Fracking water needs a closer look, EPA says. CREDIT: AP Photo/Brennan Linsley.
Has everyone recovered from the surprise and shock that fracking is bad for water? I suppose it’s good that the EPA finally managed to spit this one out, now that it will most likely be dismantled.
The Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) can affect drinking water.
In light of the facts that tap water near some fracking wells has become flammable, that two families in Pennsylvania last year won a court case over the impacts of fracking on their water, and that scientists have found arsenic in water sources near fracking, the EPA’s announcement Tuesday should not come as a surprise.
But it does, since just 18 months ago, a draft version of the EPA’s fracking report said that the EPA “did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.”
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It’s not clear that the science will continue to be investigated, at least in the near term. President-elect Donald Trump has suggested dismantling the EPA, and his nominee to head the agency has come out strongly in favor of oil and gas development.
Trump is in the process of assembling what will be the most anti-environment, pro-fossil fuel cabinet in modern history. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has fought EPA regulations for years, has been tapped to run the EPA.
It’s worth noting that water quality is not the only thing at risk from fracking. Fracking has been linked to numerous air quality concerns, including in areas where fracking wells are located close to schools. Fracking has been tied to asthma, migraines, and other health impacts.
And let’s not forget that fracking causes earthquakes. We really don’t need to cause earthquakes, they are bad enough when they happen naturally. The government that is poised to take power seems to want to hasten the death of our earth, and all of us on it.
And we still don’t know what all chemicals they are pumping into the ground because it’s a “trade secret” and refuse to tell anyone.
I have to say I don’t understand the controversy around these reports;
1.) Fracking has the potential to contaminate drinking water. Correlation between unexpected and unprecedented contamination events of drinking water and nearby fracking have occurred multiple times and any reasonable person would see a clear causal relationship. Of course, this would never be as easy to sell as it would be if a chemical found only in fracking fluid was found in previously uncontaminated drinking water, but given the “trade secret” crap Kengi mentioned, this smoking-gun case is all but an impossibility.
2.) Fracking has, in many cases, not been shown to contaminate the drinking water of the area it was operating in. In fact, in some areas it has been shown to have had no effect on ground water quality (and drinking water when ground water was the drinking water source).
Point 1 was addressed in the more recent report, and point 2 in the report from 18months ago.
Even so -- the precautionary principle should be followed but we in the US apparently don’t give a fuck. My fathers’s family, which up until my generation was a generation of hard smokers, has never had a death from lung cancer or heart attack. A couple of deaths due to stroke, but those people were also older than their 80s. Should I be expecting insurance companies to not raise my rates if I choose to smoke. Look, definitive proof that smoking doesn’t always cause lung cancer or heart disease!