We have copies of frackopoly available for 20 off at the registers in the next room. This discount is how we saying thank you for buying books and your purchases support the author series and insure the future of an independent bookstore. We are pleased have booktv here and when asking questions during the q a please know you will be recorded and wait a moment for the micrmicrophone to come over. As a reminder and thank you for silencing your cellphone for tonights talk. Wenonah hauter is the founder and executive director of food and water watch which focuses on corporate and Government Accountability relating to food, water and fishing. She has worked and written extensively on food, water, energy and Environmental Issues including as director of public Citizens Energy and environment program, and as the environmental policy director for citizen action. Her previous book, foodopoly, the battle over the future of food and farming in america, was publiced in 2012 and been released in paper back unveiled the issue of corporate control of food in the united states. Her latest book, frackopoly takes on hydraulic fracturing reporting on its history and examininging the part ease who support it and arguge it is dangerous to the environment and human health. Environmentalist and author bill mckid praises frackopoly as a truly powerful manifesto about one of the greatest environmental fights on the planet from one of its greatest champions. And the huffington posted ads read frackopoly. It is wellwritten, timely and very importantment we are pleased to bring the conversation to Harvard Bookstore tonight. Please join me in welcoming wenonah hauter. And thank you to Harvard Bookstore and all of you for coming this evening. In the mid1990s i worked on a Renewable Energy project called powering the midwest. We knew in the 90s that renewables were ready, that Energy Efficiency was ready, and we really needed to make a transition. So a couple years ago, we had been working on fracking at water watch for several years as the First National group to call for a ban on fracking. I started looking at some of the statistics about how far we had come with Renewables Since the mid 1990s when i worked on this project. It was stunning. As of 2015, only 5 of our electricity is generated from solar and wind energy. We need to do so much better and yet here in a state like massachusetts, where you are not really suffering from fracking, but you are suffering from all of the infrastructure to really promote fracking and to allow it to expand. So i decided to write this book because you really need to know where you have been to know where you have going. I wanted to see how we ended up with this monopolized oil and gas industry that has so much power over our democracy and over the future. So i started in at the turn of the century and i want to talk about that history tonight. I mean the turn of the 20th century, not the turn of the 21st century. But before i get started on that history, i want to know how familiar people are with fracking. Maybe i should start by defining it and talking a little bit about the impacts and why we care that there is so much oil and gas drilling and fracking across the country. Come on in. There is plenty of room. Fracking is a sciencefictionlike process that uses large amounts of water, toxic chemicals and very fine sand. It is injected deep underground in a well and then over multiple stages the fracking takes place. The wells are drilled about a mile up to two miles into the ground and then a horizontal tunnel is drilled. Again it could be as much as it a mile or two miles. Then this toxic mixture of sand chemicals and water is injected under very High Pressure in multiple stages to fracture the rock, usually shale, and to release the oil and gas. Although we are talking a lot about fracking being for natural gas since 2012 about 80 of fracking has been for oil. So, what is this doing in the communities where the fracking is taking place . These are called sacrifice zones. There have been 140,000 wells fracked in the last about ten years and today 17 Million People live within a mile of a well and there is a lot of infrastructure to support out fracking and the drilling and fracking for oil and gas. We are talking about thousands of miles of pipelines, c compressure stations, and processing facilities. C compressor stations, fracking and drilling, processing facilities all have a lot of impact with chemicals like benzine and methane are admitted into the air that make the People Living near the facilities sick. Since 2013, there have been 62 studies written about the Health Impacts. 94 of those studies show adverse effects and Health Impacts in living near where fracking is taking place or the compressor or processing facilities. Lets talk about the water now. Fracking uses 50 times more water on average than conventional drilling. We are talking for one well anywhere from 1. 7 million gallons to 13 million gallons in a state like texas. Lots and lots of water is used. Fracking, of course, is going on in some of the driest places in the nation. Places like texas that have been having a drought, california, and in a state like colorado frackers are competing with farmers for water in auctions and having a real impact. When you are using injection, a lot is coming to the surface and it is bringing not just the fracking chemicals and we know the companies dont have to disclose exactly what the chemicals are we know there are over 400 chemicals used, many carcinogenic with other health effects. A lot of the water comes back out of the well. 10 gallons of water a day on average. That is a lot of waste water. It has to be dealt with. And one way it is dealt with is injecting it under the ground. We know that has its own impact, right . Earth knox quakes. And this isnt something i made up for the book. This is something authorities have now confirmed. Fracking waste water injected deep underground causes earthquakes and in a state like oklahoma it has been really shocking. Before fracking started there were one or two serious earthquakes over 3. 