Isao Hashimoto‘s animation:
Category Archives: Ansari – New Environmentalism
EPA plans to study “Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on Drinking Water Resources”
in 2011
I came across a 2011 proposal by the EPA which has left me somewhat confused. Click the image below to download and read the actual document published by our Environmental Protection Agency, “Plan to Study the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on Drinking Water Resources.”
For the record, hydraulic fracturing was pioneered by the Halliburton corporation in 1940. There are over one million (1,000,000) such wells in the United States with more on the way.
The word “SCIENCE” on the background of the report’s cover is intended to connote scientific method and oversight: that process of systematic thought and labor which put men on the moon and successfully brought them back again. How exactly is the scientific method to be invoked seventy years after this industrial process began? It seems a little late to “plan” a study of “potential impacts.”
We are here
Carl Sagan on the now iconic “pale blue dot” photo.
This video is worth ten minutes of your time.
These ideas came to mind after viewing the video:
• Earth will remain on track, orbiting around our sun, long after we have returned to dust.
• Our biosphere supports a wealth of life operating within a fixed range of variables.
• The Marxist notion of Nature as an endless source of raw materials is as dated as the Dodo.
• If we do not act as agents for positive change no one else will.
• “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that the good do nothing.” While I cannot find the correct attribution for this quote (Burke, Jefferson, Plato?), the power of that thought is timeless.
Garth Lenz:
The true cost of oil
This is one of the most powerful presentations I have experienced in a long time. It is also a living example of the cancer which defines the fossil fuel industry.
Foreign corporations (and nations) have been investing in petroleum in the United States and Canada for many years. China invested 33 billion dollars in Canadian petrochemical interests from 2005 – 2012. Canadian oil interests would like to see more investment. China owns at least 40% of the tar sands production at Athabasca Oil Corporation (formerly Athabasca Oil Sands Corporation); a company which sold China all of its holdings of the McKay River tar sands development3.
In 2013 China purchased 100% of Canada’s tar sands operator Nexen for $15.1 billion1.
Canadian interests favor these purchases – otherwise they would not have been approved2.
Not to be left out of courting Chinese dollars, President Obama is selling the United States as a better place to invest4. Considering how heavily invested China already is in fracking operations within the United States, the President’s position makes little sense6.
They came, they drilled, they left:
There is the question of just who will be left to clean up the mess left behind – if this is even possible. Once China develops fracking within its own boundaries5, why would it pay for more expensive energy elsewhere?
The only way out is to develop a new source of power; something other than petroleum that will not poison our biosphere.
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