The Noxious Legacy of Fracking King Aubrey McClendon

March 7th, 2016

Awake Goy

WHEN FRACKING BILLIONAIRE Aubrey McClendon died after crashing his Chevy Tahoe into a bridge last week, the federal investigation into his alleged bid-rigging came to an end. At his memorial in Oklahoma City today, his friends and family will remember him as a “swashbuckling innovator” and a loyal friend, but his most enduring legacy may be his role in convincing policymakers and the public that natural gas could be an environmental boon and a solution to global warming. More than any other individual, McClendon personified the excesses of the fracking boom, gobbling up land so quickly and spinning the boom’s story so effectively that regulators, environmentalists, and even Wall Street struggled to keep pace.

McClendon was not only the founder of Chesapeake Energy, the most important fracking company in the technique’s history, but he also co-founded one of the gas industry’s most important lobbying arms, America’s Natural Gas Alliance. In creating both, McClendon became an architect of the energy market’s reorientation around a product whose climate-warming emissions rival those of coal.

“His desire for ‘more’ … was the driving force in the rapid development of U.S. shale resources,” Wall Street Journalreporter Russell Gold wrote in his book, The Boom. “McClendon wasn’t a mere participant in the great shale land grab. He created it.”

McClendon and a friend launched Chesapeake in 1989, and their competitive edge always lay in the company’s ability to buy up acreage quickly and cheaply. In 2011, Chesapeake deployed 4,500 land scouts across the U.S. and at one point controlled the leases on 15 million acres, an area the size of West Virginia. Mutilated landscapes in Oklahoma, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will long bear his fingerprints.

In order to get the most favorable deals possible and to earn an edge over coal in energy production, McClendon eventually began buying politicians and manipulating public opinion. In 2007, he funded an organization called the Clean Sky Coalition, running ads that railed against dirty coal in Texas and — under the name Know Your Power — against coal projects in Oklahoma and Kansas. A year later, he launched another industry front group, the Clean Skies Foundation, “to be a kind of Heritage Foundation for energy and the environment,” in the words of the foundation’s first CEO, Denise Bode.

McClendon also co-founded America’s Natural Gas Alliance, a lobby group that represents natural gas producers and has helped push some of the last decade’s most important fracking-friendly regulations. In 2009, according to the Dallas Morning News, the organization launched an $80 million campaign to oppose oil and gas taxes and a bill to regulate fracking. More recently, ANGA spent $230,000 in the last quarter of 2015 lobbying for the inclusion of natural gas interests in the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Clean Power Plan, and the EPA’s controversial study on the impact of fracking on drinking water, among other issues.