The environmentalists are all worked up about hydraulic fracturing. I have been reading some information on the Ohio Environmental Council's website. They refer to fracking as a "relatively new drilling technology." Interestingly, this technology was first used in 1949. I guess that is "relatively new" compared to the Earth.
The website www.dangersoffracking.com states that "Up to 600 chemicals are used in fracking fluid, including known carcinogens and toxins." Numerous websites out there want to imply that "fracking" is destroying the Earth. There contention is that the process pollutes ground water and produces cancer deaths. In fact, they don't have any studies showing this to be the truth. Former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson is quoted as saying that there is no "proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water." Fracking has been done on federal lands, and the former director of the Bureau of Land Management says that his federal agency "has never seen any evidence of impacts to groundwater from the use of fracking technology on wells that have been approved by [the Bureau of Land Management]. . . We believe, based upon the track record so far, that it is safe."
It is ironic that the MessAPolitico is trying to block the use of fracking. Stopping fracking would limit the supply of natural gas. This technology has unlocked a lot of domestic sources of natural gas and oil. About 10-12 years ago, the price of natural gas was rising dramatically, and we were being told that the last supplies of clean natural gas were depleted. Those of us that heat our water and our homes with natural gas could see the effects of this waning supply of natural gas. I live in a new, efficient home, but I would have two gas/electric bills in the winter every year that were around $400. Of course, that makes the cost of industrial production where heating is used, very expensive too.
The big irony is that 71% of our electricity is produced by burning coal. Coal is a cheap, but not very efficient way to produce electricity. It also produces a lot more greenhouse gas and other pollutants in heating your home than electricity produced by burning coal. Wouldn't it make sense to a tree-hugger to encourage folks to use more natural gas and less electricity? Wouldn't more plentiful natural gas tend to reduce it's cost relative to electricity and make folks migrate from electricity toward natural gas?
The truth is that the environmental movement is littered with liars and people that believe the lies. I don't believe that the tree-huggers are really all that worried about fracking destroying the environment by pumping chemicals and water into the ground. I firmly believe that they want to stop anything that reduces the cost of energy produced by fossil fuels. They are using EPA regulations to shut down coal-fired power plants. They are stopping the Keystone XL pipeline based on environmental concerns that are shaky at best. They don't want any drilling for oil in the ocean or northern Alaska or anywhere else. The environmentalist wacko strategy is to very simply limit the supply of all fossil fuels to make the alternative energy sources cost competitive.
What does this mean for us regular Americans? They aren't going to make alternative energy less expensive to make it competitive. The goal is to make our current sources a lot more expensive -- probably more than double what it is today. That drives energy intensive manufacturing out of the USA. It means we spend more on energy and less on other stuff. It hurts our economy. It drives the prices of a lot of things that require significant amounts of energy to produce and/or deliver up, up, up.
If you believe the doom and gloom brought to you by the tree-huggers that are controlling the strings of their puppets in the MessAPolitico, then I would bet that you are a voter who helped put them in power. You are hurting us all by believing the crap they are spewing. That's the biggest pollution problem we have in America today -- the crap being spewed into the environment from Washington, DC. Don't forget that increasing the use of natural gas instead of electricity and oil would make the environment cleaner, and the environmental movement is fighting this.
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