President Obama is facing humanity's biggest problem with the right facts and language, and yet has polluted the whole thing by setting America on a development path that includes fracking for "natural gas."
The speech was bittersweet for a climate activist like myself who foresees runaway Climate Change causing human extinction. I loved hearing President Obama sound like author Bill McKibben as he recited weather facts such as 2012 being the hottest year on record. I was inspired to hear the President say "I refuse to condemn your generation to a planet that's beyond fixing" and that the US would "lead the planet in a coordinated assault on Climate Change." At long last, a U.S. president spoke sanely and intelligently about getting Humanity on track towards long-term survival!!! Hurray, praise be to God, may it be so!
And yet... I've spent the last year studying the rape scene that is fracking and so there was no joy in Mudville. Obama got it mostly right on Climate, but includes the false solution of fracking as "a bridge fuel", just as environmentalists become aware that fracking is the largest emerging public health crisis on the planet.
Fracking is wrecking America's water supply right now! Large chunks of America are being made uninhabitable right now! Fracking is the most unpatriotic, anti-American activity imaginable: blowing up America's ground floor and ruining our water forever! If Chesapeake Energy's corporate empty-heads had Taliban-style beards instead of Wall Street suits, the military would be drone-striking their headquarters in Oklahoma City.
Fracking is the creation of vast regions of Ghost Towns, where the water makes you sick and doesn't grow good food. Someday a fracked map will overlay America and the only land of value will be where they didn't frack. Fracked land will be filled with poor and sick people. This is the making of an ugly American future, a version of Stephen King's story about "The Children of the Corn" mixed with a splash of industrial cruelty. President Obama's long-term legacy may be green-lighting this ecological disaster.
With fracking, there is no "government regulation" that can make it safe. Government merely pretends to "regulate" to provide a fig-leaf of cover and legitimacy for the rape scene. But fracking can't be done safely ever, no matter what. Fracking wrecks the water supply, bottom-line, case-closed, period. So any talk of regulating the industry is a falsehood, a lie, a great pretending that government's power is greater than it is over the laws of geology, water and methane migration.
According to the fracking industries own studies, as documented in the film Gasland, 5% of the fracking wells fail immediately and start polluting the water supply with chemicals, radon 226, toxic waste water, and so on. And over time, all the wells will fail, ensuring that in 50-100 years, every well will be leaking toxicity into the water! This is what Chesapeake and Exxon are doing right now! Creating millions of wells, across America, with one inch of concrete to stop the methane migration into the water.
Having mixed concrete before, I know this is bad design that will not function to protect the water. Sure, concrete will make a sidewalk, but even that crumbles eventually. Stick concrete a mile into the Earth, amidst shifting rock, and expect it to hold FOREVER? The whole process is a lie, B.S., a pretend head fake at legitimacy while they ruin America's water. Everybody involved with fracking should acknowledge and atone for their sins, walk away, become whistleblowers and help us save America's water while there is still time.
We need a NATIONAL BAN ON FRACKING right away. Someday we'll get one, as inevitably as methane migrates into tap water. People will eventually see how bad fracking is. In the meantime, so much more water and land will be ruined. While there are many places where a safe, successful human future is being derailed, fracking is the perfect crime of insane industrialism. Fracking is a Wall Street financial instrument where junk bond billions are laundered by being spent on massive, self-absorbed, industrial projects. Chesapeake Energy borrowed $800 million to get started, another example of how alienated capital causes alienated decisions. They are wrecking America's water for five minutes worth of gas. It doesn't get any greedier, shortsighted and selfish than that.
Albany, NY has become the front lines in the fight to protect America's water from fracking. On June 17th 2013, Don'tFrackNY.org gathered over 4000 people at the Capitol Building in Albany. An impressive and sustained NY anti-fracking movement has arisen that's made it politically impossible for Governor Cuomo to sign off on fracking for New York state.
A former truck driver for the fracking industry gave the days most inspiring speech. He said the industry gets rid of toxic wastewater by putting it in trucks labeled for pure water and then spraying on Pennsylvania's roads to keep the dust down. As a driver, he was personally breaking the law doing this and so he called the government to report this. He was threatened and told not to call back. He said "So I became a whistleblower! They want me to shut up but I'm not going to!"
I love that President Obama is directing the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon pollution. (A president even talking about "carbon pollution" is progress.) Here is another action Obama can do without Congress: direct the EPA and the Justice Department to start enforcing the Clean Water Act laws already on the books. True, fracking got started when a sociopath you may remember named Dick Cheney pushed thru the 2005 Halliburton Exemption "Get out of Jail Free Card" to the Clean Water Act. But the Frackers are illegally dumping waste water down municipal sewer drains across the country right now. President Obama, before bothering to make new EPA laws, have Attorney General Eric Holder talk to that truck driver and end the lawless, wild-west mentality of the fracking industry. Enforce the laws already on the books!
Fracking is America's next big contentious, not-going-anywhere issue. Fracked gas requires a spiderweb of pipeline to take the volatile, hard-to-store fuel to places where it can be used. In Vermont, a utility named VTGas is trying to build a 41 mile gas pipeline thru people's farms and gardens using immanent domaine. (Rule of thumb: "Immanent domaine" is a legalistic mumbo-jumbo term that in real life translates to poor people lose their land's value when bullied around by rich companies and their stable of lawyers.) A group called Rising Tide Vermont is opposing the pipeline, and challenging Vermont's rubber stamping of this massive, pro-carbon development.
Finally, the real kicker, fracked gas isn't even cleaner than oil once you factor in the methane released during production. Fracked 'natural gas' releases more greenhouse gases overall once you count the methane that leaks out of the wells. So fracking is a lose-lose proposition: ruin the water and the sky.
I'm grateful President Obama is getting serious about Climate Change. I dislike having to write this critical article when Obama just advance the ball so far in terms of talking sanely about Climate. Challenging coal production ain't nothing when West Virginia will never vote for anti-coal politicians. And check out the amazing graphics the White House released to explain the problem: http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/climate-action-plan. I have faith Obama will come around to an anti-fracking position eventually. But since fracking is ruining the water immediately, we don't have time to coyly please-both-sides of the issue like with the Keystone XL pipeline.
Obama's Climate speech was great progress and yet still feels a day late and a dollar short. This opinion is reflected on many environmental blogs and websites. The inclusion of fracking divided the environmental community's response. This is too bad because the Climate Movement is the natural constituency to support action on Climate Change.
Try to see Gasland 2, premiering in July on HBO. Check out Don'tFrackNY.org, AmericansAgainstFracking.org and see the film "Dear Governor Cuomo." Join the movement against fracking and let's save America's water.
