The public is being coerced by the misinforma​tion on natural gas drilling

On Thursday night in a church in Butternut Valley, Nicole Dillingham and Louis Allstadt gave a presentation on the dangers of drilling for natural gas. 

Unfortunately for the audience the presentation was extremely misleading.  Ms. Dillingham presented a slideshow of the "dangers of horizontal hydro-fracing the Marcellus shale" that had the statistics and statements of fracing methane coal beds.  These are two totally different things.  When the discrepancy was pointed out and the audience asked her if she knew the difference between methane coal beds and hydro-fracing shale, she would not reply.   The fact is they are completely different, yet she put information about coal beds in her presentation to coerce the audience with misinformation.  She continued to show slides of WV and other states drilling pads and stated that open- pits of hazardous waste would be left by the gas companies.  The DEC has ALREADY addressed the open-pit issue for NY, and it will NOT be allowed.  Her presentation states that children will be playing and fall into these open-pits, that animals will drink from them and die.  If you do not know that this will NOT be allowed in NY to begin with, of course natural gas drilling sounds horrific!!  BUT these statements are NOT true, and need to be brought out for there fallacies.  Ms. Dillingham continued to say that the gas companies are trying to convince us that it is our patriotic duty to sign over our land to produce the energy that WE use every day! I would disagree, the gas companies have NOTHING to do with my feeling that it is OUR responsibility to produce our own energy, and stop sending our money to other countries!  Ms. Dillingham tried to convince the audience that even if we drill, the natural gas will be shipped to other countries instead of used here.  It was pointed out by a knowledgeable audience member that this was yet ANOTHER fallacy - that there are state and federal regulations involved in the export of goods from the US.  She said that she was not aware... Apparently, she is unaware of a lot to do with natural gas drilling, and should not be touting herself as an expert, and making false, misleading statements.

Mr. Allstadt's presentation was also full of misinformation designed to scare and coerce the public.  Throughout his presentation he kept repeating that NY state and the DEC do not have stringent enough regulations to permit natural gas drilling safely.  Again, a more informed audience member asked Mr. Allstadt if he was privy to the SGEIS (that is still being worked on and isn't even out yet!) And he had to say "no". The audience member then said , "then how can you possibly know if the regulations are safe enough, or not?" The answer is that he CAN'T!  Again more misleading propaganda to scare the public - they know what's good for us as long as we are not informed with the TRUTH!
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