Readers continue it:
I’ve been following Josh Fox’s “Ask Anything” series with particular interest. As a native Pennsylvanian, I’ve been outraged by the gas industry’s aggressive and arrogant rush to turn Pennsylvania’s forests and farmlands into industrial areas. As recently documented by this USGS report, this rapid industrialization of Pennsylvania’s forests with so many new roads and pipelines is fragmenting habitat that is really important for wildlife (among other apparently expendable things like clean water, air, public recreation, solitude, etc.). The USGS released another report in March about the habitat fragmentation issue, which receives almost no coverage whatsoever.
A reader complained that “it’s obvious that Fox isn’t at all interested in presenting a fair (but biased) assessment.” That may be true. But I’m fairly more concerned about the gas industry’s propaganda that permeates the media. You cannot turn on cable TV without seeing an ad about the amazing benefits of “clean” natural gas. Give me a break. You may be able to say that burning natural gas is “cleaner” than coal or oil, but it is certainly not “clean,” particularly when you consider the process of exploration, development, production and transportation.
As for Mr. Fox’s presentation, full disclosure: I’ve never seen Gasland, so I’m not sure how the issues were presented. But the reason I never saw Gasland is because I’ve lived Gasland.
I grew up in the oil and gas fields of northwestern Pennsylvania. I’ve seen firsthand what happens when the oil and gas industry infiltrates and dominates your area. Anyone wanting to know how good turning your region over to the oil and gas industry is need look no further than the “incredibly prosperous” towns of Oil City, Warren, and Bradford in northwestern Pennsylvania. I invite anyone to visit these towns to see the rewards that await you if you only sign over your mineral rights for some short-sighted profits.
Unfortunately, the rest of Pennsylvania is getting to know all too well the reality that has existed in northwestern Pennsylvania for more than a century thanks to the oil and gas industry. So much of Pennsylvania’s state forests in the north-central part of the state have been leased to the oil and gas industry over the last several years that the agency charged with managing those state forests, the DCNR, is concerned about its ability to maintain its status as a “sustainably managed” system by the Forest Stewardship Council. Between Governors Rendell (a Democrat) and Corbett (a Republican), there’s been a bipartisan appeasement to the oil and gas industry that simply sacrificed hundreds of thousands of acres of state forest land, consequences be damned.
Finally, you state that “if it provides energy while lowering carbon emissions, I’m for it.” Please, get out of Manhattan and for god’s sake visit some of the areas in Pennsylvania where “fracking” is allegedly “lowering” our “carbon emissions.” I guarantee you it will take no longer than 10 minutes to see how ridiculous a statement that is. Regardless, Bill McKibben repeatedly cautions that the only number that matters is the global amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Thus, even if America allegedly reduces its emissions by transitioning away from coal to natural gas, that reduction only matters if that coal remains in the ground and is not dug up and shipped overseas to be burned. Do you think the coal industry is just going to stop extracting coal because America relies more on natural gas?
Another suggests:
The dissenters that you published may want to read this article, “Fracking Would Emit Large Quantities of Greenhouse Gases,” in Scientific American.
Another reader:
I’m opposed to fracking. When I was still working for a newspaper, I did a couple of stories about people who were investigating fracking, so I wasn’t dealing directly with sources who were doing fracking or having their landfracked. I am intrigued by fracking because I took a couple of courses in geology in high school and so the actual process of fracking was something I wanted to know more about. I became opposed to fracking for several reasons.
First, I don’t like the way fracking disregards property lines on the surface, so that it’s difficult to allocate where the natural gas comes from and who should profit; I don’t like the unsettled law and I don’t like having mineral rights separated from surface rights (mostly because I grew up in a state where there wasn’t much mining or oil drilling).
Second, I don’t like the way fracking pumps undisclosed chemicals into geological strata to free up natural gas. Iffracking used water and say, baking soda, I’d say fine, go for it. Those are known quantities over the long run. But I am seriously concerned about water quality and have been for years, and I worry that we don’t know enough about how all aquifers are recharged to say with authority that fracking chemicals won’t circulate into aquifers eventually. I am very conservative about messing with water sources.
Third, I don’t trust regulation or corporations in general in the long run. Fracking advocates say the casings for the wells are securely enclosed and will last for years, protecting the water supply. That may be true. But there will be fracking contractors who don’t adhere to state-of-the-art standards and there will be weak or unethical regulators, so there will be instances of failure. Until we know how costly failure will be – in terms of water resources damaged, maintenance and containment of fracking fluids, and maintenance and containment offracking wells 50 to 100 years from now, I don’t trust fracking. I would want to see long-term bonds posted for each individual well-head, and I would also want to see regulators who don’t make mistakes or get complacent by doing active research on maintaining water quality and mitigating well failures.
My problems with fracking are that I can’t trust government to take in enough money to pay for problems caused by fracking many years from now. I can’t trust government to keep that money only for dealing with fracking without wasting it. I can’t trust corporations to always put water quality and public safety above profit margins, and I don’t trust lawyers, lawmakers or the courts to protect the rights of individuals when it comes to profits from resource extraction that can’t be tracked in ways that reflect the ownership interests of people who own the land at the surface, whether or not they always owned the mineral rights, never owned the mineral rights, or sold the mineral rights.
I think protecting the water supply is more important than lowering carbon emissions through fracking, but that leads to another discussion I won’t get into here – my bias is toward solar-powered roofs on every house and solar-powered skins on vehicles, with distributed energy production that decreases reliance on a grid powered by fossil fuels; I also favor funding more research into nuclear power production through fusion rather than fission.
Previous Dish on fracking here.
The Dish 