Guest post by David Middleton
First up: Yoko Ono and friends…
‘Fracking kills’: Yoko Ono joins star-studded cast fighting against hydraulic natural gas drilling in upstate New York
John Lennon’s son Sean Lennon, actress Debra Winger, songstress Natalie Merchant and “The Avengers” actor Mark Ruffalo have also spoken out in opposition to the extraction process criticized for potentially contaminating water supplies and damaging the environment.
By Glenn Blain / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Friday, January 11, 2013
ALBANY — Hydrofracking is not the most glamorous of issues but the gritty subject is bringing a lot of glitz to the state Capitol.
Yoko Ono, the widow of ex-Beatle John Lennon, and son Sean Lennon became the latest celebrities to visit Albany Friday to press for a ban on the controversial natural gas drilling.
“Fracking kills,” Ono said at a press conference with other drilling opponents. “And it doesn’t just kill us, it kills the land, nature and eventually the whole world.”
[…]
Now it’s the 4th graders’ turn…
Fourth-graders have concluded fracking’s bad
By Steve Israel
Published: 2:00 AM – 01/13/13
If it were up to nearly four dozen future voters at a Middletown elementary school, fracking would be banned in New York — and the rest of the world.
Just listen to what those fourth-graders at Maple Hill Elementary School have to say about the controversial natural gas extraction method of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking:
“It could cause methane explosions, poison water and kill people. It killed cattle,” says 9-year-old Philip Gazer.
“Sometimes, because of fracking, earthquakes could happen,” says 9-year-old Sagnik Chakraborty, citing minor earthquakes in Ohio apparently caused by the underground injection of fracking waste.
Bottom line for the fourth-graders in the classes of Mary Hayes and Patricia McGorry?
“We don’t want to be poisoned by fracking,” says 11-year-old Nancy Jaime.
[…]
There you have it. Yoko Ono is either not smarter than a 4th grader or she has a strong desire to spend winters freezing in the dark. The wellhead price for natural gas in the US is currently in the range of $3.00 to $3.50/mcf.
The shale boom is the single biggest reason why natural gas prices are so low in the USA compared to most of the rest of the world…
Without fracking, there would be no shale boom and US natural gas prices could be $8/mcf or higher.
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If these folks are proud about making children afraid of minor earthquakes caused by water injection, just wait till they find out about carbon capture and sequestration.
So when one uses fracking to recover hot water for use in home heating or small scale electrical generation, do the same issues manifest themselves?
Or is it at that stage a harmless activity?
In Kansas, fracking has been used for 60 years. To date the biggest most obvious blight on our landscape has been wind turbines, and not dead cattle (we do still have a lot of those). I’m sure Kansas natural gas goes to New York, but maybe we can put a stupid tax on it and make a little extra for our troubles.
jonny old boy says:
January 23, 2013 at 1:55 am
Fledgling technique (hydrauling fracturing):
http://www.conservation.ca.gov/dog/general_information/Pages/HydraulicFracturing.aspx
It was first used in California in 1947!! It didn’t hurt anything because the Luddites didn’t know about it. C’mon jonny, be smarter than Yoko.
Also on that point, note it’s fourth graders and Yoko Ono who we’re supposed to be educated by on the subject. Even Hansen didn’t show up. Of course he is only a retired astronomer.
The UK gets, on average, 400 earthquakes a year. Obviously they are very minor ones – but what’s the betting that all of them from now on will be blamed on fracking..?
By the way – wouldn’t CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) – i.e., compressing and burying carbon dioxide at high presure underground, create earthquakes..? Or perhaps these would be NICE earthquakes as oppose to NASTY earthquakes caused by fracking..?
Yoko aside, I wonder what comes after shale gas because that graph is quite worrying.
Two years ago, the State NY Oil & Gas geologist Dr. ‘Taury’ Smith gave an excellent lecture on shale gas in NY. His lecture was embargoed by the power-that-be, requiring a freedom of information act request by a blogger (NYshalegasnow.blogspot.com).
