Monday, May 9, 2016

A Fracking Good Time

Here in Colorado, fracking is popular, or so the commercials lead us to believe. We are treated to images of happy female farmers using fracking to supplement their incomes, and they don't have to worry about polluting the water table because it's so safe... Unless you live in Canada or Oklahoma.

Canada currently has over 50 wildfires blazing in 620 square miles, with no way to put them all out. It's estimated that it will take months before the fires will be contained. The area is in Alberta's oil sands region, one of the largest reserves in the world, and all fracking has been halted. I guess we should be glad that no wells were directly set on fire, it would make those old Kuwaiti well fires look like a campfire roast; but the region looks like it will take years to rebuild, and it could easily all go up in smoke again next year or the year after next...

I don't really want to pick on Oklahoma, today they are having some gnarly tornadoes, but ya gotta wonder at the sanity of the state's government. Thanks to their aggressive fracking program, there have been over 107 earthquakes last year, before fracking there might have been 3 small tremors per year. If that weren't bad enough, I think that Oklahoma also has that huge sinkhole that is swallowing up a whole town and surrounding area. The town was built over an old salt mine that soon became depleted. The caverns filled up with water, which dissolved the remaining salt, and voila, a giant sucking sinkhole, with videos to be found on youtube...

The problem is a simple one: if you take an enormous amount of stuff out of the ground and have nothing to replace it with something bad will happen. Mines collapse. Major underground rivers have dried up, leaving many once fertile regions in China, Africa, and California, with arid, dusty ground that are no longer able to grow crops.

With all of the recent earthquakes happening in places that haven't had a history with them, I wonder if our Mother Earth isn't trying to shake us humans off the planet, like a dog getting rid of fleas (to paraphrase the great George Carlin)...

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