Blissful Ignorance ...
A few years ago, a giant conspiracy theorist movement exploded in American pop culture. Perhaps the growing distrust of our government was because the people began to seriously question the 9/11 Commission's official story. Or perhaps it was the severe disappointment that came with the Obama administration after eight years of Bush-era tyranny. Something pushed us to the edge. Something had changed.
As I become increasingly aware of the numerous injustices committed against humanity every day, I can't help but feel like it's not smart to bring children into this world right now. From crimes against people to crimes against the planetary ecosystem as a whole, virtually every case shares at least one commonality-- that these crimes are almost always perpetrated or enabled by the very systems of protection men built to prevent these very occurrences, and not to mention, are often linked to Halliburton.
From the war on drugs to the war on terror, or from the war against encryption to the war against the American constitution, it was already enough to make anyones head spin. But than the election year came, and with it a reignited movement against hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as "fracking". I only knew that fracking was the process of drilling for natural gas, and that it is controversial. Despite this being a big issue throughout the election, for some reason I never bothered to look into it.
Perhaps nobody around here was talking about fracking because I live in New England, a region which has no large natural gas deposits, a place nobody thought would be "getting fracked" anytime soon. Whatever the reason, there was a giant media blackout and general ignorance of this issue, particular in this area. Even when the Kinder Morgan pipeline was threatening my backyard, I still didn't have a clue what was really going on. I thought that it was oil that they wanted to transport through our state... I have not asked around, but I can't have been the only ignorant one.
Than a few days ago fracking came up in a conversation with a friend. He told me, "Fracking has severely damage the Earth, possibly irreversibly." Now I knew that the f word was bad, mmkay, but nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to learn from the documentary, Gasland. Nobody could have convinced me that I of all people, one week after watching two documentaries, would literally still be nauseous because of what I had learned. In other words, absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the truth.
Awful Truth ...
So, what is hydraulic fracturing, how does it work, and why is it so despised? Are you sure you want to know? I must warn you that if you begin investigating fracking as I have, it's quite possible that you will never be able to look at the world optimistically again. Last chance to hit the back button...
The United States has several very large deposits of natural gas deep under the Earth, and spread across roughly half of the states. Deep beneath the water line, and trapped underneath shale rock, are trillions of tons of methane, a naturally occurring, highly toxic and volatile gas. Until the last decade, most natural gas produced came from much shallower deposits, and it was generally thought that drilling for shale gas was not economically viable. That all changed when Halliburton pioneered the technology to drill into shale and extract the gas inexpensively. The process is much worse than it sounds...
First a deep hole is drilled down several thousands of feet, sometimes a mile downwards. Than they drill horizontally for another few thousand feet, to reach more pockets of gas. The entire process Halliburton came up with is known as Hydraulic Fracturing because the next step involves pumping millions of gallons of fluid, which is about 99.5% water and 0.5% extremely toxic, often unknown chemicals into the ground. The pressure causes the shale rock to fracture and release the stores of methane, which than vent up through the well to the surface over the next forty of fifty years.
Before going any further, ask yourself how mature adult men could ever honestly have believed that it would be acceptable to inject a trillion gallons of water mixed with neurotoxins such as benzene, methanol and ethylene glycol into US soil over the last decade? Now speculate for a moment about what the negative effects of this part of the process could be. Now consider the fact that enormous quantities of methane gas, a greenhouse gas that traps eighty times more heat than carbon-dioxide, leaks throughout the entire industrial process, all the way from the well to the tank outside your home.
That's not even the half of it. For every million gallons of frack water that is pumped into the ground, only about four or five hundred thousand gallons, or half ever comes back up. This means that there are now potentially about a hundred thousand little pockets of highly poisonous, radioactive waste water deep underground, in the United States alone. And the water that does come back up is rarely disposed of properly. Did I mention it's often radioactive? That's because there is lots of stuff deep under ground that does not normally, and is not ever supposed to ever flow back up to the surface. You are probably wondering how this water is disposed of. This is when it gets really sickening. "Produced" water, as the industry calls it, is some of the nastiest, most unnatural shit in the world. Often black, full of glycol ethers, and smelling of turpentine, it is virtually good for nothing. This waste water is stored in a pit and sprayed into the sunlight to accelerate evaporation before being removed by truck (and taken where?). Often times it's not removed at all, and is actually injected right back into the ground, and incredibly also is often injected directly into deep underground drinking waters supply wells.
Ah yes, the water cycle. Mother Earth has the amazing ability of filtering our dirty waste water for us, naturally, through all the porous dirt, and thanks to microbes that live in that dirt, which eat crap, turn sewage into pure drinking water again. Incredible! It worked great until George Bush decided to sign a law making the fracking industry exempt from every environmental law that exists in the United States. This is not an exaggeration, by any means. Google it. But the earth cannot filter out stuff like ethylene-glycol, or
2-Bromo-2-nitro-1,2-propanediolso... this stuff is not going anywhere for a long, long time.
