The debate continues on today, as residents and companies fight for against hydraulic fracturing. This article in the New York Times reports about the E.P.A. weighing the cost and effects of hydraulic fracturing.
Hydraulic fracturing is the act of drilling wells into Marcellus Shale to extract large amounts of natural gas. If done correctly, the amount of natural gas that is to be extracted is great and if fracking was to be adopted everywhere, the United States would be able to obtain energy independence. They will be able to spend less money on importing fuel and it will cause less pollution as it does not burn as greatly as fossil fuels. However, despite these pros, have we ever thought about what this could potentially do to our land? Our country is urban, but this does not mean that we must lose all of the nature we have left today.
Landowners are lining up to gas prospectors to lease their land for the price of them drilling holes into the ground to find natural gases. What will happen to this land? Countless wells will be constructed to extract the gases from the ground, and if they are not constructed properly, great amounts of chemicals will seep into our air. The integrity and the process of which the wells are built lead to chance of spilling chemicals into the ground and water as well. Many chemicals are used in this process and most of them do not have to be disclose by the companies so we do not know the exact relationship between the two. But do we really want to take this risk? The fact that the water absorbed and used through this process will not be received back does not help this situation too.
The risks does not stop here. Hydraulic fracturing is also have said to be linked to increasing the cause of earthquakes that we experience. This is merely a theory but if there’s a possibility where this can be true, once again, why risk it? Should we gain all of these possible threats and risks to our environment for natural gases, while killing the beautiful nature we have left today? Should we really kill off the rest of the land that we have so scarcely of?
The NYTimes article posts, “Corporations have no conscience… The E.P.A. must give them that conscience.” This is completely true. Businesses are started and built for the mere objective of profit. It is up to us, the people, to stop this and show them that nature and our environment does really matter. Money is not everything. There are things that you cannot put a price on. In this case, the harms do outweigh the pros that this can do for our environment. Not merely because of the lack of information we have on this, but because of the fact that we need to realize what we are destroying. Nature can be destroyed within a few minutes. But rebuilding it will take a lot longer than that. We need to learn to appreciate what we have now, rather than trying to change everything for the “better.”
Jr., Tom Zeller. “Far From Gulf, Due Diligence.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 24 July 2010. Web. 03 Dec. 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/business/energy-environment/24gas.html?pagewanted=all>
