Monday night, Rachel Maddow proudly hosted someone named Richard Muller, a scientist funded by the Koch brothers (petrochemical moguls who are also sponsors of the Tea Party and Romney campaigns). Muller, a former climate-change skeptic, has had an incredible revelation: global warming is real, and it’s being caused by humans. [See video here.]
He came out of the closet in an op-ed in The New York Times. Maybe it took a lot for Muller to catch up with the past 20 years of climate science, or maybe his position is a ruse, but then live on the Maddow show, he proposed a solution: burn natural gas instead of coal. Where would we get that natural gas? Fracking, of course! Or as he put it, “clean fracking,” which does not exist and is unlikely ever to exist except in the hallucinations of PR people.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a way of violently extracting gas from miles below the ground. In the process, it consumes tons of water, injects toxins into the aquifer, causes flammable drinking water and destroys communities.
Notably, her program has been sponsored by fracking propaganda ads for years, and continues to be, as recently as the Thursday night edition. The ads state outright that fracking — which is not mentioned by the name everyone would recognize — is safe and protects both communities and drinking water supplies. It’s fair to say this is an outright lie, given the problems that have been exposed about fracking over the past few years. For most people who get dragged in, it becomes a living nightmare that is destroying their lives.