August 30, 2012

Recently I visited some of my friends on the East coast, who live on the Pennsylvania/NY State border near the Delaware River. Much of the conversation(s) we had were about their concerns for the consequences of “fracking for natural gas” and the probability that our ground water and possibly our aquifers would become polluted by the process of fracking, and the chemical substances used to “frack.” I lived in this area for most of my life and heard the passion that was conveyed by these good folks about the recent and somewhat misunderstood and secretive practice of “fracking for natural gas.” Anyway I decided to find more informative information regarding this practice so I read an article by Trevor Curwin entitled: Natural Gas Fracking Begets a Clean-Up Industry. This article was written for CNBC last June and is informative and balanced. I advise anyone who wants to know more about this way of releasing natural gas from shale and the possible consequences of these methods of extraction to read it. So let’s look at the backstory.
One of the issues raised in our discussions was the issue of transparency. I will not bore you with the litany of dangerous and deadly past practices that large energy corporations have caused because of the lack of public discourse and consent. In the fracking industry there seems to be the usual use of subsidiary’s to insulate the larger energy companies from criticism, oversight and liability.
When I was young and lived in the Delaware/Broome/Wayne county area we dumped sewage into the Delaware River until it was too polluted to eat the fish from the water or to swim in the river. We called the large slow water that ran along the east side of Point Mountain at the head waters of the Delaware River “shit eddy,” simply because that was what the water contained to a large degree. Eventually we (the people) were able to pressure our state and local governments to forbid the practice of dumping sewage into waterways and supported through taxes localities to build sewage treatment plants. We were lucky with the Delaware River; as larger populations lived downstream and the pollution was less in upstate waters where less is more. Like I said, we were lucky.
Now we have companies that are fracking for gas in many places across the nation admitting that they WILL pollute and contaminate the ground and the water supply in some places, with impunity.
Some of the companies that are actually doing the fracking you will recognize as large players in the “energy industry”, some are shell companies for larger conglomerates that will take more research to identify, as they buffer themselves from the possible liability that may result from their actions.
Understand that I am not one to tell someone what to do with their land or other property. I have marveled at how folks have lived with the land in my life time and before. Looking back historically one should read “The Big Burn” by Timothy Egan. This book speaks to the beginning s of protecting our natural resources and the creation of protected lands; today these are our national parks. Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot saw and understood corporate wealth and America’s “Land Barons” sense of entitlement over the wealth of “public domain.” “It was theirs for the taking, and they answered to no one.” Out of this history came the many federally protected lands we enjoy since their creation and a philosophical war that continues today and will beyond, maybe until there is nothing left to frack (sic).
This conflict still rages today and is presently being played out by fracking for “natural gas” (and mining the tar and oil shale for crude oil) presently being made a center piece for America’s “energy independence.”
The truth is that the semantics are misused; there is no energy “independence.” As long as we take resources from the earth, which are not given to us naturally, we will be dependent on those resources; they in fact own us. This is the paradox that Roosevelt and Pinchot understood well. They could not see the energy needs or wants of the future yet they did understand the power(s) of greed and money.
There is wind that blows eternally, ocean waves and tides that will outlive us all, and there is a sun that gives us the light of life. Somehow these sources of energy seem more in harmony with our energy needs than drilling, fracking, and collecting and storing deadly waste that nuclear produced energy leaves us with.
The lessons of the Exxon Valdez; the BP oil spill(s) in the gulf of Mexico, Alaska and other places all lead us back to one conclusion. That answer is that human error and the lack of transparency in the startup process led to deadly consequences. Numerous “accidents” and conflicts have in the final analysis kept energy prices high and profits beyond human understanding. Yet we persist in this process over and over again. This is the paradigm that continues with the present “fracking for natural gas.”
There is a survey in the article by Mr. Curwin; that most folks believe that fracking is environmentally safe. I cannot say it is, because I am not a scientist of the sort that can explain why the majority of the survey is probably wrong. My experience as a citizen and a lover of nature tells me so.
I believe his article, which is focused on the rise of clean up companies for the pollution from fracking makes its own point well; if it (fracking) wasn’t harmful to the environment it would not need to be “cleaned up.”
While the energy industry will deny most of the long term issues of pollution and water poisoning due to fracking; I am old enough to remember when the tobacco industry and the medical community once claimed that smoking was a healthy habit, and cocaine was not addictive. Other miscues by corporate power brokers and politicians in their pockets, swore that the air at “ground zero” after the attacks of 9/11 was safe to breathe; and that weapons of mass destruction in a faraway country were “immediate threats” to our way of life. I digress, but I also remember that the proponents of nuclear power claimed that they had the answer to our energy needs; that “Nuclear Energy is safe Energy.” I wonder if I could get the folks from Chernobyl and Fukishima to weigh in on that issue????
Dan Clune

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