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| Fracking may not only be about opening the ground and cracking the earth, it may also be a real estate scheme. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images) |
03 March 12
It's not only toxic - it's driven by a right-wing billionaire who profits more from flipping land than drilling for gas.
ubrey
McClendon, America's second-largest producer of natural gas, has never
been afraid of a fight. He has become a billionaire by directing his
company, Chesapeake Energy, to blast apart gas-soaked rocks a mile
underground and pump the fuel to the surface. "We're the biggest
frackers in the world," he declares proudly over a $400 bottle of French
Bordeaux at a restaurant he co-owns in his hometown of Oklahoma City.
"We frack all the time. What's the big deal?"
McClendon dominates America's supply of natural gas
the same way the Tea Party-financing Koch brothers control the nation's
pipelines and refineries. Like them, McClendon is an influential
right-wing power broker - he helped fund the Swift Boat attacks against
John Kerry in 2004, donated $250,000 to the presidential campaign of
Rick Perry, and contributed more than $500,000 to stop gay marriage. But
unlike his fellow energy czars, McClendon knows how to tone down his
politics and present a friendlier, less ideological face to the public.
He secretly gave $26 million to the Sierra Club to fight Big Coal, and
built a Google-like campus for Chesapeake's 4,600 employees in Oklahoma
City, complete with a 63,000-square-foot day care center, a luxurious
gym and four cafes manned by cook-to-order chefs. He even voted for
Barack Obama because he thought the country needed "an inspirational
figure."
At 52, McClendon still looks like the whip-smart
accountant he once aspired to be - crisp white shirt, polished shoes, a
toss of white hair. To hear him tell it, the cleaner-than-coal fuel he
produces will revive our faltering economy, free us from the tyranny of
foreign oil and save the planet from global warming. "I have a fossil
fuel that makes other fossil fuels obsolete," he boasts. By McClendon's
estimate, the industry has drilled more than 1.2 million wells
nationwide, yet so far there have been only a few confirmed cases where
things have gone wrong - despite dire warnings from scientists and
environmentalists that fracking pollutes rivers and streams,
contaminates drinking water and turns large swaths of farmland into
industrial moonscapes. "Where is the mushroom cloud?" McClendon asks.
"Where are the dogs with one leg? Where are the people that have been
maimed or hurt?"
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