Gotta love this. At a meeting of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, the CEO of Haliburton was onstage and apparently about to drink fracking fluid.
Fracking is the hydraulic fracturing of rock to extract natural gas from it. Fluid. Well, you know what that is.
But this kind of fluid facilitates fracking, and it’s allegedly full of toxic stuff that pollutes groundwater and allegedly make people sick. Allegedly.
Wrong, said Dave Lesar, the CEO, before raising a beaker of the stuff to his beak. He seemed ready to take a sip, but he stopped and invited another company executive to do the deed.
Later that evening, the two were arrested for disorderly conduct in the Hydraulic Tap, where empty beakers littered the barroom floor.
(I made up that last part. Now, back to the facts.)
A reporter called to follow up on the “condition” of the subordinate executive. (“Is he dead?”)
He was just fine, thank you, and the company took the opportunity to promote the product he’d been swilling, called CleanStim.
It must have been a slow news day, and more journalists jumped on the story. Somebody called the Environmental Defense Fund for a reaction.
A spokesman wasn’t amused. If CleanStim was so clean, he asked, why did a lower-level dude have to endure the indignity of drinking it?
“Why wouldn’t the CEO drink it himself?” he asked.
The environmental guy called the incident a stunt. It was, in his view, “indicative of the problem the industry has in assuring the public that they are in fact taking public concerns seriously.”
He went on. “A typical homeowner in Pennsylvania doesn’t have the option of having an underling drink his water. He has to do it himself.”
True enough. But I have to come down on the other side on this one.
Consider the bright side of this story—the right side, in my view. CleanStim is safe enough even for human consumption.
I say the real problem is that some people are never satisfied. A Haliburton boss drank fracking fluid onstage, and that’s not good enough?
The concerns might have blown up from there. Was it really a glass of CleanStim he drank? Or just a vanilla shake with food coloring? And is CleanStim widely used in the field? Or is it counterfeit product brewed up for PR stunts? And did the executive take an antidote before or after his performance?
And even if it is widely used and safe to drink…does it taste good?
The industry should declare a victory here. The environmentalists ought to be happy. Instead, we have the usual unsettled scuffle.
Couple years ago, a prominent black Harvard scholar, Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested by a white police officer. Gates said it was racially motivated. President Obama tried to defuse the situation, and invited both men to the White House to chat over a beer.
That’s what should happen here. The executive and the environmentalist should get together somewhere neutral (maybe the Hydraulic Tap). I’d even buy ‘em the first round. Whatever they want to drink. But make mine a Coors Light.
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