AEI is pleased to host a panel discussion to weigh the pros and cons of hydraulic fracturing, a technology that--depending on which side of the debate you fall on--is either our saving energy grace or a troubling new threat to environmental quality.

Not long ago, environmental groups were heralding natural gas as a “bridge fuel to a more climate-friendly energy supply.” Today, New York “progressives” are leading the charge to demonize it as a “bridge to nowhere” — producing “water contamination, air pollution, global warming and fractured communities.” Why the flip-flop?

Howarth doesn’t have to convince anyone he’s right to devastate New York’s budding shale industry and put tens of thousands of jobs into question. He wins if he muddies the waters enough to give cautious Albany bureaucrats reason to stall.

The forlorn and increasingly desperate climate campaign achieved a new level of ineptitude last week when what had looked like a minor embarrassment for one of its critics​—​the Chicago-based Heartland Institute​—​turned out to be a full-fledged catastrophe for itself. A moment’s reflection on the root of this episode points to why the climate campaign is out of (greenhouse) gas.

There are new twists to in the ever-entertaining faux debate over the dangers of shale gas. The New York Times, which turned obscure Cornell University marine ecologist Robert Howarth into an anti-fracking rock star in its questionable spring series on shale gas, and got hammered for it by its own public editor—I‘ll take some of the credit—is finally getting on the science bandwagon.

The Times is a great newspaper--the only remaining consistently reliable news outlet in this country, and probably the best in the world. Thankfully it has the integrity to wash its dirty laundry in public. That should make for quality journalism going forward.

The examples of rigidly enforced conformity could fill several volumes, and no amount of criticism from outside the environmental citadel is likely to break though the walls. So, is there any chance that reform will come from within?

Frustrated with the perceived environmental threat of economic freedom and the inconvenience of political freedom, many environmentalists yearn for shortcuts.