Recent comments

Anonymous, you are at least up front about your pro-industry bias, which is very obvious in any case. You are using precisely the tired corporate propaganda with which we have been bombarded over the past few years via a $140 million marketing and lobbying campaign by the fracking* industries. *I use the term "fracking" to refer to the entire, "cradle-to-grave" process, from exploration to point of use. In response to your points: 1) The process has not been used for 50+ years. Just because industry repeats this lie over and over and over and over again does not make it true. Conventional hydraulic fracturing of the past is nothing like the slickwater high-volume horizontal fracturing now going on in, for example, Pennsylvania and other states in the Marcellus Shale. The current method requires four technologies that have only in the past five years been combined: directional drilling, high volumes of frack fluids, slickwater, and the use of multi-well pads and cluster drilling. The entire new unconventional method is still being developed; there have been no long-term studies of its health and environmental effects because it hasn't been around long-term. 2) These assertions are patently false. 3) You and your colleagues are very fortunate not to have cancer. I congratulate you. You also, by your own account, have not been exposed to the toxic chemicals being used in current unconventional gas drilling. But you may be at some point, as have many people in fracklands. I hope your fate is better than theirs. But don't gloat that you don't have cancer, Anonymous. Just be grateful. Having cancer, or watching someone you love die of it, is hell on earth. As, I have come to realize, is living with fracking. 4) The price *is* at a severe low, which makes this an especially inopportune time to spend tens of billions of dollars on extracting it in this destructive manner, even as we permanently remove billions of gallons of water from the hydrological life of our planet and contribute outrageous amounts of greenhouse gases to our atmosphere, hastening climate change, which will surely raise the number and severity of catastrophic [and expensive in many ways] weather events. We should be spending our money instead on conservation efforts and on R&D for renewable, sustainable energy systems, on the local and national levels. 5) The cost of gasoline is completely unrelated to fracking for methane gas. Anyone who does not identify himself or herself as an environmentalist is either a fool or arrogant beyond reach. We all depend on our environment to survive. It gives us the air we breathe and intake via our pores, the water we drink, the food we eat, the ground under our feet. We cannot survive individually or as a species without it. My taking the time to write this response was not for your benefit, because I can see that your mind is made up and you have little if any compassion for people who are suffering under fracking or under the stress of fighting to keep it from destroying the things they cherish. Perhaps you can understand it as a property rights issue: the desire of people not to ruin the property they own, and to not cede sovereignty over their property to some corporation from another state that has neither roots in nor obligation to the community into which they intrude. I will not comment further. You've let me waste enough of my time.