{"id":571,"date":"2011-11-21T19:19:11","date_gmt":"2011-11-22T02:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.constructonomics.com\/blog\/?p=571"},"modified":"2011-11-21T20:42:11","modified_gmt":"2011-11-22T03:42:11","slug":"what-the-frack-is-going-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/21\/what-the-frack-is-going-on\/","title":{"rendered":"What The Frack Is Going On?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I didn’t know much, if anything, about fracking until about three months ago when I downloaded\"frack a podcast of This American Life <\/a>that explored the issue and then specifically looked into two professors who had\u00a0conflicting opinions about the benefits of fracking.\u00a0\u00a0After listening to the podcast, I came to the brilliant acertion that\u00a0the whole thing is\u00a0totally fracked up.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the professors from Penn State, in this NPR\u00a0tale of good vs. evil,\u00a0calculated the large amount of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale\u00a0deep beneath the surface of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and West Virginia and presented his admirable findings with pride to the administration of his University.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The other professor from the University of Pittsburg did a calculation of the amount of toxic chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process that could be polluting ground water, streams, rivers,\u00a0and eventually making its way into drinking water.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of these professors received wide acclaim and praise for his\u00a0work, the other ended up out of a job.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u00a0starting trying to gather facts about fracking (I guess you could call them fracks).\u00a0 The funny thing is that\u00a0facts (fracks) are rather few and\u00a0far between.\u00a0 It doesn’t seem that anybody really knows if fracking is safe,\u00a0dangerous, good,\u00a0or bad.\u00a0 However, this much we do know, fracking is big money.\u00a0 It’s big money for drilling companies,\u00a0but it’s also\u00a0very lucrative for owner’s of land with gas underneath.\u00a0 We also know that the fracking practice was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act despite knowing that\u00a0the\u00a0fluids used to fracture the rock contain many toxic chemicals including known carcinogens.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Pennsylvania is sometimes described as Pittsburg and Philadelphia with Alabama in between.\u00a0 In short, there are some depressed towns in\u00a0central Pennsylvania and\u00a0natural gas drilling has\u00a0transformed these places.\u00a0 The gas industry has brought money, luxuries, and to many of these people – hope.\u00a0 But at what cost?\u00a0 The word is very mum on that one.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

I’m honestly kind of torn about the issue.\u00a0 I tend to knee jerk to the side of the environmentalists in situations like this, but I can also see the need for quality domestic energy and a decreased reliance on foreign oil.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

However, I do want to make sure we are dealing with the correct information before we rush to judgment.\u00a0 For example, the drilling and gas companies cry from the mountaintops about how natural gas is so clean burning and a non-contributor to climate change.\u00a0 This is not true.\u00a0 While natural gas does burn\u00a0cleaner\u00a0and\u00a0with less impact to climate change, the extraction process releases natural gas into the atmosphere which is a tremendous contributor to climate change, so the net effect is not much better than\u00a0burning oil or coal.\u00a0 Sorry, but gas companies\u00a0didn’t quite hit the mark on that one.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

I guess I’m just an advocate of full disclosure of information and\u00a0having smart people make good choices\u00a0based on lots and lots of accurate information.\u00a0 That’s all.\u00a0 So when the EPA asked the drilling companies to disclose all the chemicals used in fracking fluids and they said, “No”,\u00a0that kind of ticked me off.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Hopefully we’re not fracked on this one.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn’t know much, if anything, about fracking until about three months ago when I downloaded a podcast of This American Life <\/a>that explored the issue and then specifically looked into two professors who had\u00a0conflicting opinions about the benefits of fracking.\u00a0\u00a0After listening to the podcast, I came to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":576,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions\/576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}