Several items that have come up in the last week or so deserve attention and comment.
The first one that caught our eye was the release of new polling data from the University of Texas that contained the following interesting findings:
More than 80 percent of Americans say the federal government should focus on developing more natural gas;
Clear majorities of Americans see benefits of domestic natural gas production. Those include creating jobs (which 68 percent see as a benefit of development), lowering costs (68 percent), energy security (64 percent), increasing energy efficiency (64 percent), boosting manufacturing (61 percent), and lowering carbon emissions (57 percent);
61 percent say they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported natural gas development, which is tied for the highest among all the categories listed;
More respondents said we should promote hydraulic fracturing on public lands than said we should ban it; and yet
When asked if they support hydraulic fracturing, or “Fracking”, only 38% of the respondents had a favorable view.
So how does one explain the seeming contradiction of respondents showing heavy support for natural gas development, but corresponding low support for hydraulic fracturing, the technological process that makes development of shale natural gas resources possible?
The answer is actually pretty simple: About five years ago, radical elements of the “environmentalist” movement decided to mount a well-funded, focused disinformation campaign to turn “Fracking” into a pejorative, a virtual cussword in the collective minds of the American public. And, to be honest, they’ve been pretty successful in that effort, thanks in part to the willing or unwitting cooperation by many in the news media and entertainment industries.
Loren Steffy, writing Tuesday at Forbes.com, makes the point that these seeming inconsistent findings also point out to the reality that the oil and gas industry has done a poor job of telling its own story, and that’s hard to argue with. The truth is that this industry has historically done an awful job in the realm of public education and simple communication. There are many reasons for that historically, going all the way back to muckraking reporter Ida Tarbell’s dealings with John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil.
I personally got myself into trouble about ten years ago when I told an audience at an industry conference in Washington that the oil industry wasn’t just “bad” at communications, it was worse than any other industry in America, including such stalwarts as the coal, tobacco and nuclear industries. Not a great way to win friends and influence people, but hey, it was true at the time.
It isn’t true anymore, though. While the industry still has vast room for improvement, as Mr. Steffy points out, it has greatly improved its efforts in the last 8 years or so, as more and more of the industry’s leaders have realized that they now live in a world in which communicating and public education about their business are critical elements to success. They also increasingly realize that, if they don’t tell their own story, no one else is going to do it for them.
To be fair, as bad as the industry has been at communicating, it would be difficult for any industry to effectively counter when TV series like CSI and Longmire (two of my favorite programs, by the way) air episodes that are nothing more than absurdly-plotted propaganda pieces against Fracking. Let’s face it: neither CBS nor TNT are going to be giving the industry equal time to respond.
Hollywood is willing to fork over $15 million for Matt Damon to film “Promised Land”, another thinly-veiled, absurdly plotted anti-Fracking vehicle that failed miserably at the box office, but hell will freeze over before the mainstream film industry ever airs a movie that offers a favorable view of Fracking or oil and gas development in general. That has never happened, and never will.
HBO was willing to come up with $750,000 to finance Josh Fox’s “Gasland II”, even though HBO’s executives were fully aware of the myriad inaccuracies and outright falsehoods contained in the first “Gasland” fake documentary. But Phelim McAleer and Anne McIlhenny had to mount a Kickstarter-based campaign to raise a couple hundred thousand to fund “FrackNation”, a film that offers a more favorable view of shale development, and which no one at HBO would ever consider giving air time. Meanwhile, Mr. Fox continues to receive softball interviews at news outlets like Politico, in which he is never asked a difficult question.
John D. Rockefeller Senior (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Now, many would say, well, the oil and gas companies are rich – they should spend more money on countering this stuff. Yes, perhaps they should, but I would challenge you to go to Google news and do a search on the word “Fracking” any day of the week. Your search will turn up article after article in mainstream media outlets that report even the most absurd and outrageous claims about hydraulic fracturing without any effort to determine whether such claims have any basis in fact at all. No amount of money invested by “rich” oil and gas companies is going to counter that reality.
So what’s the answer – whining about the unfairness of it all? No, not at all. Look, I used to work for a boss whose favorite advice to his employees was to “work smarter, not harder”. Basically, this just meant he was a skinflint who wasn’t going to adequately staff his department, but the advice was still sound, and can be applied here.
Industry doesn’t necessarily need to spend tons more money in its public education and communications efforts, it just needs to spend the money smarter. That means less money spent on big, national advertising efforts that yield diminishing returns and more spent on state and locally-based grassroots efforts that have in recent years produced great results.
It means companies engaging in more multi-stakeholder efforts, like this year’s Center for Sustainable Shale Development, and scientific efforts like the ongoing University of Texas/EDF study on methane emissions. It means spending more time getting out into the local communities to educate citizens on what oil and gas operations really look like, what the benefits and impacts are, and to answer every question anyone wants to raise. And it means spending more time interfacing one-on-one with reporters who focus on energy and environmental issues.
These are the kinds of things that work, they are the kinds of activities that help inspire public confidence in what the industry does, they are the kind of activities that can result in more balanced media reporting, and they are the activities that, if deployed in a broad enough manner, will help balance out the findings of future public opinion polls.
It’s hard work, and it can be expensive, but the opposition is tireless, and their sources of funding just keep growing. But they’re not smarter, as their increasing radicalization and hyperbolic rhetoric prove. If armed with accurate information, the average guy on the street will figure it all out.
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