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Sunday, May 12, 2013

My View Of Fracking




I like relatively cheap energy and energy independence as much as anybody else.

Having said that, what do you think my opinion is on a process that is described as :
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/201357123155791818.html
The industry that uses this technology calls its product "natural gas", but there is nothing natural about up-ending half a billion years of safe storage of methane and everything that surrounds it. It is, in fact, an act of ecological violence around which alien infrastructures - compressor stations that compact the gas for pipeline transport, ponds of contaminated flowback, flare stacks that burn off gas impurities, diesel trucks in quantity, thousands of miles of pipelines and more - have metastasized across rural America, pumping carcinogens and toxins into water, air and soil.
Sixty percent of Pennsylvania lies over a huge shale sprawl called the Marcellus, and that has been in the fracking industry's sights since 2008. The corporations that are exploiting the shale come to the state with lavish federal entitlements: exemptions from the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Clean Drinking Water Acts, as well as the Superfund Act, which requires cleanup of hazardous substances. The industry does not have to call its trillions of gallons of annual waste "hazardous". Instead, it uses euphemisms like "residual waste". In addition, fracking companies are allowed to keep secret many of the chemicals they use.
Now I know this is written by someone unfriendly to fracking, but I think I am old enough to handle the emotion-laden wording.

What I truly find troubling are the exemptions from the Clean, Air, Clean Water, Clean Drinking Water Acts, and the Superfund Act.
This indicates that the companies and the regulators and the Congress knew what the deal was right from the get-go, and they went to extraordinary lengths to let fracking continue.

If we combine this with the post yesterday  A Senior Moment  http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-senior-moment.html   wherein the increase in diseases such as Alzheimer's and Dementia, Asthma, Cancers, etc. cannot be correlated to increased age and living longer, rather they indicate there is a complex causality of environment and genetics.

Couple this with the toxic residues of fracking, and knowing full well that only two months ago we were talking about leaks in the Hanford, Washington storage tanks, tanks established in World War II at the Hanford facility which supplied the Manhattan Project

In other words...
What is my view of fracking and a society which allows it?

What do I think of someone who poisons not only themselves, but everyone around them and the governing structures that allow it?

What is there to save us from our insanity?

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