Is Fracking Safe?
If I’m guilty of under-representing any of the big ideas in energy, it’s probably my failure to make my position clear on fracking that has been my greatest journalistic sin of late. Here at 2GreenEnergy.com we’re gaining on 3000 blog posts, most of them mine, and I don’t think I have more than half a dozen articles on the subject.
In my defense, I guess I would claim that so little is known about the real health-related issues that it’s hard to claim that fracking represents a specific danger. Acclaimed scientist and author Dr. Sandra Steingraber would agree, but she would reframe the question. She points out that the decision to open up our underground reservoirs of fossil fuel deposits affects the health of millions of people, but are being made behind closed doors, by a small cadre of lawyers, industrialists, and bureaucrats, in the absence of independent scientists and health experts.
I hope readers will check out Steingraber’s on-camera interview, and come to appreciate her position, which she sums up as follows: “We consider (Illinois’) fracking regulatory bill to be a subversion of both science and democracy. No public hearings or public comment periods ever took place. And yet it is the public that is being compelled to live with the risks sanctioned by this bill. It is an unjust law.”
Craig,
I’m with you on the point that scientists and health officials should have been involved (though they were involved – there were plenty of reports and studies, but we agree they should have been in the room as active participants in the framing of the regulations.).
However, I would not wish to see this debate be open to the public, and more than I believe that ordinary citizens should have a say in climate change debates. For every citizen that has a valid point to consider there are between ten and a hundred that don’t have any more specific knowledge upon which to base their opinion than the average grade-school student. A mob is the dumbest form that homo-sapiens can be a part of (with the possible exception of the “tea-party”).
As to fracking itself… I believe the onus is on the opponents to articulate a reasonable reason to ban fracking, and I don’t believe I’ve heard one. I do think that the regulations concerning well cases must be tightly enforced, and penalties should be corporation-ending for those who take the slacker approach… but that should also be true of traditional oil and gas drilling. As far as I can tell, fracking doesn’t implement a single threat that traditionall well drilling had not already presented, and arguably reduces those threats (seen from traditional gas drilling at least) by dozensfold..