“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
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Seriously. Fuck you. I would snap bet my net worth you couldn’t describe what fracking is if you were not able to google it.
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Surface pollution is a lot more knowable, so while there are risks. You can then evaluate whether those risks eventuate and then fine/sue to polluter (I mean, also lol)
Neighbours of fracking, and those who rely on complex subsurface water formation, where the risks are more complex are very reasonable to argue that a lower risk tolerance should be taken.
Haven’t we spent years together critiquing the weakness of the US state, it’s regulators, and their capture by special interests?
Seems bizarre to think on this specific issue where
- benifits are very concentrated
- risks are very spread
- the risks are especially complex
- the industry is one with a history of capturing political policy
That the policies are some how good?
Fracking is a textbook example of where you would expect weak policy outcomes
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I absolutely respect your expertise in this area. I’d encourage you to lay out the arguments for why fracking risks are low, especially around water table contamination and damage to sub surface water table structures.
The evidence is the lack of evidence for widespread bad outcomes. There are thousands of wells fracked every year and very few examples of adverse outcomes. Can you cite evidence of broad scale and common adverse outcomes? I don’t think you can because they just don’t exist.
It is worth noting that the vast majority of wells are fracked hundreds of meters below potable water formations. There is literally no interaction. Only in rare cases are wells shallow enough to interacted with potable groundwater. They are also cased to prevent interaction.
Nobody is arguing the regulations can’t be better. I’m simply arguing if the concern is the carbon budget make a carbon budget argument. Don’t make up false risk.
There is a very reasonable carbon budget argument to be made.
Oddly nobody has brought up induced seismicity which is a real fracking risk we don’t fully understand yet.
That’s not very typical. I’d like to make that point. Some of them are built so that the front doesn’t fall off at all
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Zzzzzzzzzzzzz so boring
Thank you for bringing this video into my life
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They’re one of humanity’s finest duos
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Is it possible to disagree with Clovis8? Only if you’re ignorant or edgelording
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You are not disagreeing with me. You are just insulting me. You’ll notice I’ve responded to every actual good faith post with a good faith response.
You simply called into question my entire character and 25 year career in environment claiming I’m just lying and shill for oil companies.
So yes. You are a boring edgelord and frankly it’s very fucking insulting given my history here. It’s also really pathetic that your response to my having a slightly different opinion, one in which I brought tons of data and you brought zero, is to call me a fraud and oil shill.
So yes fuck you is the only reasonable response but the reason I didn’t respond that way to you but with a zzzz is you have regularly sent me private messages and public ones being kind to me but now all of sudden I’m a total fraud.
It’s just boring edge lording.
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Harris was never going to ban fracking. It was just running in poetry because she knows the outcome.
Can someone tell me what is the next policy response the day after fracking is banned? National oil production has just dropped massively and the US is now a net importer rather than exporter?
What’s the outcome?
I don’t know much about fracking so I have to rely on Google. Articles like this make me think there are things to worry about, especially since the data is relatively new and it will probably take a while to see more results. Whether these problems count as widespread or serious is up the reader I guess
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Why should we accept any adverse outcomes?
The onus on polluters is to show a reason to allow an impact to society, not the other way around.
The fact that fracking is ALSO a net negative to the world because of the carbon is context for the discussion around local pollution.
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As I noted earlier, there are risks for sure but those are largely mitigated with regulation. Your last point isn’t really true though. It’s not really up to the reader on our side of the political divide though right? We are not the side of personal opinion but of scientific fact. To that end, if there was widespread unchecked risk with fracking we should expect to see lots of data to that effect, right?
I’ll say this, if I was ranking current environmental risks I see everyday in my job fracking would be way down the list. Banning it would have negligible environmental outcomes but massive economic ones.
If you are worried about the environment you should be worried about wetland lose, surface water contamination, soils degradation, the slow rate of reclamation and remediation in oil and gas, policy impediments to decarbonization and, of course, climate change. Fracking would be way way down my list of real risks we should be talking about on the national level.
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As I said earlier, there is no development type or technology with zero risk. Everything we do is balancing risk with cost. Sure everything could theoretically be designed with no risk but then it would all be infinitely expensive and our economy wouldn’t function.
Why do we accept some risk with vaccines, cars, bridges, or the American idea that it is better if a million guilty people get off to save one innocent person being found guilty? Why do we advocate for things like safe injection centres when we know they have some associated negative outcomes?
We do all this because we accept some level risk when the outcome is considered positive enough. Fracking is allowed because the economic benefit is considered to outweigh the environmental impact.
As I said earlier, if your argument is a carbon budget one then banning fracking is a very odd arms length way to deal with that issue. We have tons of direct policy ways to influence and regulate emissions that don’t require trying to regulate some tangential part of the process.
The carbon budget one is problematic too as I pointed out earlier as reducing domestic oil production just results in more importing of oil. It’s not clear it results in less molecules being extracted globally.