RE:RE:RE:Fracking not the issue!!!!!!!!BY EZRA LEVANT ,QMI AGENCY FIRST POSTED: SATURDAY, DECEMBER 07, 2013 06:00 PM EST l Last week the Telegram newspaper in St. John’s published a column entitled “Some truth about fracking wouldn’t hurt,” written by an oil and gas engineer from Calgary named Syd Peters. It was a devastating personal confession by a fracking industry insider who said he had spent 28 years polluting the environment across the U.S. and western Canada, and then “coercing landowners” and “silencing” towns to keep the industry’s dirty secrets. “This is what is coming to Newfoundland if fracking is allowed,” he wrote. Except there is no oil and gas engineer from Calgary named Syd Peters. APEGA, Alberta’s association of professional engineers, has no record of him. He’s not in the Calgary phone book. His stories were fake, just like he is. After I raised these questions, the Telegram acknowledged they did not follow standard editorial procedures, and could not verify the author. But the identity of “Syd” as an evil oilman was essential to the whole column. If anyone else — say, a professional environmental protester — had made the shocking allegations, he would have been asked for proof. By creating “Syd,” that credibility problem was solved. It was his personal confession. It was like that 60 Minutes bombshell from the 1990s when Jeffrey Wigand, an executive with the Brown and Williamson cigarette company, “switched sides” and dished dirt on the industry. The story was so compelling it was turned into a movie starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe. But Wigand was real. “Syd” is fake. “Syd” said fracking leaks into “your source of drinking water” and “people are sick from the contamination and the chemicals.” But what does someone real say — a real expert, like Lisa Jackson, the director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during Barack Obama’s first term? She was called before Congress and asked, point blank, if fracking can contaminate ground water. “I am not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself affected water,” was her answer. More than one million oil and gas wells have been fracked in the U.S. since the 1940s, and hundreds of thousands more in Canada. But the EPA, and its state counterparts, have not found a single case, despite countless investigations. “Syd” also claimed that fracking makes life unbearable — “flares, truck traffic, 24-hour noise, the smell of methane.” Except fracking is just a very short stage in the life of a well — typically three to 10 days. And methane doesn’t have a smell — that odour is added by the gas company to help us detect leaks in our homes. “Syd” really doesn’t know a lot about fracking. But those details added to the hoax. “Syd” claimed “fracking involves a lot fewer jobs” than other kinds of oil and gas. Back in reality, four of the five fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are fracking cities — two in North Dakota and two in Texas. North Dakota, which fracks for both oil and gas, has an unemployment rate of just 2.7%. In the past 10 years, fracking has tripled the average income in the state from less than $25,000 a year to $78,000. The average salary in oil and gas is more than $100,000. But the Telegram’s readers already know all this. Because thousands of young men and women from the Atlantic work in fracking right now. They just do it in places like Alberta and B.C. Fracking in the Atlantic could bring those young men and women back home to work. But not if liars like “Syd” carry the day. I don’t blame the Telegram for falling for such an intricate hoax — newspaper editors can’t operate as if every letter writer is a fraud, setting the newspaper up. They were quick to acknowledge that they were tricked, and they published a response by me. But the question remains, who concocted the “Syd” hoax? It’s unlikely we’ll ever know. But it’s telling. Anti-fracking activists are so short of facts and arguments, they feel the need to make stuff up. And it shows their disrespect for the Newfoundlanders they lied to, too.