Dick Russell – Global Warming: When Profits Trump Truth
Dick Russell: I’m afraid you’ve got it. I think so, too.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Dick Russell, I watched Josh Fox who made the movie Gasland and I watched a little bit of his movie about fracking. You talk in your book about how Oklahoma billionaire Howard Hamm paid off the local university in an attempt to cover up its geological studies showing how fracking is behind the state’s huge increase in earthquakes. Tell us a little bit about Howard Hamm.
Dick Russell: Harold Hamm is one of the wealthiest people in the country. He’s a multi-billionaire. He hit the Bakken oil shale field in South Dakota, it was his big pioneering discovery, I guess. He’s been connected to the University of Oklahoma for some time, as he has been on their Board of Trustees. He was very close to the President David Boren, a former US senator from Oklahoma. But, what went on was there was a geologist at the university named Austin Holland. He was with the Oklahoma Geological Survey. So, it was part of the university’s College of Earth and Energy.
Holland began studying these tremors that were plaguing about half a million mostly rural people who lived in the central and north central parts of the state. Oklahoma, people may not realize, has gone from experiencing almost no earthquakes to now being the earthquake capital of the United States, including a couple of them which have registered as high as 5.6 on the Richter scale.
People have lost their homes, and it’s really been quite scary. And nobody for a long time supposedly knew why this was happening.
Well, but the University of Oklahoma did, and they began talking about the fact the hydraulic fracturing of natural gas, which was sending all this wastewater down into the earth from the process, was triggering earthquakes because Oklahoma has a geological formation that’s fragile, and similar to Texas and other states who’ve also been seeing some of the increase in earthquakes.
So, basically, they had a meeting where Hamm came in and met with Boren and met with the geologists and they began dropping subtle hints, not–that he’d better lay off of this or he was going to end up losing his job. Well, he eventually resigned from the survey.
It took several years before the Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin would admit that, “We’re looking into this, and it does look like the hydraulic fracturing process is causing an increase in the earthquakes.”
When you watch Josh Fox’s amazing documentary Gasland, which was an awakening for me when I saw it, you’re seeing people with groundwater contamination, and they turn on their faucet in their home and, it burst into flames, the water. I mean, it’s like, wow, and people are drinking this?
So, there’s definite evidence that fracking causes contamination of water supplies. And thank goodness that Josh Fox did that documentary that shows this.
So, now that we know them, and yet they’re still trying to cover it up and push fracking forward all over the country, that to me is a crime against nature and humanity.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Well, let’s look on the more positive side because you also write about the descendants of many of these families who are trying to make a difference. You mentioned Richard Berman earlier, and in your book, you talk about how his son has completely rejected his father, denounced him publicly. Tell us about some of these people who are making a difference.
Dick Russell: Yeah, well, I tried to interview the young people from these fossil fuel families who would talk, but in fact, there weren’t any. Even the ones who may not like what their fathers are doing aren’t willing to speak publicly against the family. David Berman was an exception to that. He was the lead singer for a long time for a popular independent rock band called The Silver Jews. And a few years ago, he quit. He said he couldn’t continue anymore, and he said a lot of it had to do with what his father did. And he came right out and said my father is a despicable man. He’s an exploiter and a scoundrel.
So, he’s one who was certainly willing to come out and publicly speak about it. But, there are others.
One family that I greatly admire is the Rockefeller’s. Standard Oil was the precursor to Exxon, and John D. Rockefeller began, the whole oil boom in the world.
But, the newer generations of Rockefeller’s, first, they’ve been divesting from Exxon. They’ve been calling for things like forcing them to take climate change into consideration. I mean, that’s down the line.
And then there are some of them like Chris Lindstrom, he’s the grandson of David Rockefeller, the Chase Manhattan banker who died just this year at the age of I think 101. And Chris has been out there, starting a bioenergy company in Jamaica. I know Chris. I interviewed him at a conference there’s a new organization called Nexus, N-E-X-U-S, which are children of inherited wealth who come together. They have regular meetings, they have an annual conference at the United Nations where they bring together about 500 of them to talk about what can they do to make a different kind of world than their forefathers have created.
And Chris was one of these. And his bioenergy company he’s now moved into manufacturing of hemp.
He had spoken to me and to people at Nexus about investing in companies that start moving resources into transforming the system itself. He said, “The first real necessity at this point is to compost the BS in our heads about the world we live in, that we’re at the end of the line of a chain of living creatures and everything is here to benefit us. We have the technology to create renewable fuels that have been suppressed by the fossil fuel industry.”
So, working in Jamaica, he set out to come up with a new form of bioenergy that would take waste and transform it into energy that would not pollute the atmosphere and could create fertilizer.
So, you have people like Chris. And then I also interviewed a woman named Katherine Lorenz whose grandfather, George Mitchell, had pioneered hydraulic fracturing or fracking.
I found her to be a very interesting person and someone who’s definitely devoted to creating a more sustainable world.
Sandie Sedgbeer: I read an article yesterday online how Millennials could bring the oil industry to its knees. And do you think that they really are the ones that are going to change things? Do we have time to wait for them?
Dick Russell: Well, we’re running out of time to save civilization, really. And I think that more and more Millennials and especially even younger people are starting to see this and really get out there and call for change.
Sandie Sedgbeer: What can we as individuals do?
Dick Russell: We can get out there and march on the streets. We can make ourselves heard. We can obviously do things that have been talked about for years, that we need to do at home like drive more fuel-efficient cars, save energy, recycle. All those are great things that we should all be doing.
Sandie Sedgbeer: I think many people feel helpless because they just don’t know where to begin. But, one place that I would highly recommend is your blog. We do not have the luxury of remaining in ignorance, do we?
Dick Russell: No, we don’t, we really, really don’t. We can’t bury our heads in the sand. And unfortunately, for some time now, I would say since the ’60s when I came of age, things have been much more oriented toward everybody’s out for themselves, and material world and, we’ve lost track of the need to do something for the future and of the more spiritual aspect of life.
And the only silver lining I see in the fact that this new Administration has taken power is that there are a lot of people starting to wake up to the fact that we can’t be complacent.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Dick Russell, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Men who are Destroying Life on Earth and what it Means to our Children has been called one of the most important books of our era. Go out, get a copy, read it and educate yourself. If you want to know more about Dick Russell’s work, check out his website at dickrussell.org.
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