Elected representatives, public officials and other persons on whom people rely have proven spineless and appeasing about the dangers of fracking. This has left the public unrepresented. Below are some easily verifiable points.
• It takes 6 million gallons of water plus 60,000 gallons of chemicals to frack one well of thousands.
• Exploding high pressure, hastily built, frack-gas pipelines are regularly killing people.
• Cornell University finds frack gas more environmentally damaging than coal.
• Fracking's toxins, carcinogens and radioactivity routinely escape or are released to the environment and are currently getting into our fresh water supplies.
• Injection wells dump fracking's polluted water into deep subterranean cavities, thus permanently remove billions of gallons of water from the hydrologic cycle. It simply rains that much less.
• New York City is declaring its source of drinking water off-limits to fracking.
• Denver has already experienced a 4-level earthquake from injection wells. Victims currently have no legal recourse. Same for Ohio and Arkansas.
• Fracking is a "shock, drill and run" operation typical of irresponsible behavior. All of the shale gas potential equals only a few years of national supply.
• "Remediation" is nearly impossible on a water table polluted with toxic nondegradables and long-lived radioactivity. Frackers may be dumping toxic waste on open ground. Who is monitoring this?
• Natural gas has twenty times the greenhouse impact of CO2. We need to know the relative climate change effect of fracking's methane releases.
• Fracking is not now "economic." Indeed, it incurs social costs in the billions.
• Pavillion, Wyoming residents are cautioned to ventilate their homes when bathing because the fracking related methane in their water could cause an explosion.
• Wells routinely experience failed cement casings and other losses of containments allowing routine pollutions by toxic, carcinogenic, and radioactive fluids.
• Competent officials would require fracking fluid "tracers" and a "damage bond" — better yet, entirely cut off fracking's unconscionable amounts of water use, thus extensive pollutions.
• Gas and oil lobbyists have removed the Enviromental Protection Agency from any jurisdiction over fracking. Local officials have no authority over fracking, even within city limits.
Our elected officials seem to know hardly anything significant about the social costs of fracking. Being truly spineless and impotent, they need guidance. If intransigent, we may have no recourse but to "Occupy" as needed!Wendell G. Bradley lives in Windsor.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.