For Fracking Sake, an Industry Completely out of Control

One wonders how these catastrophes keep arriving on the front pages

The NYTimes recently reports—as if it was Breaking News:

‘Monster Fracks’ Are Getting Far Bigger. And Far Thirstier. “Giant new oil and gas wells that require astonishing volumes of water to fracture bedrock are threatening America’s fragile aquifers.”

Yeah well, we’ve long known that what’s become known as ‘industrial agriculture’ has been stealing water from million-year-old aquifers for decades. Back in the day of owner-operator farmers there was a dug well for the household and crops thrived or failed according to the weather.

But then the bean-counters arrived, those masters of profit at any cost who tell absentee farmers what to do and when to do it to keep Wall Street invested. When family farms get gathered and sold as ‘investment vehicles,’ bad stuff happens. It’s always good to remember that a ‘vehicle’ in Wall Street terms is a getaway car from a robbery. Remember 2008? The vehicle in that disaster was sub-prime mortgages.

It's the same scam with fracking

America’s oil wells got tired, the easy money go harder to get and fracking was the last hope for dragging the last drop of oil and gas from what had taken millions of years to form in the ground. It’s a tradition in America and Saudi and other oil-based economies to rip what no man fairly owns from the ground and stuff the proceeds in the bank.

Fracking bleeds the rock faces of former oil reserves by blasting water and other chemicals into the ground to free up oil and gas—both of which are lighter than water and rise to the surface. As the NYTimes points out, that takes ‘astonishing’ amounts of water and the only amounts that rate that adjective are in deep aquifers.

According to the Times, “nationwide, fracking has used up nearly 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011. That’s how much tap water the entire state of Texas uses in a year.”

Those aquifers are as public a property, as the air we breathe

Well, not if you’re a Wall Street investor, they’re not. They breathe the air and drink the water in gated communities, leaving behind the smoke and poisoned water for those of us unfortunate enough to live elsewhere.

What the Times is less interested in telling its readers is the basis of the chemicals included in that water blast, all of which are poisoning what is left behind, as any chemical intrusion poisons drinking use. Fracking companies refuse to tell us, claiming the content is shielded by the laws protecting corporate secrets. But fracking liquids are not Coca Cola.

And then of course, there are the earthquakes

Earthquakes? What has fracking to do with earthquakes and why should that matter?

Well, we go to none other than the United States Geological Survey for the answer to that and the moneyed crowd have penetrated there as well: “Reports of hydraulic fracturing causing felt earthquakes are extremely rare. However, wastewater produced by wells that were hydraulic fractured can cause “induced” earthquakes when it is injected into deep wastewater wells. Wastewater disposal wells operate for longer durations and inject much more fluid than the hydraulic fracturing operations. Wastewater injection can raise pressure levels in the rock formation over much longer periods of time and over larger areas than hydraulic fracturing does. Hence, wastewater injection is much more likely to induce earthquakes than hydraulic fracturing.”

That gobbledygook (defined as the incomprehensible or pompous jargon of specialists) is essentially telling us that it’s the wastewater that’s at fault and not fracking. It seems useless to remind such luminaries that without fracking, there is no wastewater.

It matters—and matters enormously—because we have the case of Yellowstone Park, which is underlaid by magma (molten earth) of such extraordinary capacity that, should it be released, it would fill the Grand Canyon.

Really?

Yes, really and its thousand year timeline since the last discharge is somewhat overdue. There happens to be a cluster of Wyoming fracking sites surrounding the southeast corner of Yellowstone. Needless to say, one tickles the bear with possibly devastating circumstances.

There was once a federal organization charged with keeping such things honest

It was called the Environmental Protection Agency, but it seems all its teeth were pulled, packed carefully in a well padded box and sent off to various polluting industries, to hide away in their basements. You know the types—those guys sending big bucks to Congress and then hiring Senators and Representatives at huge salaries once their political careers are over. Elected representative government, the gift that keeps on giving.

Part of the Chop-Shopping of America.

That’s all perfectly legal, because the Congress has made it legal. You see we have no fraud or bribery in American politics, because our politicians in both parties co-conspired to avoid it because of the laws they so conveniently allowed themselves. No other entity in our proud republic enjoys such protection, private or public. Why else would a candidate spend millions of his own (or corporate donations) to secure a job that pays $175,000 a year, plus or minus a few bucks?

We have created, in our profound wisdom, the finest government money can buy

Chew this fact over for a moment or two when trying to figure out why our political system is so overstuffed with the elderly, clinging to this or that committee chairmanship until death do us part.

Once a Senator or Representative is in the saddle it’s impossible, short of shooting the horse, to bring him down. Where would he come up with the money and what would be the purpose? His vote has already been bought. And the really aggravating circumstance is that the big bucks are in the hands of the richest Americans. No pro-union, pro-environmental or pro-tax fairness candidate has a chance under these circumstances. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be the last of their kind in the Congress.

But we were talking fracking

Indeed we were, but the subjects are joined at the hip and the one disaster cannot be understood without the other.

It seems that whichever of the wondrous candidates we end up with as president in the 2024 election is not nearly as important as where we are so willingly headed as a species.

Fracking is but one.