Susan G. Komen’s Support for Fracking Typical of Tortured Conservative Logic

Sorry. Pink drill bits won't keep the carcinogens from shooting out of them

Sorry. Pink drill bits won’t keep the carcinogens from shooting out of them

You have to wonder why anyone would support the fight against breast cancer, yet also support a cause of breast cancer, fracking.

Baker_HughesYet that is what the Susan G. Komen Foundation has done by partnering with a fracking company. In fact, the company involved, Baker Hughes, is actually donating $100,000 to the Komen Foundation and is distributing “1,000 pink drill bits worldwide.”

The Komen Foundation gives as their mission statement, “To save lives and end breast cancer forever by empowering others, ensuring quality care for all and investing in science to find the cures.” Baker Hughes lists “integrity” as one of their core values: “We are a responsible corporate citizen committed to the health and safety of people, protection of the environment, and compliance with laws, regulations, and company policies.”

Fair enough, but talk is cheap: According to Breast Cancer Action, “the practice [fracking] exposes people to endocrine disruptors and carcinogenic chemicals that are linked to breast cancer.”

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Baker Hughes says “Doing our bit for the cure” (pun) but they’re also doing their bit for the cause. And if you compare $100,000 to the millions they make from fracking, you can see where their core values really lie.

Rather than donating money, assuming they really cared about breast cancer, it would make more sense to simply stop contributing to the causes of breast cancer, not to mention other health concerns, by switching their focus to wind farms or solar energy.

As Beast Cancer Action puts it,

Komen claims to care about ending breast cancer but is taking money from – and providing good PR for – corporations that are poisoning and contaminating our air, our water, and our bodies with chemicals linked to a range of diseases and disorders, including breast cancer. Shame on Komen.

In fact, the $100,000 is paltry compensation for the great evil Baker Hughes is doing through their fracking activities. Consider it Komen’s thirty pieces of silver.

And looked at from the other direction, David Sirota at Salon said it best, calling it “pinkwashing”: “By teaming up with the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the industry hopes to recast itself as a public health advocate.”

One of the most reliable strategies to suppress this line of questioning is a public relations campaign designed to recast an industry as an earnest public health advocate, rather than a public health menace. Such initiatives aim to redirect people’s attention by convincing them to arrive at industry-friendly conclusions. In this case, the campaign in question aims to convince Americans to equate oil and gas exploration with pink drill bits and anti-cancer crusades rather than, say, huge rigs near schools and scientific studies about carcinogens.

The industry uses many arguments to excuse their actions. Rolling Stone relates that the self-proclaimed world’s biggest fracker, Aubrey McClendon claims how opposition to fracking by environmentalists is merely a case of sour grapes:

According to McClendon, environmentalists hate fracking for a self-serving reason: because it upends their dreams of green power. “If you believe in a world where the wind and the sun are going to produce all our power in the future, then we’ve disrupted that vision of the world,” he says. “On the other hand, if you dream of a world where air is cleaner, where energy is half the price it was before and we’re not exporting a million dollars a minute to OPEC or having to go fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then you should embrace natural gas. That’s what’s so troubling to me – that people are willing to turn a blind eye to the enormous, well-known consequences of what we do today and not realize that this new path is the only affordable, scalable way to something else.”

It’s not that we’re worried about greenhouse gas methane leaking from fracking sites. As Colorado State Senator Randy Baumgardner told Gordon Klingenschmitt back in August, methane is perfectly natural!

They talk about methane in the water and this, that, and the other, but if you go back in history and look at how the Indians traveled, they traveled to the burning waters. And that was methane in the waters and that was for warmth in the wintertime. So a lot of people, if they just trace back the history, they’ll know how a lot of this is propaganda”

In fact, we are not talking about natural amounts of methane or we would not be talking about methane at all. Then there is the little matter than fracking makes the water undrinkable over a wide area. Raise your hand if you want to drink water laced with toxic chemicals including “over 100 suspected endocrine disruptors and carcinogens.”

Fracking also makes the air unbreathable. Raise your hand if you want to breathe air full of “carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, benzene and other illness-causing pollutants.” You might as well go suck an exhaust pipe and get it over with.

And then there is the little issue that fracking is linked directly to earthquakes.

Far from the issue being a case of environmentalist sour grapes, the problem is a bunch of rich people not wanting their revenue streams interrupted by something as inconsequential as our health. T. Boone Pickens is a prime example of the problem. Screw you and your grandkids too, he wants his now and he wants you to pay for it.

And there are other sides to the problem. As Right Wing Watch points out, fracking is not exactly social justice-friendly:

Farris Wilks, the Texas fracking billionaire who gives huge amounts to the Heritage Foundaiton and other right-wing groups, declares that “the Torah is set up on the free enterprise system” and that “Yahweh never intended for us as a people to be afraid and reliant on government.”

People like Farris and Dan Wilks, who are called by RWW the “sugar daddies of the far right” are willing to mortgage our kids’ futures to put people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz in power. If things are bad as they stand now, imagine these guys running the country rather than simply obstructing progress. The Kochs aren’t America’s only enemies.

If you have any doubts at all remaining, think about Ann McElhinney, who told the CPAC crowd back in 2012 that fracking is “a miraculous gift from God.”

Because God loves to poison our air and our water and give us cancer. It’s not in the Bible but c’mon, none of these people really care what the Bible says. To them it’s just a big heavy book they can thump you on the head with and use God to excuse their brutal disregard of the human race.

Conservatives like to harp that we are saddling our kids with debt but they have sold their souls to big gas and oil, and they have no problem saddling those same kids with unbreathable air and undrinkable water.

All the money in the world isn’t going to compensate for that. You can’t breathe a greenback. And if you can’t do it, you can bet your last greenback that your kids can’t either. In the end, they might not live long enough for breast cancer to be a problem.


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