Hard to Believe

 Naomi Klein On a Good Day

A recent piece in the Guardian by Naomi Klein should come with a health warning:  "During reading, you may die laughing".  Naomi (the Fulminator) Klein--the ardent anti-globalization campaigner and anti-climate change warrior--has turned her attention to the latest evil to threaten humanity.  Ukraine is going to exploit its natural gas reserves by means of fracking. This is eeeeeviiiillll, says the Fulminator.

Why so?, you mildly ask   One would have thought that Ukraine, hitherto dependant upon Soviet (er, Russian) gas, would be well within its rights and prerogatives to harvest its own gas supplies using whatever means it saw fit.  Moreover, it would be wise to do so.  Since fracking is a recovery technique accepted to be safe, what's the fuss about?


Well, first up, says the Fulminator, global oil companies will be involved.  Right off that means it is a dirty business, since globalisation is also eeeeeeviiiiilllll.  Those pariahs will be putting profit ahead of humanity.  Good luck trying to carry off that argument to a crowd of shivering Ukrainians unable to heat their own houses or food.  (The Fulminator, of course, is making these arguments from the comfort of a centrally heated, warm living room.)

But, says Naomi, it is true that fracking releases the most deadly global warming gas of all, methane, into the atmosphere.

Never mind that the industry's singular solution to the climate crisis is to dramatically expand an extraction process in fracking that releases massive amounts of climate-destabilising methane into our atmosphere. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases – 34 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, according to the latest estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And that is over a 100-year period, with methane's power dwindling over time.

Fracking, says the Fulminator, releases "massive amounts of climate-destabilising methane into our atmosphere".  That's the second reason it's evil.  Then, two paragraphs later, she writes the following, without the slightest self-awareness of irony:

Not that we know how much methane is actually released by drilling and fracking and all their attendant infrastructure.

We don't know, but we do know for sure that fracking is evil because it releases methane.  (We are not making this up.  Read the article if you want confirmation of how badly reasoned her piece is.)  How do you know fracking releases methane?  What's the evidence?  Well, it's not been measured, proven, or established.  The Fulminator apparently believes it to be a self-evident truth, the veracity of which is carried in its very assertion.

It would appear that passion has substituted for reason, emotion for evidence, and laziness for logical, coherent argument.  It's so bad that one is inclined to wonder whether Klein as actually engaged in self-parody.   But if not, if she wants to be taken seriously, the only appropriate response is gales of belly-laughter, notwithstanding its possible danger to one's health, and to the climate, of course.