“The hydraulic fracturing process poses multiple threats to water supplies.”
– Les Stone of Greenpeace
TRUE FACTS:
Yes, fracking does pose some threat to underground water sources. A better choice is to drill offshore. No wait. I forgot that we are supposed to be Protecting our Coasts, Communities, and Climate from Offshore Oil Drilling, as Vicky Wyatt of Greenpeace reminds us. Never mind that one. Let’s go back to our old ways, and import 949,000 barrels of oil per day from Saudi Arabia. We’ll have to check our collective conscience if we do, if only because of that man ‘sentenced to death for atheism’ in Saudi Arabia. Or the maid from Sri Lanka who was sentenced to death for adultery in Riyadh. Not to mention her poor male partner, who got 100 lashes for the same offense. So the woman gets a stoning, and the man gets a spanking. And the govenrment who condemned them gets your money.
Let’s rely instead on our good friends to the north, and import 1.4 billion barrels of oil annually from Canada. But that would make us complicit in Canada’s most shameful environmental secret, as Tzeporah Berman of The Guardian calls Alberta’s notorious 142,200 square kilometer environmental horror show known as oil sands.
So scratch fracking, offshore drilling, imports from morally repellent countries, and tar sands. We are now just about out of oil. We plucked all the low-hanging energy fruits long ago. Nearly every source of oil available to us comes with political or environmental risks. For the time being, fracking is probably our least noxious option.
