It's worthy to note that they might be lying to you.

        It's frustrating not being able to prove anything, but even more frustrating that people don't simply block operations or protest until a civilian review board of petro engineers from Universities sign off on it with all the data public. Review isn't perfect by any means, but it sure makes it a lot harder to get away with stuff over long periods of time. Not something as big and noticeable as damaged water tables and aquifers that supply people water. This would have been already over if we had actual access to well data and operation logs. With 3D seismic, and operational logs showing casing integrity, I feel pretty confident we could clear it up on a well-by-well basis, all the way up to piping going to the refinery. Why can't we look?

        I'm just one person, but I think it's important enough to say this. It's not an unreasoned fallacy to be demanding information symmetry when people are saying that their hair is catching on fire and corporations are saying that cream cheese can't be responsible. That's literally how ridiculous it is that a frack (according the entire purpose and designed engineering) can cause damage to anything beyond the specific designs of the frack. Well since people really are having their hair catch on fire, start freakin ask that they do what you want me to do, and actually start showing people that the cream cheese is really cream cheese instead of saying cream cheese is approved by the FDA.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday December 08 2014, @09:34AM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday December 08 2014, @09:34AM (#123685) Homepage
          Thank you for your considered reply. For reference, I could easily be in a reversed role in this exchange had the topic been security related. I could show the scientific proofs of security of protocols until red in the face while the rest of the world was implementing them with bugs, information leakage, timing attacks, and shitty PRNGs. However, because of the latter, I wouldn't even bother with the former. If everyone's doing it wrong, then the theoretical perfection may as well not exist, most of the time.
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