Saturday, October 19 is Global Frackdown Day, in which we are encouraged to voice our opposition to hydraulic fracturing, the process of drilling deep into ancient shale layers to extract trapped natural gas.
I am currently strongly opposed to fracking. But note that I say "currently."
Perhaps I'm a cockeyed optimist at times, but I feel like human ingenuity can, given time, solve some engineering and logistical problems that would make fracking safe and sane for America. We have not reached that point yet. The existing technology -- no matter how much Big Energy wants to spin it -- is demonstrably unsafe. When you add to that the proximity of fracking sites to major watersheds that serve the drinking needs of millions of people, gas extraction currently has too high an environmental price tag.
Where are the fine young minds that could make this process viable? I guess they haven't arrived at the banquet yet. When a country can't get a national insurance plan up and running on a web site, given all of our sophisticated computer technology, it makes sense that sucking gas from a mile deep in the planet would be out of reach ... right now.
So we at "The Gods Are Bored" go on record as opposing fracking until such time as the process can be made safe and unobtrusive. In the meantime, perhaps advances in other, less damaging, sources of energy can be developed and refined.
Stop fracking now! Back to the drawing board.
3 comments:
I fear that even if they could come up with some stuff they could inject into the earth to extract the NG that wasn't poisonous to the water, it would still cause earthquakes when they pull the NG out from between the layers of rock/earth. We need to just change over to renewable energy completely, even if we have to be more careful using energy.
--Kim
What I am really in favor of is energy rationing. Oh, brother, would THAT ever meet with opposition! But rolling pre-announced brownouts and gasoline limits would be one viable solution to over-consumption of enerby.
fracking and tweerking..don't like.
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