WashPost reporters mislead readers on enviro-natural gas industry split

Juliet Eilperin and Steve Mufson try their hand at whitewashing enviro corruption.

In reporting on how the natural gas industry paid enviro groups tens of millions of dollars to attack the coal industry, an alliance that has now come to an end, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Steve Mufson assert:

… It made sense that environmentalists viewed the natural gas industry as an ally when they were trying to forge a climate deal on Capitol Hill in 2009 and 2010, said Deborah Gordon, a senior associate in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s energy and climate program.

“When cap-and-trade was going through, they needed an alternative… They saw it as the savior, and it’s anti-coal,” Gordon said. But now, she said, concerns about the chemicals used to tap shale gas have become more pressing as hydraulic fracturing activity has increased nationwide. “It’s just exploded,” she said…

Moreover, the subheadline in the print version of this story is:

Environmental groups back away from the industry over the chemicals that companies use in shale-deposit extractions

However, enviro “concerns about the chemicals” are not why the alliance has fractured — and Eilperin and Mufson must know this.

The alliance has ended because the advent of cheap natural gas has subverted the enviros’ goal of a fossil fuel-killing “clean energy standard” — i.e., wind and solar mandates that are cap-and-trade by a different name.

Eilperin and Mufson aren’t stupid (we suppose, anyway). Moreover, Eilperin is married to a climate specialist at the Center for American Progress and so shares pillow-talk with an enviro insider.

This article is an effort by Eilperin and Mufson to mislead Post readers into thinking that the enviros backed away from natural gas as some sort of act of conscience. But corruption, hypocrisy, and cynicism don’t constitute the new morality.