0 magnitude. Today there are as many as 5400 earthquakes. That is a recent figure. Annually that are picked up on the seismic equipment. Huge number of earthquakes. This is happening in multiply states ohio, arkansas. There are a lot of other impacts but if you live in a community where fracking is taking place you are probably concerned about it. Your family members may be sick having rashes, nose bleeds, and even more serious impacts. That is why there is a big movement that has sprung up in these communities against fracking and drilling which i will tough on in a minute. But now i want to turn more to the story about how we ended up with an ex treme Energy Process like fracking taking place. Why we are continuing to use fossil fuels even when the Global Climate is threatened. That story begins at the turn of the 21st century when jd rockefeller rolled up the oil and gas industry, controlled 90 of it, used a lot of ruthless and unethical practices to drive other companies out of business and really control a resource that was very important at the time. Originally it used for kerosene which people depended on for lighting their houses. Around the turn of the century, some other companies formed. Oil found around texas, and in europe there were two other companies and i will call them by their modern names. With the mergers through history they have gone through a dozen changes. We are talking about Important Companies that have done a lot of lobbying and have a big impact on where we have today. So the European Companies are shell and bp. The u. S. companies were formed after Rockefellers Standard Oil was broken up. You will remember from history Teddy Roosevelt challenged for the oil industry and there was a proceeding and they ended up breaking up standard oil, rockefellers company in about 30 countries. That is usually the end of the story. But that should be the beginning of the story because standard oil wasnt really broken up. Standard oil got to write its own plan and each of the 30 companies are exon getting half the value of the original standard oil. Rockefeller maintained an interest in each one. The three rockefeller companies were exxon, chevron and mobile and exxon and mobile merged and texaco and gulf merged into chevron as well. We are talking about four companies but for a good chunk of the century there were seven companies that were almost dictating Public Policy and the American Companies had a huge impact on our tax policies, the research that was actually done for the oil and gas industry, the whole system of energy and this got very dramatic in 1928. Kind of the beginning of the oil and gas industry drilling in the middle east. You will remember that the middle east was created at the break up of the Ottoman Empire by france and britain and the oil industry was already there and interested in the resources. In 1928, when oil was found in iraq the big Oil Companies, they are called the Seven Sisters named after a greek mythological story of atlas daughters who fought amongst themselves but if there was every n attack on one of them they all gathered around and protected her so they were nicknamed the Seven Sisters and that is how they behaved. So when this oil was found in iraq there was a lot of overproduction. So the Seven Sisters got together and one of their groups and drew a red line around the middle east and made an agreement amongst themselves they would only go in and drill for oil as jointly. They would never go in alone. This was so they could watch one another. And they would limit production, fix prices and break antitrust laws. Soon after this agreement was made, the three largest of the Seven Sisters, exxon, bp and shell met at a castle in scotland and decided on a set of principles for how they would accomplish this price fixing and moving forward and moving forward to break antitrust and monopoly laws we have in this country. They met after that and were having a big effect on the rules that were being written and the laws that were being decided on prior to world war ii and then after world war ii. But let me step back a minute and talk about the Utility Industry a little bit because today we have this oil and gas industry, the big electric and gas utilities and actually the banks which i will get to in a little bit. While the industry was rolling up and dictating the rules around oil and gas drilling and discovery there was a man named samuel ensoul who was doing the same in the electric utility and gas Utility Industry. He gets something that is similar to what happens with the Housing Market in 20082009. He had an ownership in about 5,000 gas and electric utilities in 30 states but there was a Holding Company structure or a Multi Corporation today and the Parent Company milked the utilities charging them big rates and fees for services. Meanwhile, he had investment companies, a number of them and sold the stock over and over again to these different utilities and this contributed to the crash of the great depression. This has a big impact on policy today so i am talking about this. When roosevelt came into office, there was information to curtail what the electric industries was doing and the Financial Services were doing at the time. There were a couple laws passed i want to talk about because when they were repealed it allowed fracking and the oil and gas industry to blossom and create giant utilities. The first one was an archaic law