Fracking might be profitable, but whether it's good for
anything else is doubtful.
Jacki Schilke was
suffering from symptoms ranging from rashes, pain, and lightheadedness to
dental problems and urinating blood. The formerly healthy, 53-year-old cattle
rancher’s body was under assault from a list of toxic chemicals as long as your
arm.
But Schilke’s lucky —
so far — compared to five of her cows. They died.
The rancher’s problems
might become worse in time, since the chemicals causing her acute problems are
also linked to chronic, deadly diseases like cancer.
What’s afflicting Schilke and her cows? The oil and gas drilling craze known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. As The Nation magazine and the Great Plains Examiner reported last year, Oasis Petroleum started fracking on land three miles from her ranch in 2010. Oasis got money, the world got more energy from the gas they drilled, and Schilke got sick. Now, she won’t even eat her own beef.
If the results of
fracking were virtually unknown a decade ago, before it became a common
practice in states like Pennsylvania and Schilke’s home of North Dakota,
there’s no mystery remaining now.
It shouldn’t be a
surprise. After all, when you pump a cocktail of toxic chemicals into the
ground to dislodge fossil fuels, there’s a cocktail of toxic chemicals in the
ground. And some of those toxins don’t stay put. They
make their way into the water, the soil, and the air.
And the toxins flow
from there into the living things that rely on the water: the soil, the air,
plants, animals, and us. We’re fracking our food.
Yet President Barack
Obama is a big fracking supporter. He called natural gas a form of “clean
energy” in the big address on global warming he delivered in June, touting the
nation’s production of more natural gas “than any other country on Earth.” Then
he said, “We should strengthen our position as the top natural gas producer
because, in the medium term at least, it not only can provide safe, cheap
power, but it can also help reduce our carbon emissions.”
Right. Compared to
other forms of dirty energy, natural gas might reduce our carbon emissions. But
at what cost?
If our only energy
options were oil, coal, and natural gas, we’d be in a rotten Catch-22. Luckily,
we have more choices than that. There are growing solar, wind, and geothermal
options. Perhaps the most overlooked alternative is increasing efficiency.
I visited the
University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, two years ago. The school had made a big
effort to reduce its energy use. In one building, I saw a hallway that used to
have its lights turned on all the time. The builders had never even installed
switches to turn them off.
Decades ago, energy
was “too cheap to meter.” It seemed cheaper to just leave the lights on all the
time than to wire them to be turned off. That’s changed. After some
retrofitting, the lights can be turned off.
How many other
buildings and homes have no light switches, insufficient insulation, or old,
power-guzzling appliances? How many are still being built without taking
advantage of the most up-to-date methods that curb energy use?
Obama proudly spoke of
doubling America’s use of solar and wind power in the last four years, with
plans to double them yet again. He’s right. We increased wind and solar energy
from less than 1 percent of our energy in 2007 to less than 2
percent in 2011. (Meanwhile, our reliance on natural gas crept up from 28
percent to 30 percent of total energy consumption, and our total use of energy
overall rose in those four years by 9.4 percent — with most of the increase
coming from dirty sources.)
Fracking might be
profitable, but whether it’s good for anything else is doubtful. Emissions
during the fracking process outweigh any benefits of reduced emissions when the fuel
obtained is burned. Besides, how does fracking American land make sense if it’s
poisoning our food and water supply with chemicals that give us cancer?
Let’s solve our energy
problems by increasing efficiency and by turning to truly clean sources of
energy: renewable options like solar, wind, and geothermal power.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author
of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do
to Fix It. OtherWords.org