Anti-fracking left trot out another bogus story

Jon Entine:

New York Times natural-gas reporter Ian Urbina last week launched another salvo in his crusade against the shale-gas industry and the “fracking” method that’s opened up new vistas of gas exploitation. And, yet again, he screwed up. 

In a March 18 article, Urbina reported that the Agriculture Department was about to require expensive and extensive home-by-home environmental reviews before issuing mortgages to aspiring rural homeowners who may want to lease out the natural-gas rights on their property. 

But his main evidence was a few internal e-mails from lower-level regional administrators. For example, Jennifer Jackson, a junior program director for rural loans in the Ag Department’s New York office, had written: “We will no longer be financing homes with gas leases.”

We don’t know how Urbina got access to those internal e-mails — but it’s a good bet he was leaked them by sources who wanted this to be the policy. 

He also cited an Agriculture congressional liaison’s e-mails to a few anti-fracking Democrats, which said the agency would consider revising current policies, but lacked the money for such a review. 

His story notes that he couldn’t get comment from top Agriculture officials; I’m told there’s little trust in the department for the mistake-prone reporter. 

More important: A bit more reporting — or, perhaps, more honesty about the biases of his sources — would have revealed that what was really going on was a campaign by activists pushing to use obscure environmental rules to scuttle shale-gas extraction. 

The Agriculture Department has provided more than $165 billion in loans and guarantees under the Rural Housing Service Program, which helps the poor and small businesses almost exclusively. Activists hoped to see the National Environmental Policy Act applied to the program, further slowing (and stigmatizing) natural-gas exploitation. 

But Urbina failed to note that NEPA, a vague 42-year-old statute that in limited cases requires environmental reviews before federal money is spent, had never covered any aspect of the rural aid —and that, were it applied, it would bring the whole program to a halt. 

For that reason, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack sent out an e-mail rebuke just hours after Urbina’s tale was published: “As indicated in previous statements, USDA will not make any policy changes related to rural housing.”

...

For some reason the reporter still has the confidence of some at the Times.  What I think he ans his anti fracking friends missed is that a lease for oil and gas would make the property more eligible to most lenders because it would demonstrate and income stream in addition to agriculture for the repayment of the loan.  The anti energy left appears to be grasping out straws in their bogus campaign against increased fracking.

The story also played into the hands of those who are portraying Obama and his administration as hostile to energy production.  That is a political loser for Obama right now and is probably why Vilsack was so quick to shoot down the story.