Quote:
Originally Posted by agrarian
Tiny, I don't follow exchanges on here as closely as many posting here do, so pardon my failure to comprehend the ass-whooping you administered to me about fracking. I finally went back to that thread and saw this, posted by you:
Agrarian's comments about carbon emissions, which he appears to confuse with air pollution, have more merit, because they potentially effect people outside the Permian Basin. I still disagree, but my arguments aren't as strong.
If I recall, the Supreme Court during Shrub's presidency classified (yeah, the Court doing this sort of thing is awkward) CO2 as a pollutant, correct? In other words, carbon emissions are classified as air pollution. I also stand by my contention that water use and water degradation associated with fracking is immense. It's a huge factor in the fracking sector. I think it's unacceptable. We should reconsider sacrificing air quality and so much water for energy that could be sourced in other ways.
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Agrarian, You're changing the subject. We're talking about your PERMIAN BASIN ass whipping. A drilling engineer in the Permian Basin would laugh at the idea that the frac fluids he's injecting at 9000' vertical depth pose a realistic threat to the groundwater people use, which is much shallower.
You should take a tour of West Texas and Southeast New Mexico. Go to the county courthouses in Pecos, Kermit, Lovington, Odessa, and Stanton. Stand up on a soap box and tell them what you think, how they need to save their precious groundwater resources by outlawing fracking. See what kind of reception you get. What I'm saying, they know the trade offs of living, working, farming and ranching in the oil field. They know about the quantities of groundwater being used for hydraulic fracturing. And they're happy with the status quo.
Does that mean that there shouldn't be reasonable regulation by regulatory bodies, in Texas meaning the Railroad and Texas Water Commissions? Of course not. Does that mean that the majority of people in communities affected by fracking shouldn't be able to ban fracking? Again, of course not. If someone wanted to drill a 2000' deep well in my backyard or community and frac the hell out of it, I'd be against it. Government should be closest to the people, and know-it-all bureaucrats and politicians in Washington D.C. shouldn't be dictating to the rest of us.
As to the carbon emissions, beware, perfect is the enemy of good. Shut down hydraulic fracturing and cheap natural gas goes away. This includes gas used in the USA to generate electricity that formerly was generated from coal. And gas that will be exported as LNG to Asian and other countries and used in place of coal. Coal, as you should know, emits a lot more CO2 per BTU generated than natural gas.
If you want to eliminate risk associated with all human activity, and go to "0" net carbon emissions, then you need to eliminate factories, driving, fracking, flying, etc. Not go back to the iron age, but rather the stone age. And if the USA does it, so what? We don't account for that large a percentage of the world's CO2 emissions.
Would something like a carbon tax, used to cut the income tax or pay down the debt, make sense? I think so. It's good to encourage renewables. But banning fracking everywhere is stupid. And the Green New Deal, with zero net CO2 emissions by 2030 or 2040, is a recipe for disaster.
Fossil fuel to the rescue!
