Reporter’s Notebook: Unfriendly Bars and The Incredible Hulk Comes to Dimock

Things have got­ten pretty tense in Dimockthese days. On a rainy day this week, more than one hun­dred peo­ple trav­eled from New York to sup­port those res­i­dents along Carter Road who want Cabot Oil and Gas to con­tinue fresh water deliveries.

Up until two weeks ago, Cabot had been sup­ply­ing water to fam­i­lies who, accord­ing to the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion, had expe­ri­enced high methane lev­els in their water wells due to mis­takes the com­pany made while drilling for nat­ural gas. But DEP recently ruled Cabot had ful­filled its oblig­a­tions, and could stop deliv­er­ing water on Decem­ber 1. The water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion has become a national issue, and made Dimock a flash­point in the bat­tle over hydraulic fracturing.

The press con­fer­ence took place under a tent, and pro­vided ample oppor­tu­ni­ties to gather inter­views with res­i­dents and their sup­port­ers who oppose nat­ural gas drilling, such as a min­is­ter deliv­er­ing a bless­ing, a feath­ered Chief with the Onan­doga Nation, and celebri­ties like actor Mark Ruf­falo. Ruf­falo spoke pas­sion­ately to the crowd, and posed like a pro when he caught him­self within the sights of my camera.

After the press con­fer­ence ended, I asked Ruf­falo to answer a few ques­tions. He eagerly jumped out of the tanker truck filled with water to talk to me. At first I threw him a soft­ball — why is this impor­tant to you? Then I asked him to answer the most obvi­ous crit­i­cism sure to be launched by pro-drillers, that an out­sider, car­pet­bag­ger, Hol­ly­wood Lib­eral, comes to save the day. True, he lives in New York above the Mar­cel­lus Shale, but it’s easy for him to refuse a landman’s offer, he doesn’t need the bonus pay­ments and roy­al­ties. But a lot of impov­er­ished peo­ple in this area do.

I knew Ruf­falo would play the Incred­i­ble Hulk in the upcom­ing Avengers movie. But I didn’t know the role would con­sume him so much that he would grow green mus­cles before my very eyes. That his eyes would pop.

“I’d say you don’t bring your daugh­ter to the red light dis­trict just because times are tough,” replied Ruf­falo. “You don’t build your­self a meth lab in your garage just because times are tough. This is poi­son­ing people’s water, there’s absolutely no doubt about it.”

Ruf­falo said he’s will­ing to catch flak for his activism. But he said there’s sim­ply not enough sci­en­tific research to deter­mine the long term impacts of gas drilling to pub­lic health and the envi­ron­ment. Then I asked him about the lack of alter­na­tive energy sources to meet our cur­rent needs. The shirt started to rip.

“That’s not true,” said Ruf­falo, before I could fin­ish the ques­tion.  “If you look at Pro­fes­sor Mark Jacobson’s work, who’s the lead­ing civic engi­neer from Stan­ford, he has shown us that by 2030 we can be com­pletely off car­bon based fuel in this nation.”

Jacob­son wrote this cover piece in the Novem­ber 2009 issue of Sci­en­tific American.

Ruf­falo con­tin­ued to speak, seem­ingly with­out tak­ing a breath and mov­ing closer to my microphone.

“What do we really pay for gas and oil? What does it really cost us? When you back out the sub­si­dies, when you back out the wars, when you back out the reme­di­a­tion, when you back out the health effects? What does it really cost us for energy? And how can we say that those hid­den costs don’t equal what we can do with solar, wind, geot­her­mal, and hydro?”

http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2011/12/09/reporters-notebook-unfriendly-bars-and-the-incredible-hulk-comes-to-dimock/#more-5166