Top environmental journalists, professors and analysts will direct a teach-in on global warming, fracking and the oil and gas industry at the University of Colorado this Friday, April 22 and Saturday, April 23.
“Fracking: A Sure Path to an Ice-Free Planet,” will feature presentations and question-and-answer sessions from author Andrew Nikiforuk (Slick Water: Fracking and One Insider’s Stand Against the World’s Most Powerful Industry), author and journalist Antonia Juhasz (Black Tide; and The Bush Agenda) and a keynote presentation from leading fracking researcher Anthony Ingraffea of Cornell University. There will also be discussions with local policy makers, professors and scientists.
The all-day forum, and movie screening on Friday night, was born out of a need to act urgently on climate change and highlight how important research isn’t getting adequate coverage, says Marty Walter, a CU professor who co-organized the event with local researcher Daniel Ziskin.
“When you hit a weather report and you hear about baseball-sized hail in Dallas last week, you never hear the weather guy say, ‘Statistically speaking, this is probably related to global warming,’” Walter says. “You can never say this weather event was caused by X; that’s a question that you just can’t answer because it’s complicated. [But] is the probability that you get baseball-sized hail in Dallas increased due to global warming by X percent? The answer to that is yes, and you can do calculations based on what percent X is.”
Models can be conservative or liberal when framing the impact of global warming on specific weather events, but Walter says more often than not, the conservative estimates are the only ones reported and “You never hear about the larger Xs.”
Some of that under-reported research is by Ingraffea and his colleagues at Cornell. His recent work on methane emissions from shale gas development showed major methane levels above and around fracking operations in Pennsylvania, and he also has published work showing that methane released from fracking operations is much more destructive to the atmosphere than coal emissions over 20- and 100-year timeframes.
That research will be shared in a presentation Ingraffea will deliver over Skype, Walter says. It’s critical to widely and immediately disseminate the work Ingraffea and his colleagues at Cornell have done, Walter says, because fracking amplifies the potential for climatic catastrophe.
“With this methane thing, [global warming] could be accelerated and nobody is admitting it; you don’t hear about this. It’s not the thing that makes the headlines and we could get an [extreme weather] event that happens in a decade as opposed to 100 years,” Walter says.
Nikiforuk will speak in person at the event and sign books. His book, Slick Water, chronicles Jessica Ernst, a woman in Alberta, Canada, who took on gas operator Encana by filing a lawsuit claiming that they had secretly set up hundreds of fracking wells, which then contaminated local water supplies to the point that Ernst could set her tap water on fire.
Antonia Juhasz will speak about her work around the globe investigating the effects of oil and gas drilling. Her work has covered the BP Gulf oil spill, the politics of how governments and oil companies work together, rainforest destruction, climate negotiations and more.
On Friday night, there will be a screening of Merchants of Doubt, a documentary that looks at how corporations and politicians hire pundits to sling phony science and research in the media to create uncertainty and confusion about everything from climate change to the medical industry. The screening is free.
Walter says the events on Earth Day will hopefully inspire attendees toward action, and that it’s particularly critical for Boulder citizens to start thinking about the immediacy of such action.
“What we’re lacking right now is a sense of urgency in dealing with this. We shouldn’t be asking about should we municipalize because of a cost benefit, we should be saying, ‘No, we should municipalize right now because Xcel is not moving fast enough toward renewables,’” Walter says.
Both the movie screening and forum will be held in the Math 100 room at CU, and the Saturday event runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with an optional lunch break in the middle. Walter says all money raised from the event will support the Colorado ballot initiatives regulating fracking, but that attendance is more important than the price of admission.
“It’s zero to 15 bucks just to attend,” Walter says. “If you’re too poor, don’t worry about it, I’ll pay for you. I want to see a good audience because the urgency for dealing with global warming is lacking in our civilization right now. The amount of carbon we burn puts us one atom closer to the destruction of complex civilization.”
For more information on the event, visit fracktivism.net.
