Environmentalists in Ohio are crying foul after it was discovered a few months ago that Ohio’s oil and gas industry has been touring schools, science centers and fairs throughout the state, promoting the energy industry’s controversial oil and gas drilling technique known as fracking.
Funded by the oil and gas industry, the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program says it has been educating Ohio residents and science teachers on oil and gas drilling techniques for the past 16 years.
However, controversy over the program has ensued in the past few months when it was discovered that the group partnered with Radio Disney to promote what some are calling a “pro-fracking agenda” with coloring books, pipeline-building contests and other fun activities, while environmentalists were not being brought in to share their side of the debate.
According to a petition by Climate Parents, Radio Disney and OOGEEP promoted oil and gas extraction and pipelines under the guise of getting kids excited about science, “through a music-filled roadshow …”
Videos of these events used to be on YouTube, but OOGEEP has since made the videos private. According to a report in Ecowatch, one of the videos showed children jumping and shouting for prizes while songs such as Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” played in the background.
Though some pro-energy advocates say that groups like OOGEEP are going into schools to get kids interested in science, since there are many great-paying jobs with benefits in the industry available, many environmentalists and parents say that the energy industry is downplaying the risks involved with processes such as fracking.
Jack Shaner is the deputy director of the Ohio Environmental Council. He said that while the energy industry has every right to promote whatever they want, he said “it seems a little inappropriate to be minimizing the risks of this highly industrial activity using props like Twinkies.
“Schools should be offering a balanced presentation, not a one-sided traveling medicine man-style show,” Shaner said.
What Shaner is referring to is the OOGEEP’s use of the snack cakes to illustrate how fracking processes work. As a local Columbus newspaper shared in a recent report, science teachers were told to put a plastic straw in a Twinkie to illustrate how fracking works.
Alison Auciello, the Ohio organizer for Food and Water Watch, agrees with Shaner that the education seems one-sided in Ohio when it comes to the energy industry.
“I look at Rhonda Reda doing 300 presentations, and I’ve only had one group of students come see our Gasland (an anti-fracking movie) screening,” she said. “We’re certainly not being invited into classrooms.
“They’re going into schools and trying to recruit people and not giving them a real scientific education or the whole picture,” Auciello said. “They’re using Twinkies — how innocuous is that? Why don’t they just open up fracking sites to the public forever so they can see what that’s really like?”
Not everyone is concerned about the one-sided education. Scott Spohler, a physics and physical-science teacher at Madison-Plains High School in Ohio, said he was impressed by the OOGEEP workshop.
“The kids are interested in hands-on activities,” he said. “That’s a way to keep their attention.”
However, Spohler added that he doesn’t think there is enough information out there yet to allow for fracking, which is why he had his students research the issue — pros, cons, and in-betweens — and form their own opinions.
“You present all sides of an argument to be fair,” he said.