What Makes Sense

I want to say a little more about the film, Gasland.

A couple of years ago, we drove through Wyoming, and I wrote this. My previous experience with Wyoming was largely through the scenery in the movie Brokeback Mountain, which was stunning, but admittedly not the focal point of that film. Anyway, Wyoming was...horrifying. Mile after mile of oil and natural gas drilling. Waste dumps. Truck traffic. We didn't care much about anything at that point. We had no jobs, no obligations, no itinerary. Everything we owned packed in Sandy. We camped out every night, got a little drunk with Lance and made awesomely delicious food on the fire. So, we said screw Wyoming and went on to Montana and Idaho, where we became obsessed with following the Lewis and Clark trail. I forgot about Wyoming.

I use natural gas to heat my home, just like most people in this area. I really can't argue the need for energy sources. I know that I can't realistically power my home on solar. As for the necessity of domestic energy production? Well, I'm pretty sure that has to do more with domestic money making than with national security. Anyway, I'm a long way from figuring out how to reduce my own energy usage.

Gasland is not thorough investigative journalism. Critics debunk the claims made by those featured in the film, mainly the impressive lighting-well-water-on-fire.

And there's more, very rational debunking here, and here and here. A lot of scientists and oil men making a good and rational case for the safety of fracking.

I'm no scientist, but I just want to make a plug for common sense.

How can it possibly be ok to mix a bunch of chemicals with water and inject them thousands of feet into the ground? How does that not contaminate something? Why would you assume that those toxic chemicals will never resurface? So maybe you can drill into the Marcellus Shale and it won't pollute my drinking water this year. But what makes you so sure it won't pollute Laurel's water in 10 years or her children's water in 30 years? Or even two hundred years from now? Or a thousand years? Why are you so sure that trillions of gallons of water mixed with chemicals will not resurface at some later date making for a very icky cleanup?!

It makes no sense to me.