Marcellus Shale: The Hazards of Toxic Oligarchy

Marcellus Shale: The Toxic Hazards of Oligarchy
(A letter sent to The Nation)

I read with passionate agreement Bernie Sanders' essay "No to Oligarchy." Never was a tax better in tune with democratic institutions than the so-called "death tax"; not to impose it simply amounts to a large welfare handout to the near and dear of the rich. Somehow, I suspect they're already not hurting.

Although Sanders' piece hints at the hazards of oligarchy to the American people, it lacked the length to give examples. I can cite a telling one: the breakneck-paced, unjust imposition of gas drilling by hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") on communities throughout Pennsylvania. The whole history of industry lobbying in our state, now exposed in a Common Cause study titled "Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets," reveals how painstakingly gas industry lobbying and campaign funding assure that their siren voice rings round the clock in lawmakers' ears--at whatever incalculable cost to the common good.

As citizens of rural Pennsylvania, my wife and I will soon be among the many to pay that cost. Even if we dodge the horrors of water contamination documented in Josh Fox's award-winning film Gasland, we'll still face certain air pollution and the virtual industrial dismantling of the peaceful rural community we picked to live in. Far more broadly, the water supplies and recreational fishing and boating of the unsuspecting millions served by the Susquehanna and Delaware watersheds will soon be at risk. And all for the sake of a supposedly "clean fuel" that a Cornell University study shows, once its extraction process is considered, to be a worse greenhouse gas offender than even mountaintop coal.

In all of this, the only "advice and consent" that occurred was between gas industry lobbyists and U.S. and PA legislators, or between drillers and leasers of drillable land--many cash-strapped farmers scarcely equipped to negotiate shrewdly with well-heeled, well-rehearsed industry touts. Perhaps the best evidence of the iron grip of toxic oligarchy on our lawmakers is that increasingly many activists believe our only chances to force a moratorium lie in civil disobedience--or in citizens invoking their Second Amendment rights. Clearly we should have said "no to oligarchy" long before it came to this pass.