Just one Planet . .

From Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab publication, “Living Bird”, Summer, 2010
  “The View From Sapsucker Woods”  by John Fitzpatrick – in part-

“The Deepwater Horizon gusher was generated by 21st-century technology, but it symbolizes the 19th-century ethics we continue to apply when environmental  protection contradicts energy exploitation.  Although we cannot yet know the eventual scale of its biological and economic costs, we should for once agree that we must assemble, and never again forget, all the fundamental lessons of this disaster.  The unthinkable is possible, and must be planned for in advance.  As we assess risks versus rewards, as we fully audit the true costs of energy exploration and extraction, we need to incorporate and properly mitigate the enormous risks and costs of disasters like  Deepwater Horizon.  With just one planet to steward and only one chance at this game, all of us should ponder whether some natural systems are just too complex and valuable to risk losing, regardless of what temporary energy boost lied (lay)beneath them.”

 The Whole Fracking Enchilada
   Violating the bedrock, the atmosphere, and everything in between    by Sandra Steingraber 
     Published in the September/October 2010 http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/5825/> issue of
     /Orion/ magazine

I HAVE COME to believe that extracting natural gas from shale using the
newish technique called hydrofracking is /the/ environmental issue of
our time. And I think you should, too.

Saying so represents two points of departure for me. One: I primarily
study toxic chemicals, not energy issues. I have, heretofore, ceded that
topic to others, such as Bill McKibben, with whom I share this column
space in /Orion/.

Two: I’m on record averring that I never tell people what to do. If you
are a mother who wants to lead the charge against vinyl shower curtains,
then you should. If the most important thing to you is organic golf
courses, then they are. So said I.

But high-volume slick water hydrofracturing of shale gas—fracking—is
way bigger than PVC and synthetic fertilizer. In fact, it makes them
both cheaply available. Fracking is linked to every part of the
environmental crisis—from radiation exposure to habitat loss—and
contravenes every principle of environmental thinking. It’s the tornado
on the horizon that is poised to wreck ongoing efforts to create green
economies, local agriculture, investments in renewable energy, and the
ability to ride your bike along country roads. It’s worth setting down
your fork, pen, cellular phone—whatever instrument you’re
holding—and looking out the window.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS can be viewed as a tree with two trunks. One
trunk represents what we are doing to the planet through atmospheric
accumulation of heat-trapping gasses. Follow this trunk along and you
find droughts, floods, acidification of oceans, dissolving coral reefs,
and species extinctions.

The other trunk represents what we are doing to ourselves and other
animals through the chemical adulteration of the planet with inherently
toxic synthetic pollutants. Follow this trunk along and you find asthma,
infertility, cancer, and male fish in the Potomac River whose testicles
have eggs inside them.

At the base of both these trunks is an economic dependency on fossil
fuels, primarily coal (plant fossils) and petroleum (animal fossils).
When we light them on fire, we threaten the global ecosystem. When we
use them as feedstocks for making stuff, we create
substances—pesticides, solvents, plastics—that can tinker with our
subcellular machinery and the various signaling pathways that make it run.

Natural gas is the vaporous form of petroleum. It’s the Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde of fossil fuels: when burned, natural gas generates only half
the greenhouse gases of coal, but when it escapes into the atmosphere as
unburned methane, it’s one of the most powerful greenhouse gases of them
all—twenty times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat
and with the stamina to persist nine to fifteen years. You can also make
petrochemicals from it. Natural gas is the starting point for anhydrous
ammonia (synthetic fertilizer) and PVC plastic (those shower curtains).

Until a few years ago, much of the natural gas trapped underground was
considered unrecoverable because it is scattered throughout vast sheets
of shale, like a fizz of bubbles in a petrified spill of champagne. But
that all changed with the rollout of a drilling technique (pioneered by
Halliburton) that bores horizontally through the bedrock, blasts it with
explosives, and forces into the cracks, under enormous pressure,
millions of gallons of water laced with a proprietary mix of poisonous
chemicals that further fracture the rock. Up the borehole flows the gas.
In 2000, only 1 percent of natural gas was shale gas. Ten years later,
almost 20 percent is.

International investors began viewing shale gas as a paradigm-shifting
innovation. Energy companies are now looking at shale plays in Poland
and Turkey. Fracking is under way in Canada. But nowhere has the
technology been as rapidly deployed as in the United States, where a gas
rush is under way. Gas extraction now goes on in thirty-two states, with
half a million new gas wells drilled in the last ten years alone. We are
literally shattering the bedrock of our nation and pumping it full of
carcinogens in order to bring methane out of the earth.

And nowhere in the U.S. is fracking proceeding more manically than
Appalachia, which is underlain by the formation called the Marcellus
Shale, otherwise referred to by the /Intelligent Investor Report/ as
“the Saudi Arabia of natural gas” and by the Toronto /Globe and Mail/ as
a “prolific monster” with the potential to “rearrange the continent’s
energy flow.”

In the sense of “abnormal to the point of inspiring horror,” /monster/
is not an inappropriate term here. With every well drilled—and
thirty-two thousand wells per year are planned—a couple million
gallons of fresh water are transformed into toxic fracking fluid. Some
of that fluid will remain underground. Some will come flying back out of
the hole, bringing with it other monsters: benzene, brine,
radioactivity, and heavy metals that, for the past 400 million years,
had been safely locked up a mile below us, estranged from the surface
world of living creatures. No one knows what to do with this lethal
flowback—a million or more gallons of it for every wellhead. Too
caustic for reuse as is, it sloshes around in open pits and sometimes is
hauled away in fleets of trucks to be forced under pressure down a
disposal well. And it is sometimes clandestinely dumped.

By 2012, 100 billion gallons per year of fresh water will be turned into
toxic fracking fluid. The technology to transform it back to drinkable
water does not exist. And, even if it did, where would we put all the
noxious, radioactive substances we capture from it?

HERE, THEN, are the environmental precepts violated by hydrofracking: 1)
Environmental degradation of the commons should be factored into the
price structure of the product (full-cost accounting), whose true carbon
footprint—inclusive of all those diesel truck trips, blowouts, and
methane leaks—requires calculation (life-cycle analysis). 2) Benefit
of the doubt goes to public health, not the things that threaten it,
especially in situations where catastrophic harm—aquifer contamination
with carcinogens—is unremediable (the Precautionary Principle). 3)
There is no away.

This year I’ve attended scientific conferences and community forums on
fracking. I’ve heard a PhD geologist worry about the thousands of
unmapped, abandoned wells scattered across New York from long-ago
drilling operations. (What if pressurized fracking fluid, to be entombed
in the shale beneath our aquifers, found an old borehole? Could it come
squirting back up to the surface? Could it rise as vapor through
hairline cracks?) I’ve heard a hazardous materials specialist describe
to a crowd of people living in fracked communities how many parts per
million of benzene will raise risks for leukemia and sperm abnormalities
linked to birth deformities. I’ve heard a woman who lives by a fracking
operation in Pennsylvania—whose pond bubbles with methane and whose
kids have nosebleeds at night—ask how she could keep her children
safe. She was asking me. And I had no answer. Thirty-seven percent of
the land in the township where I live with my own kids is already leased
to the frackers. There is no away.

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