This week, we discussed two very separate concepts, water filtration and fracking. They do not have much to do with each other, but there is a very important overlap that I will discuss.
When the EPA began to mandate water filtration systems, many cities had to pay huge amounts of money to put them in place. New York City took initiative and came up with an alternate method to circumvent the huge costs of building filtration infrastructure. It bought up land around water sources upstate and set up monitoring points for water quality along its path to the city. This solution cost only 1.5 million dollars versus the potential 16 million that a filtration system may have cost. However, other cities did not follow this example because they did not have the same financial pressures as New York City. They simply yielded to EPA regulations. It worries me to think that, if New York had the funds, it may have gone that route as well. The point here is that many environmental problems have cost effective and green solutions that go unnoticed. It was not the forward thinking environmentalism of New York City that led to this innovative solution that continues to provide some of the cleanest drinking water ever. It was an immediate fiscal threat that jolted the city into action. The outcome was good but this does not bode well for future action.
Fracking is a process by which natural gas is extracted from bedrock by drilling horizontally and pumping in fracking liquid until the increased pressure fractures the rock. Unfortunately, the fracking fluid contains chemicals that are known to be dangerous and the process is not completely undestood from an environmental perspective. People living in areas where fracking is done complain about headaches and other illness. Those who defend it can only say that there is no proof of any causation. This is a misallocation of the burden of proof. The impetus to prove safety should be on the companies that want to engage in fracking. Instead, they do not even fully disclose the contents of their fracking fluid. I understand the notion of company secrets but when lives are at stake there is no room for uncertainty. If fracking continues while studies are done, the consequences can be terrible. The companies will have major liability to affected locals. They should learn a lesson from New York City here. Instead of taking the risk of paying massive fees later on, they should find a compromise. Perhaps until the study is done, the companies should only be allowed to drill under land they own upon which no one lives (similar to New York and its reservoir system). This is very important because they cannot actually guarantee that their pipelines are completely secure and filled with cement. Unfortunately, like New York City, without a fiscal incentive up front it is unlikely that any fracking company will discontinue drilling or reveal the contents of its fracking fluid. Without such an incentive, a better solution may never be reached. Job growth in those communities can wait two years especially because guaranteeing safety for the locals is the right thing to do because private profits cannot come at social costs. Most importantly, US law needs to mandate proven safety before any action by these companies. This will even provide an incentive for these companies to fund the safety research themselves. This is good because, “the EPA, God bless them, tries these two year studies often.”
These companies are prepared to deal with the consequences of their actions but refuse to take preemptive measures. This is short sighted and, as evidenced by New York City’s water purity solution, often times a less efficient solution. Attacking the cause of a potential problem, rather than the symptoms, is an important part of environmental engineering. Making cars that are easier to recycle, buildings that have zero energy impact, and clothing that lasts and is not damaging to the environment are all great examples of this trend of forward thinking that must be adopted and in the end may even prove profitable. All we need is incentive.
