And you thought you’d heard the last about fracking

It's been two or three weeks since I've weighed in on fracking so here's a few disparate points to consider:

• First of all, my basic position is unchanged. I don't think fracking (the horizontal drilling variety), if it actually happens in Athens County to any great degree, will be as bad as opponents make it out to be, nor as wonderful as supporters predict. Both sides are prone to almost pathologically selective data filtering, only collecting and considering information that supports their points of few, and then magnifying its significance. (I had one well-meaning letter-writer a couple months ago suggest that the adverse effects on water supplies from drilling one fracking well could be felt in a 200-mile radius, which is  basically the whole state of Ohio and a good part of Indiana.)

But I'd be guilty of the same thing if I tried to predict what's going to happen with fracking in this area. My gut feeling tells me that Athens County, as a result of its less-than-ideal geology, won't see the boom that's happening either in east Ohio or out West. Unfortunately, my "gut" – while embarassingly substantial – is wrong quite often.

• It would be nice if Cunningham Energy, the Charleston, W.Va.-based company that made a major splash in Athens County late last fall, buying up oil and gas leases for much of the county, would follow up and actually tell the people of this area what they're doing. Since early December, Cunningham has clammed up almost completely, and its officials have declined to discuss why, for instance, they haven't followed their previously announced timeline for filing drilling permit applications with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

On Nov. 29, Cunningham landman Joe Blackhurst told The Athens NEWS that the company expected to file its permit applications in "30 to 45 days"; that the state would take "between a few weeks and a few months" to process those applications; and that the company expected drilling by "early spring." Now, nearly a month after that "45 days" would have expired, no drilling permit applications have been filed.

Why is this? What's the delay? No venture partner yet?

Many, many local people have a direct and substantial interest in whatever Cunningham intends to do with all these leases. March 15 is the drop-dead date for most of its leases (and signing bonuses and royalties). This small company holds the future of our county in its hands. The continued refusal to talk about their plans is irresponsible, and raises hard questions about this company's intentions. It also doesn't do anything to refute the widely held suspicion that Cunningham intends at some point to "flip" all its southeast Ohio leases to one of the bigger players in the gas and oil racket.

• It would also be a good thing if we started getting more pro-fracking opinions in the paper. Letter and Reader's Forum submissions to this newspaper have been 95 percent anti-fracking. I'd feel the same way if we were getting all opinions in support of horizontal hydraulic fracturing. The decided tilt toward opposition opinion, I suspect, isn't a reflection of overwhelming opposition in the county. I think it's more a matter of people who support fracking being afraid to expose themselves to anger and scorn. To be blunt, local fracking supporters need to grow a pair. (Well, good news, after I wrote this, we received a pro-fracking opinion. It's on page 6 of today's paper, and almost assuredly will unleash a renewed flood of anti-fracking opinions. But please, people, you'll have a much better shot of getting your opinions in the paper if you write regular-length letters.)

• It's encouraging to see proposals for greater taxation and regulation of the oil and gas industry getting some traction at the state level. This has been my position all along – that this industry stands to profit fabulously from shale-bed development. But they need to compensate communities for any damage they cause, and abide by strict regulations on where and how they drill for gas and oil and dispose of drilling wastewater. If taxes and regulations start discouraging oil and gas development in the east Ohio fracking fields, we can revisit these issues. But I doubt that will happen; the alacrity at which oil and gas outfits are gobbling up mineral rights – and the unprecedented piles of money they're willing to pay for them – suggests it will take an awful lot of taxes and regulation to discourage these people.

• Increasingly, fracking opponents are condemning area landowners who have signed leases turning over their mineral rights to oil and gas companies. They're painting them as greedy, money-grubbing Snidely Whiplashes. This is unfair. I know a number of landowners, who after intensive research and soul-searching, came to the conclusion that the benefits of signing a lease, to their families, outweighed the potential risks.

In most cases, these people didn't make a decision after calculating that all that money was well worth destroying their and their neighbors' water and land. Rather, they studied the available information, and came to a different conclusion than fracking opponents about what's likely to happen if they lease their land for oil and gas development.

They simply disagree that fracking will ruin the county's natural resources or food-based economy.

And some leasing landowners see this as an opportunity to crawl out from under heavy debt, to pay off medical bills, credit card debt or college loans, or to leave something for their kids. To describe these people as "greedy," or to suggest primly that "money isn't everything," is just obnoxious.

On the other hand, I will grant that if you truly believe fracking will destroy our county's natural resources and the businesses that depend upon them, then it's entirely consistent to be angry at your neighbors and fellow community members who will hasten that result by leasing their property.

This is wishy-washy on my part for sure, but I have a natural reflex to do the "on the one hand/on the other hand" dance when I see friends and neighbors going at each other's throats. Granted, this attitude probably would have gotten me strung up in pre-Civil War Kansas and Missouri.

• I'm also tired of hearing the conventional anti-fracking wisdom that oil and gas drilling doesn't translate into economic development. In just the past week, two proposals have been aired for huge chemical plants directly related to fracking, employing thousands of local people in the Ohio Valley, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.

Other industries that hope to exploit the shale-oil and gas boom are building factories and industrial facilities throughout the region.

You may have a problem with traditional industry, the sorts of places that make the plastic that every one of us uses every day of our lives, but don't tell me it doesn't benefit people economically, or that this type of industry hasn't sustained families and communities in the Ohio Valley for many decades.

Thankfully, we're developing clean energy options that eventually will supplant these traditional "dirty" industries, but until the renewable industries – with ample government support – can support jobs for many more people, people in the Rust Belt have to work somewhere to provide for their families and communities.