The USA is on a great upswing in oil and natural gas production, and a lot of people don't see the need to talk or worry about "peak fossil fuels" (i.e. dwindling cheap supply) because of technological advances such as with hydraulic fracturing ("fracking").
The thing is: even if our net available supply of natural gas has increased, that doesn't change the fact that the industry is operating in a market/system that pretty much completely discounts human and environmental health. It doesn't mean that mixing highly toxic chemicals into very large amounts of water and pumping it at high pressure into shale formations to release natural gas deposits is the answer to our "energy crisis".
You wouldn't know it by the way we dump our feces and industrial poisons into it, but water is more valuable than oil or natural gas. It's one of those really essential things.
City-councilman Doug Shields successfully introduced a hydro-fracking ban in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania shortly after the city's public drinking water supply was shut down due to highly toxic gas industry waste being dumped directly into rivers with minimal and inadequate treatment. The industry was well aware of these millions of gallons of waste, not just in Pittsburgh, but all over Pennsylvania. A recent article in The Nation by Elizabeth Royte states, "Between 2008 and 2011, drilling companies in Pennsylvania reported 2,392 violations of law that posed a direct threat to the environment and safety of communities." This is especially surprising because the industry sits in a 2005 Energy Bill loophole to exempt them from key elements of the Clean Water Act according to the website of the documentary Gasland--- they already have fewer laws to "follow".
It's no small wonder New Yorkers are protesting and petitioning their Governor to deny industry access to their stretch of Marcellus Shale in the name of their abundant freshwater supply --- and most recently, in the name of their food supply. Alongside the compromised lives and livelihoods of neighboring ranchers, exposure to some of the myriad hazardous chemicals associated with hydraulic-fracking has led to the serious illness, death, and still-birth of nearby livestock (according to one peer-reviewed study, personal testimonies, and that fantastic Elizabeth Royte article).
These are some pretty high externalized costs for energy independence, don't you think? Why are we scaling up and auctioning public lands to this industry instead of figuring out how to live without it and deal with the messes it already creates? We can only handle so many more millions of gallons of toxins...
it's really horrifying to think what kind of natural disasters we are going to precipitate with all this fracking
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