Is the Chris Watts case a PR boon or bust for the fracking industry in Colorado? How about Watts’ co-worker at Anadarko Petroleum Corp., Nichol Kessinger?
We’ve made some passing references to the Firestone Incident, Proposition 112 at TCRS thus far, and the surprising speed at which this criminal case was investigated, concluded and the legal detritus swept away.
It may be worth taking a closer look at how the fracking industry deal with negative publicity in general, and Anadarko’s approach in particular. The source for this story is CNBC:
How this information came about is that an environmental activist [an anti-fracking campaigner] managed to attend to conference and recorded Carmichael’s comments during a session titled “Designing a Media Relations Strategy To Overcome Concerns Surrounding Hydraulic Fracturing,” which she flagged as the most contentious and militant, and passed along her audio files to CNBC.
The activist, Sharon Wilson, is the director of the Oil & Gas Accountability Project for the nonprofit environmental group Earthworks. She said she paid full price to attend the two day event, and wore a nametag identifying her organization as she recorded the conference.
In the audio, Carmichael can also be heard recommending a course at Harvard and MIT called “Dealing with an Angry Public,” and recommending this as a companion study guide to the US Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. The CBI references in the MIT guide isn’t the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, but a group known as the Consensus Building Institute.
When asked for comment on Carmichael’s insurgency remarks, a spokesman for industry group Energy in Depth dismissed them as “a joke”.
For additional background on the status of fracking at Anadarko in 2011, when the above comments were made, read this report with Carmichael’s name on it.
More: Meet the Insurgents on the Front Line of America’s Fracking War – Vice
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