On “The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur,” Josh Fox, the Oscar-nominated director of “GasLand,” described his arrest on Capitol Hill at a public House Science Committee hearing on hydraulic fracturing. Fox had hired a video crew that was credentialed to cover Congress, but that crew was rejected access by the committee chair Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX). When Fox came to the hearing and set up his camera to shoot, he was swarmed by security and eventually led out in handcuffs:

This access used to be granted quite regularly when the Democrats ran the House. . . . The video you see was shot by Congressional staffers — they’re all recording. The only person who’s being threatened with arrest is me. This is not government, this is thuggery. That is what happened. They threw out John Boehner’s promise for transparency in Congress in handcuffs with me yesterday. And they threw out the First Amendment. They threw out the Constitution.

Watch it:

Fox’s arrest has spurred outrage and increased attention about the apparent poisoning of Pavillion, WY by the natural gas industry.

An investigation by the Corporate Crime Reporter blog forced the Sierra Club to admit that it secretly had taken millions of dollars from the Chesapeake Energy natural gas company to fund its Beyond Coal campaign from 2007 to 2010 under the leadership of Carl Pope. Time’s Bryan Walsh writes in the complete exposé that Michael Brune ended the relationship when he became executive director in 2010:

Though the group ended its relationship with Chesapeake in 2010—and the Club says it turned its back on an additional $30 million in promised donations—the news raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past. It’s also sure to anger ordinary members who’ve been uneasy about the Club’s relationship with corporations.

In a Sierra Club blog post, Brune explained his response when he became the executive director in 2010: “We cannot accept money from an industry we need to change. Very quickly, the board of directors, with my strong encouragement, cut off these donations and rewrote our gift acceptance policy.”

By Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress Action Fund

Rather than face the unpleasant fact that hydraulic fracturing of natural gas wells actually can lead to contamination of underground water supplies, Republicans on a subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee yesterday decided to shoot the messenger.

The messenger – no surprise here – is the Environmental Protection Agency, which in early December released a draft report based on a three-year investigation into possible groundwater contamination by natural gas drilling near Pavillion, Wyoming. The report concluded that hydraulic fracturing and other gas development drilling practices likely contributed to the contamination of groundwater by a suite of chemicals including materials found in fracking fluids. EPA is now in the process of having the draft report peer reviewed.

As Region 8 EPA administrator Jim Martin said in his prepared testimony today, aquifers appear to have been contaminated by fracking fluid:

Analysis of samples taken from the deep monitoring wells in the aquifer indicates detection of benzene, methane, and synthetic chemicals, like glycols and alcohols consistent with gas production and hydraulic fracturing fluids.

That carefully calibrated conclusion – including EPA statements that the geology around Pavillion is unique and that the study’s conclusions aren’t transferable to other gas producing areas – has shaken defenders of the oil and gas industry and its widespread practice of hydraulic fracturing. That process pumps a mixture of water, chemicals and sand at high pressure deep underground to stimulate production of natural gas from shale formations. Combined with advances in horizontal drilling it has opened up vast new reserves of shale gas for development extending from New York State to Texas.

As concerns about threats to drinking water supplies have mounted with the spread of hydraulic fracturing, the oil and gas industry and its allies have frequently claimed that there has never been a documented case of groundwater contamination through fracking. Typical of those claims was ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson’s statement in congressional testimony in 2010 that “There have been over a million wells hydraulically fractured in the history of the industry, and there is not one, not one, reported case of a freshwater aquifer having ever been contaminated from hydraulic fracturing.”

Because the EPA’s draft report deals a serious if not fatal blow to those claims, the industry is fighting furiously to discredit the EPA’s methods and conclusions in the Pavillion study.

Appearing before the subcommittee today, Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs at the Western Energy Alliance, accused EPA of being “a political body, not a disinterested scientific institution” and charged the agency had rushed its report “without proper review and verification.”

Republican members of the science committee went even further. Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), chairman of the panel’s energy and environment subcommittee, accused EPA of practicing “press release science” and “outcome-driven” regulation. Rep. Ralph M. Hall, chairman of the full committee, said the agency was “trying to build a case” for shutting down oil and gas production around the country.

But ranting and raving won’t make the damage disappear.

As EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a letter sent last month to Wyoming Gov. Matthew H. Mead,  her agency’s study of the Pavillion issue was “rigorous, transparent and objective.” The evidence “supporting the likely role of fracturing in the observed contamination is exhaustively presented in our draft report,” she said.

In a “prebuttal” to President Obama’s State of the Union address, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and private-equity millionaire, laid out an understanding of American energy policy that bears only a tenuous relationship to reality. Romney attacked successful government investment in clean energy as failures, falsified the recent history of domestic oil and gas development, and wrote the Deepwater Horizon disaster out of memory. Like the rest of the Republican Party, Romney made sure to jump on the Keystone XL pipeline bandwagon, purporting it would create tens of thousands of jobs.

