still from the movie Gasland: A film by Josh Fox www.gaslandthemovie.com
(it looks from the picture above that once you punch through the water table that you’re home free)
A couple of days ago, I wrote a post that mentioned a movie called “Promised Land”…
The movie is about fracking…the process of extracting natural gas (in the case of the movie) …or, like in North Dakota, oil.
It’s a process that uses water and chemicals…injected deep (deeeeeep….like miles deep) into the ground to facilitate the process.
Here’s an article from the Huffington Post that poses the age-old question, “what do you do with all the stuff left over from all the progress we’re making?”
Should a Texas company be allowed to ship fracking wastewater by barge up the Ohio River prior to disposal? The company says yes. Environmental groups say no. The U.S. Coast Guard, which has final authority over river cargo, says it is investigating.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/09/fracking-waste_n_2654379.html
OK…this is supposedly a safe process …at least one that’s safe enough that we can turn our heads while we’re making a lot of money and driving our cars to Walmart. Why is there any uproar over what to do with the water and chemicals?
What the article talks about is the resistance to shipping the waste product from fracking to a place where they can dispose of it.
Packing it all up as safely as they can and floating it away…and they never have to think about it again.
Why not just use it to fill the swimming pools of the men who oversee the fracking process? Why not use it for their bath water every time someone says, “it’s all perfectly safe”. It is a safe process, isn’t it?
Safe enough if you don’t have to live right next to…or right on top of…any of these wells, I guess.
“safe on this, buddy.”
Money is a good thing…and I do love to drive around. I drive around 6 days a week delivering the mail…and I still like to go out and go somewhere.
I’m a major consumer of the product of a bunch of nasty processes.
As long as I can just pay the money and fill up my tank and GO….I’m going to do it.
But I think we need to really start paying attention to just what it means to the environment to drill a big, deep hole…fill it with all sorts of really toxic stuff that later we worry about what to do with it…just so that we can continue to drive around the way we’re used to doing.
On the other hand, just to play Devils Advocate…the guys working the fields, the guys who are making the money…they just want to have something that might have been hard to get before fracking came to town. Like logging…there’s always going to be some peripheral damage…but I think some questions need to be asked before it’s too late to back up. Water is already enough of an issue that it’s kind of crazy to take any chances with fouling what we have left.
I’m just sayin’.
But, you know….the Dakotas are a long way across the country…and we’re way down here in the South…looking at the map, it’s a long way down to get to us.
Wait a minute…doesn’t water flow downhill?