December 12, 2012 09:58 PM UTC

Hickenlooper: "Fracking" To Fight Climate Change?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado’s Democratic governor throws the conservation community a curveball on the issue of human-caused climate change, versus the controversial practice of hydraulic fracture drilling for natural gas–as the Durango Herald reports:

Hickenlooper often talked about climate issues when he was mayor of Denver, but he has been quieter on the topic since he became governor. He spent 30 minutes Tuesday morning at a conference of the Colorado Climate Network, a group of local governments that studies ways to adjust to climate change.

Acknowledging that “it drives some of my friends crazy,” the Democratic governor said embracing natural gas is the only realistic way to cut American emissions of greenhouse gases.

Hickenlooper also urged people to ramp up pressure on Congress to extend the wind-production tax credit. But he saved his strongest endorsement for a fuel that has stirred controversy in recent years.

The United States never signed the Kyoto treaty to cut greenhouse emissions, but the country is on its way to meeting the target anyway thanks to natural gas, Hickenlooper said.

“We are more than halfway toward compliance because we have these innovations in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing,” he said.

Without wading too far into the contentious underlying issue, we will say that this represents a more intelligent argument from Gov. John Hickenlooper than he’s made in the past. Last year, Hickenlooper enraged environmentalists when he claimed in an energy industry-funded ad that fracking has never resulted in groundwater contamination–a claim that has been repeatedly disproven. Later, Hickenlooper claimed that “you can drink” fracking fluid, an extremely dubious claim based on one experimental “fracking” product that is not even required to be used. In yet another gaffe, Hickenlooper absurdly claimed that fracking has “literally no risk.”

These incidents cannot help but impact Hickenlooper’s credibility on the issue.

It’s clear that the public health issues presented by “fracking” in and around Colorado communities involve more immediate challenges than those presented by global climate change, though it’s true in the abstract that natural gas contributes less to that particular problem. In this latest offering, Hickenlooper presents natural gas as a “bridge” to future energy technology, and challenges opponents to find a workable alternative.

Bottom line: we’ll give Hickenlooper credit for a more intelligent case than he has made in the past, but it’s an equivocal case at best. And the question of whether “fracking’s” incremental climate change advantage offsets public health concerns? He definitely did not settle it.