Environmentalists Use Colorado Floods to Push False Fracking Narrative

Last September’s flooding along Colorado’s Front Range was disaster for the state, but a boon for radical environmentalists desperately seeking to promote their agenda.

In the midst of the disaster, environmentalists launched a full-fledged media campaign that even involved renting out helicopters – not to help those stranded, but to fly around national reporters and push their anti-energy narrative. “We’re talking about tens of thousands of toxic chemicals floating down the river, potentially ending up in communities, next to homes, next to agricultural land,” claimed Food and Water Watch spokesperson Sam Schabacker. “We have communities that are going to be inundated with all these petrochemicals and fracking fluids,” said the group Fractivist.

As it turns out, the activists’ assertions were completely unfounded. The EPA and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission both independently found that neither fracking materials nor petrochemicals contaminated the water.

But no matter — exploiting disasters and distorting facts is simply part of the playbook for anti-fracking activists. For example, they tried to tie the recent earthquake in L.A. to fracking, citing a report from Clean Water Action, Earthworks, and the Center for Biological Diversity that says fracking injection wells are located too close to active faults. (Science does not support the hypothesis that fracking is a potential cause of earthquakes.)

Even seemingly benign events like a farmer’s dead cows are often exploited, as was the case when the group New Yorkers Against Fracking claimed they died due to fracking’s contamination of the cow’s drinking water. Even though it turned out the cows died from E. coli, the group did not walk back on its alarmist claims.

Catching the pattern here? Rhetoric, rather than real evidence, is what drives the arguments of Big Green Radicals.

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