What could possibly be wrong with leaving the safe operation of fracking wastewater pipelines to the folks who produce this toxic pollutant? Of course, that question is facetious. Unaddressed leaks reduce the amount of toxic waste for disposal. Legal remedies for damage are costly to achieve. So, the downside risk is limited if nobody is
We are happy to discover some good news about fracking: New Your State has banned CO2 fracking. There’s grumbling about lost economic opportunity, but keep in mind that all of the long-term costs are deferred and externalized. So it’s “other people’s money” that must deal with the health effects, the pollution, and the long chain
Forbs Magazine is not known for its advocacy of the common good. MediaBiasFactCheck.com says, “We … rate them Mostly Factual in reporting rather than High due to some misleading or false stories related to climate science.” So, we have some skepticism when a feature article suggests that the health problems attributed to fracking may be
The PR firms and energy lobby work relentlessly to promote fracking. They have outsized influence on legislators, particularly at the state and local levels. When the rest of us are disengaged or complacent, bad things happen. Consider Ohio . . .
“Direct action” is the term that is used to describe protests. Some are benign, like the caroling against fracking described below. Others are disruptive and seek to get in the way of business as usual to bring attention to the issue being protested. Direct actions become more extreme when the stakes are high and civil
Gutsy Greenpeace protesters in small craft blocked the way to port for a liquid natural gas tanker because the US producer uses fracking. Direct action like this is risky both physically and legally. The rest of us are heartened to see so many people organizing to make our world survivable in the long term and
Phys.com, a site that reports science news, spun the finding that earthquakes caused by fracking could be mitigated as “Good News.” This would only be something to celebrate if fracking, or removing fossil fuels from the earth’s crust, was a good and desirable thing. It is not. We are killing the planet. Those earthquakes that
Better regulation is not the answer. Nothing good happens to the neighborhood when fracking comes. Bad air, bad roads, bad water, noise, illness, and it’s hurting Mother Earth too. The drill-baby-drill crowd will lie, cheat, deceive, and leave a mess for others to clean up.
We would all welcome the use of drilling technology that did no harm and left fossil fuels in the ground while tapping the always-on heat stored in Earth’s core. But, even if we aren’t fracking, and we don’t intend to produce gas or oil, I’m skeptical that we are capable of punching holes through the
“Twenty years after the first gas well was fracked on the Renz farm in Mount Pleasant Township, Washington County, a body of evidence points to the possible correlation between the drilling technique and health harms, ranging from cancers, respiratory ailments, lower birth weights, and cardiovascular disease.” Our politicians evade the issue because there is a