By now you're probably feeling betrayed, I am. How could that happen? How does a guy like Bush get away with something like that, and how can we let these people rape the planet like this. Also interesting is how just about all of horrible things Americans face today can be traced back to Darth Cheney and Halliburton. Do these guys just sit around and wonder, "What would be the darkest, most unnatural, unpatriotic, wildly deceptive and insidious way we could screw up the planet, while dehumanizing or straight up murdering people for a prophet? Hmm..." To which Cheney replies, "We will inject trillions of gallons of poisons into the Earth, starting out west, and in the heartlands near the nations food supplies, and than we will do it on a global scale."
Remember in Obama's state of the union address when he rather randomly told us that America has enough natural gas to last a century, and told us his administration would do "Everything in our power to safely develop this energy. Thank you very much and God bless America!" I recall it seemed strange at the time, like why did he bring that up? Most forgot about it, or didn't ask why natural gas, although technically cleaner burning fuel than oil, should be the energy source of the future, at a time when solar and other renewable energy sources appeared to have extremely promising futures just around the bend. Now there is a global fracking campaign, made possible by so called democrats, which is putting the rest of the Earth at risk. And what timing.The Tesla electric car had just rolled out, the solar industry was booming, and for a split second the future looked greener. But fracking was only growing, and the practice would only become more reckless. Obama, bought and owned by the energy companies, than attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, halting long overdue investigations, which otherwise could have blown the lid off of the entire fracking frenzy.
There have been thousands of cases of water contamination around the country (and world) since the age of shale began in 2002. Entire towns of people have been forced to move out of their homes because the environment around them has been completely destroyed. Entire ecosystems have been destroyed. People living close to the gas wells have suffered headaches, lost their sense of taste or smell, gone blind, gotten cancer, and in some cases died. We don't really know the extent of the damage, because every time this happens, there is a lawsuit. The families reach a settlement, are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, and the energy companies keep fracking us all the same. The truth is buried underneath the ground right along with the wastewater. The now radioactive wastewater, which originally came from sources like the Great Lakes, and our drinking water aquifers... the precious supplies of water of which the creator blessed America with so much of.... turned into black sludge... I think I am going to cry, how about you?
in Our Hands ...
While the people of Pennsylvania were discovering that post fracking, they could literally light their well water on fire because it is so contaminated, our "leaders" were trying to figure out how they could seduce the people of New York into allowing them to drill in the New York City Watershed area, which supplies drinking water to about sixteen million people. Most thankfully, the people of New York united, and twice now have been able to get legal moratoriums placed against natural gas drilling in their state. (The EPA did a study of the likely outcomes of such an insane proposition in 2009, which is worth reading.)
Around 2010-2013, a type of "Frack Off" movement developed as the toxic effects of the industries recklessness began to quite literally come to the surface. Although many states have finally began to regulate the industry, Vermont is the only state that has managed to ban the practice altogether. And it is something that must be banned entirely. Scientists tell us that there is no possible way to drill for shale gas safely. I don't know about you, but I am a firm believer in science, above all else. In fact, it was just yesterday when Donald Trump reiterated his position on climate change denial and proposals to expand this nightmarish practice that I decided I will never vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Not to politicize this crisis too much, but fracking has been the final deciding factor in my decision to be #BernieorBust. It's really quite disappointing, because until now I actually kind of liked Trump.
What happens next? With Obama and Clinton pushing for fracking on a global scale, and Hillary being #forgainst pretty much every controversial issue, especially fracking... this election, in my eyes, just became even more important. Seriously, the fate of the entire human face is at stake. Actually, the fate of the entire planetary ecosystem is seriously at risk. Remember, there are no regulations against fracking, even at sea. It really matters who wins this election. If you look at the geography of the shale gas deposites around the Earth, you will realize that perhaps a third of the planet could potentially be destroyed over the next fifty years because of fracking, and you must keep in mind that water flows everywhere, so don't let them tell you that this cannot affect you too. What happens then? You think that the Syrian migrant crisis is bad? What will happen when billions of people around the world are displaced because of this greedy industry's bloodlust? What happens when water starts to become a commodity instead of a basic human right? Because everywhere this has happened, the people are quietly being told to shut up and move.
This is war. It is another war against the people, waged by the ruling class, on their own subjects, and only in an Orwellian world would we accept that. Only in the Orwellian age would we sit by as governments use psychological warfare techniques against their own people to roll the red carpet. This is unquestionably criminal. Who would willingly allow this in their backyard? We only have one planet. Is this why finding water on Mars was such a big deal. Wake up and smell the turpentine.
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