Posted on 03/22/2011 10:17:34 AM PDT by rightistight
The battle over natural gas drilling in the Marcellus shale formation is heating up in upstate New York. Town meetings are filled to overflowing with people adamantly against gas drilling. Rhetoric is more than heated and less than believable, and local town boards are the most recent battleground to ban horizontal gas drilling in upstate New York. This, I believe is a concerted effort to use local ordinances and zoning laws to prohibit drilling at the source.
Arguments against drilling continue to evolve and now consist of a "not in my backyard" plea of the mostly affluent to maintain the status quo. If you live upstate you know the status quo isn't working. The economy has been decimated by the recent recession. Jobs are gone, taxes are some of the highest in the nation, and services are less than desired.
The arguments as far as I can tell have evolved from aquifer pollution, too superficial water contamination, too decreased property values, too tourism, too scenic blight, too trucks ruining the roads. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, but the question should be do the ends justify the means?
I will have more to say on this, but will leave you with a quote from a recent article found in the Albany Times Union, "the average drilling complex used 8.4 million gallons of water per day of water in the Susquehanna River basin, comapared to 20 million per day for golf courses."
Perspective matters, I suppose!
Bussed in environmental astroturf?
No problem. Just cut off the fossil fuels to these cities.
TX, OK, and LA really should plug all pipelines taking our oil and gas to these parasite northern and eastern states. Let them freeze in the dark until they get the idea that their states should contribute to the energy pool, not just take out what others put in.
During Japan’s nuclear scare, there were noises being made that we could build more nuclear plants IN THE SOUTH. So again, the South should be colonized for cheap energy that is potentially risky, while we send safer fossil fuels north in the transmission lines so that no views are spoiled for the Yankees. Sorry. We are no longer that stupid south of the Mason Dixon line.
Just more liberal scare-tactics, influencing people to oppose American energy, American growth, and American development. Useful idiots, nothing more. Millions of fracks, going back decades (when equipment and techniques were far less developed), and I cannot find a major significant event resulting from fracking... and even if there is an event, that does not mean we shut down the practice. China certainly hasn’t stopped coal mining, despite their nearly monthly mine accidents.
As I sit in my house in Oklahoma with a pump jack and tank battery across the road and hear the New Yorkers cry “not in my backyard” I am reminded of a bumper sticker. “Let the Bas#%##% Freeze in the Dark”
By the way, fracking is not new technology. We have been doing it in Oklahoma since the 40’s with no problems.
Bottom line is we need to tap every energy source we can, or go back to the standard of living we had in the 1800’s.
"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
More than our founders .. if the people had not the sense of posterity, we never would have gotten this far.
That is why all government schooling must cease immediately.
I was born in '48, so I got a fair 'public' education, but as the years went by, I saw things happen I couldn't place my finger on.
There was an 'attitude' or something that just didn't match up to MY schooling.
I see now, it was the dumbing down of our kids about America and what we were and what we had as a core set of values.
That core is gone and has been replaced by some phony 'think about the other guy first' attitude.
No ... America was great because America was good.
Without good (not works and deeds, but from within ... and yes, based on a belief in God) .. there is no America.
Who the frack wrote this?
I’ll admit I don’t totally understand fracking—seems safe enough, given its history—but I just love the name.
Now there is a lot of talk that fracking is causing earhtquakes. I have no clue if that is possible or not.
save
Declare environmental groups subversive and arrest and jail their leaders, along with freezing all their assets.
I don’t want to hear any complaints from them about the high cost of energy down the road.
I'm all for that suggestion. We should also put OK and LA on the Texas electrical grid and tell the rest to make it on your own. As far as fracking is concerned, I remember my neighbor - oil field worker - talking about that in the 60s.
It is a very big and successful business venture here in PA and it exists in most counties.
Our pols haven't yet taxed the well heads {but they will as soon as they can decide on where the money goes}. The local municipalities want the money, the counties want it, the state wants it, but they don't want to kill the golden goose.
My natural gas rates have gone from $13 mcf to $ 6.45 mcf in less than 3 years.
I love the drilling, we have 50,000 new jobs in PA directly related to the shale drilling and heating costs are cut in half, whats not to like?
Oh, I forgot, global warming, dirty water, dirty air and dirty arm pits.
http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1rdb8/MarcellusQuarterlySp/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F300925%2FMarcellus-Quarterly--Spring-2011
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