What the Frak? How is Fracking Still Controversial in 2024?

Back in 2008, in anticipation of the potential election of Barack Obama in his race against Republican John McCain for the presidency, the major environmentalist groups got together to fund a coordinated effort to attack hydraulic fracturing. Together with an array of anti-progress celebrities like Yoko Ono, they had the campaign well established by September of that year, complete with the standard planted stories in friendly media outlets, along with paid digital, tv and radio advertising.

The campaign even managed to turn the safe, effective, and well-regulated industrial process into a cussword in the public’s mind, co-opting a phrase made popular in the reboot of the Battlestar Gallactica TV series – “frakking” – but changing the spelling to “fracking.” Obama himself, along with running mate Joe Biden, even worked the “fracking” talking points into their rally speeches as the general election campaign progressed.

The whole thing was admittedly a great PR success for the environmental left, one that helped to drive a legal and regulatory assault on the nation’s oil and gas industry throughout the Obama/Biden years, with a special focus on the shale sector, for whose success the continued deployment of the process in combination with horizontal drilling was essential.