and regulated gas utilities and they could not gamble with rate payer money and need to have Continuous Service operations. It really dictated the structure of the industry keeping it from getting too big to fail. That was one law and you dont really need to know that. But they were not able to get natural gas included. In fact that law i talked about was probably the most controversial law in the early years of the roosevelt administration. There were 600 lobbyists arguing against it and it passed by one vote and they managed to keep natural gas out of it. They came back and were able to pass another law regulating the Natural Gas Industry because a lot of consumers had been really ripped off and there were urban sitins that were angry and organizing to try to do something about consumers not having access to affordable tural gas which was very important for heating and for electricity generations in some places. So this law did something important. It regulated the price of natural gas and it gave the authority to a governmental body called the federal policy commission. And they used the cost of what it actually what the oil and gas industry had to pay to get the resource out of the ground and then a profit that they added to it which was between 5. 6 and 6. 5 percent over a 40year period. Pretty good for the times. So this was called costbase regulations. This natural gas act regulated pipelines. So you could not go around and build pipelines and get approval. It was a process to see if the pipelines were necessary, people could be involved in the process, it was a lot more democratic. Well, then there was a big debate for the next really tr the 1970s and i talk about characters who played a role in this. Many of them are big characters. One that comes to mind is bill cur who was first the governor of oklahoma and then a senator. He had a ten gallon hat on and pictures of him. He is actually the great nephew of aubrey mcclenden for any of you who follow this industry. He just died mysteriously. He was a big flacker at chesapeake and driven out of the company for bad behavior. This is a relative of audry and every year kerr introduced legislation to do away with the natural gas act until he died in 1963. There were other characters like mccoy who is a favorite villain. He worked for chase bank and was someone who worked as an advisor for nine president s and he is part of the government that exists that is not elected but is always there as an advisor and had a major impact in Public Policy. He was the antitrust lawyer who time and time again stepped in to get the oil and gas industry exempted from antitrust laws. A lot of the time they were sneaking behind the scenes to this. It matters. This has been a debate since the beginning of our country. Thomas jefferson wanted to have part of the bill of rights the right to be free of monopolies. He didnt care about the price of gas or iffed but he cared about the political powlar you get when you are a Large Company you are bigger than most countries and that is what happened to the oil and gas industry. So big that really especially after world war ii they could dictate Public Policy and laws and remember that the amount of oil consumed after world war ii doubled and part of that was it its use for plastic. And also, of course the industry was able to make sure it was used for lots and lots of other things other sources of energy might be developed. They were able to dictate how our tax dollars were used. I want to fast forward because we dont have much time and i want to talk about what happened when these important laws were attacked and appealed. I guess the story really begins we will start with the nixon administration. There were a lot of people in the oil and gast industry who were very concerned about the environmental laws that were beginning to be passed and the movement, the student movement, the real changes in society with the oil and gas industry being concerned about the environmental piece of this. You were the warren court extending rights to people categories of people who had not enjoyed the rights. There was the movement against the car. Kind of a youth uprising. There were a lot of both conservative interests and then a lot of corporate interests that didnt like to see how the country was changing. They helped elect Richard Nixon and after he was elected he promoted people that promoted our democracy. You might remember judge powell, he is the Supreme Court judge that wrote the first opinion saying corporations have the right to par advertise paint in elections like people participate. He wrote an important memo called the powell memo or the powell manifesto. He is a very savvy man. He wrote out a plan to help corporations take back the demomeracy. It was a longterm plan. Around the most important institutions that were going against the corporate interest. He talked about the state and the university. All of the major institutions were actually helping to support this new writing of the rules in the u. S. Including the environmental laws. So this memo laid out a longterm plan for how to undue this and lewis powell helped raise a lot of money to make this happen including money from the coke Koch Brothers and the economic interest in the country. They did weaken our democracy and our political system by creating this. I talk about this in relation to the oil and gast industry because they were key. When president carter came along, there was a lot of pressure on him and in fact, democrats started receiving corporate money at the time because Campaign Finance laws began to change. One of the things he did, you will remember, there was an oil problem with the u. S. Policy. There were long lines for gasoli gasoline. One of the things carter said h