Romney, who as recently as last June told New Hampshire voters that it’s “important” to reduce greenhouse pollution, talked only of a future where oil and gas drilling faces no regulatory hurdles.

Below, ThinkProgress Green provides Romney’s speech with the facts it was lacking.

Energy Facts: Rebutting Romney’s Prebuttal

ROMNEY: When we needed stability and solvency, he gave us Solyndra.

FACT CHECK: Solyndra, an innovative solar panel manufacturer, was a private-investment darling to the tune of $961 million until silicon prices plummeted, making their technology too expensive for the marketplace. Bloomberg has found that the default rate, including the $535 million Solyndra default, on the $16.1 billion Energy Department loan portfolio is less than 3.6 percent. The Department of Energy has leveraged taxpayer dollars into nearly $40 billion in solvent projects, helping create 60,000 stable American clean-economy jobs.

ROMNEY: When we needed a climate for private investment, he gave us Cash for Clunkers.

FACT CHECK: The Cash for Clunkers program was “huge success,” Forbes declared. Before the $3 billion program was enacted, 1500 car dealerships had closed, laying off 50,000 people. Cash for Clunkers simultaneously provided a critical lifeline to the American auto manufacturers and car dealers at a crucial moment in the economy, spurred a major increase in the fuel economy of new car purchases, and made efficiency a major selling point in the minds of the American consumer. Cash for Clunkers provided consumers about one-sixth the price of the new cars, meaning it directly spurred about $15 billion in private spending.

Read more

In the State of the Union address tonight, President Obama will highlight the administration’s fossil and renewable energy achievements, touting that the U.S. now produces more than half of its oil domestically and has expanded natural gas, solar, and wind development. The United States is on its way to becoming a global clean-energy leader, Center for American Progress Chairman John Podesta and Tom Steyer of Farallon Capital Management write in the Wall Street Journal:

In the hubbub around the president’s decision not to approve the proposed Keystone XL pipeline between Canada and the United States, Americans missed the big picture. While conservatives have been fighting to build a pipeline to import more foreign oil and deepen U.S. dependence, the U.S. is poised to transform its energy portfolio by developing domestic resources — renewable and mineral — that will let it become a net exporter of clean energy and energy technology in this decade.

Podesta and Steyer — who was a leader in the fight to protect California’s climate laws — are bullish on the domestic natural gas boom, though they note the “critical environmental questions associated with developing these resources.” They believe that “as long as we ensure high regulatory standards and stay away from the riskiest and most polluting of these activities, we can safely assemble a collection of lower-carbon, affordable and abundant domestic-energy assets that will dramatically improve our economy and our environment.”

Importantly, the United States has regained the title of the world’s top investor in clean energy. “Our companies make over 75% of all venture investments in clean technologies world-wide,” and “the clean economy grew by 8.3% from 2008 to 2009, even during the depths of the recession.” A commitment to clean energy isn’t just about generating good jobs:

Such jobs provide a strong middle-class income to workers who have technical skills beyond high school but who lack a four-year college degree. What’s more, U.S. clean-energy investment shows moral leadership, as we combine our advanced energy strategies with strong safeguards to protect our citizens and our planet from polluters and the worst impacts of global warming.

“Our economy can go from being weighed down by oil imports to soaring ahead, powered increasingly by domestically produced clean energy, and energy services and technology,” Podesta and Steyer conclude. “The Obama administration has taken a smart approach, but Congress must now work with the president to secure our leadership position going forward.”

Renewable energy use has expanded rapidly across the U.S., with solar energy booming as government subsidies help homeowners offset the costs of installing solar panels.

At the same time, the price of natural gas is dropping, thanks to increased supply due to fracking. The process of fracking can harm the surrounding area, poisons water supplies, and even causes earthquakes. But NPR reports that the cheaper cost due to the damaging process is making it harder for more costly renewable energy sources to compete:

Due in large part to a combination of fracking and horizontal drilling, there’s been a nearly 30 percent increase in the amount of natural gas produced in the U.S. since 2005. [...]

Natural gas demand has not gone up as quickly as supply, and Klaber says the price has dropped.

“A handful of years ago, natural gas could have been in the order of 12, 13, 14 dollars per million BTU,” she says. “We’re now down to three to four [dollars].”

This has allowed utilities that burn natural gas to produce electricity to hold the line on rates. For most of us, that’s a good thing, but for those who’ve installed solar panels, it makes that investment less of a bargain.

Barbara Scott, who installed 21 solar panels at her home in Pennsylvania, told NPR that she’s glad she installed the panels, but now it’s not as likely that she will quickly recoup the $21,000 she spent to install the panels. “[K]nowing it’s — at best — a break-even proposition, we’re not so comfortable telling other people to do it,” she said.

Internationally, customers are still opting for solar panels, and the cost to build the panels are dropping while coal prices rise. The U.S. needs to continue embracing renewable energy on a larger scale to keep up with the international community and get away from harmful natural gas extraction.