State Senator Tony Avella holds a public forum on fracking

The debate over whether to allow hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, in the State of New York continues to heat up.

State Senator Tony Avella held a public forum this week aiming to dissuade the public from supporting the controversial natural gas drilling procedure. Mr. Avella's event followed a statement from Governor Andrew Cuomo that he is considering permitting it in five counties near the Pennsylvania border: Broome, Chemung, Chenango, Steuben and Tioga.

For the uninitiated, hydraulic fracturing involves injecting a cocktail of water, sand and chemicals into the ground to crack open rock formations, which contain gas. It has been going on since 1947, but many environmentalists are in a seemingly sudden, even apocalyptic panic mode over the issue, especially in New York. They raise concerns fracking could cause air pollution and contaminate critical groundwater supplies by releasing methane gas and toxic chemicals. One attendee at Mr. Avella's event even claimed that, if fracking isn’t stopped, we are facing a situation similar to that in the film The Day After Tomorrow.

Not everyone is on board with this anti-fracking train. In response to director Josh Fox's anti-fracking documentary Gasland, a journalist and filmmaker Phelim McAleer made a movie of his own--FrackNation, which is about to be released as a response to Mr. Fox's movie. While opponents of fracking squad portrays the farmers living near these natural gas wells as endangered by the procedure, Mr. McAleer further argues that this is a debate is between the “rich, urban elite and the rural poor” with bored and wealthy Manhattanites working against poor farmers who could cut deals with the natural gas companies to transform their lives for the better.

The Senate Republicans, who control the chamber, were particularly unimpressed with Mr. Avella's forum.

“Another day, another political stunt by what's left of the Senate Democrat conference,” their spokesman, Scott Reif, wrote in a statement.

In the end, it may be up to the voters. At the start of the forum, Senator Liz Krueger, an outspoken opponent of fracking, told the audience she believes fracking can be stopped if the Democrats win a majority in the Senate to complement their control of the Assembly.

“I am very confident that if my Democrat colleagues were the majority in the Senate… both houses would have passed legislation in the last session that made sure that none of us had to be worried about permitting [fracking] going forward,” she said.

Yet with the election many months away and Mr. Cuomo moving forward with a limited proposal, advocates are left hoping that sufficient public pressure can be generated to guide his hand. Forums like Mr. Avella's as well as competing documentaries with completely opposite narratives are all part of that public relations battle.

A shot from the Romney campaign's video on the loan guarantee program. (Photo: YouTube)

Mitt Romney's newest web video accuses President Barack Obama and the Department of Energy of using a stimulus program to spur green jobs to pay off their friends by giving money to failing business ventures run by Democratic donors. The commercial highlights three energy companies that received loan guarantees through a DOE program and later lost money or went bankrupt; Solyndra, ECOTality, SunPower and First Solar. The ad alleges these companies received the cash because of their ties to the Obama ddministration and the Democratic Party.

"You’ve heard of Solyndra. They took $535 million in taxpayer loan guarantees and went bankrupt. But that’s not even half the story," the video's narrator says as an ominous piano sountrack plays. "More than 16 billion dollars have gone to companies like Solyndra that are linked to big Obama and Democrat donors. ... Obama is giving taxpayer money to big donors and then watching them lose it."

The U.S. Department of Energy loan guarantee program that granted over $14.5 billion in guarantees to solar equipment maufacturers and projects came under fire from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform after the failure of Solyndra, which went bankrupt after receiving a  $535 million federal loan guarantee. Solyndra's bankruptcy led the committee, which is chaired by Republican California Congressman Darrell Issa, to investigate the loan guarantee program. Mr. Issa subsequently released a report in March claiming the program gave too much money to risky businesses.

"These reports document a Department of Energy seemingly unprepared to deal with the exponential increase in taxpayer funds it received under the stimulus, leading to serious questions of waste and abuse," Mr. Issa said. "Taxpayers are right to expect better from the Department of Energy and the Obama Administration and to seek protections that this type of approach can be avoided in the future."

Following Mr. Issa's report, the Department of Energy defended the loan guarantees by arguing critics were singling out failures in an otherwise successful program in order to create "false and misleading controversy."

"For nearly a year, Congressional critics of the Department’s loan programs have demonstrated a consistent pattern of cherry-picking individual emails from the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents the Department has provided to Congress with the sole purpose of inventing false and misleading controversy," DOE spokesman Damien LaVera said in response to Mr. Issa's report. "As these investigations have made clear, decisions made on loan applications were made on the merits after extensive review by the experts in the loan program. ... We worked up until the last days doing all the due diligence."

Watch Mr. Romney's video attacking the loan guarantee program below.

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