Link to the video
http://youtu.be/6Jjb5akEsrI
Link to the Power Point Slides. You really need the slides open to follow what is going on.
http://www.glyfac.buffalo.edu/mib/course/marcellus/geologyblackshalests.ppt
It’s a rhetorical question, right?
Global warming as a cause is dying. So they are desperate to find a new sacred cow to ride.
The FrackNation film was “crowd funded” on Kickstarter. There are a lot of “shallow pockets” that want the story told. http://www.fracknation.com
Those that are against fracking shouldn’t be allowed to use the resources obtained by fracking. Let them walk to work or to the market.
They are abject hypocrites of the highest magnitude.
(Of course, they’ve been brainwashed by “perfessers” that swarm to our institutions of higher learning because they can’t find work anyplace else–we’ve turned the farm over to subversives to our way of life and they call it being “Progressive”. So if you support such institutions and don’t speak out, you are also to blame.)
Hell… Thank you very much for posting the presentations. I was a geology student till calculus defeated my ambitions. I’m going to repost this on my blog (sonicfrog.net). You’ll get a Hat Tip.
Those fourth graders have been exposed to a mighty good oversimplifying persauder – I mean educator. Maybe mommy and daddy shouldn’t be having electricity in their house either. They sure don’t want to get burned or electrocuted.
My grand daughter who is in her penultimate year at school before going on, hopefully, to learn geology has spent many years listening to me clarify the AGW story. She was required to do a school project on Climate Change and did so complete with links, verifications and clear reason.
Obviously she attempted to disprove what she had been taught by the South African school system on the matter and did rather a good job her mother tells me. The result?
She was required to apologise to her teacher and classmates for producing the “big oil” story and then had to redo the whole thing in the orthodox way or she would not be graduating high school. She is a bright girl and realised that you have to go along to get along and did as was demanded but she harbours a great deal of resentment now as no attempt was made by the school to try and show her why she was wrong.
This particular virus has infected many young people around the world but she has learned very early just how intolerant a religion is that of AGW. She told me at Christmas that it has simply strengthened her resolve to agitate further when she gets to university. To agitate against intolerance and the nonsense AGW is.
All these anti-fracking people are driving me crazy! Even less science than the CAGW crowd. I am going to get up on the soap box now ….
The only reason it’s “controversial” is because the enviros said it was bad- but without any basis in fact. But the bottom line is these people simply hate (and that’s not too strong of a word) the hydrocarbon industry & look for any way to impede or harm it they can. Using environmental excuses to attack the industry is easy, because at the end of the day, who wants a hazardous environment (it’s like being for motherhood & apple pie)? The enviros do recognize fracking a serious threat to their pipe dream of converting us to renewable energy today as renewables can not compete in a $3-4 nat gas world.
I’m mean, come on though, who do you think you are fooling ?? – the industry has been using this technology for decades, the only difference now is we are applying it to horizontal wells on a much larger scale & with better engineering & getting far superior results. Why is it controversial now when it wasn’t in the past ?? See the last paragraph.
Unfortunately, the general public (and 4th graders) don’t know this – all they know is the crap they read & hear in the general media, which makes no attempt to find the real facts of the story. I think the only way to make people understand would be for the industry to withhold all hydrocarbon products from the market for a few weeks – then people would get the benefit & tell the enviros to go take a hike.
Amongst other unfortunate things, the environmental movement is simply a mouth piece for far left politics. Environmentalism was high jacked by the far left & we end up with things like this anti-fracking position & CAGW. The real intent of both being de-industrializing the west, as a political goal. They really don’t care about the environment at all. Everyone should & generally does care about the environment, when there are REAL problems, but because all environmental problems have become so politicized, real problems wont be addressed by the right for fear of looking like they sympathize with the left, thus leaving real problems unaddressed.
Final thought ….. something to put this in perspective, and this is absolutely true. There is an industrial machine out there that is killing , on average, about 40,000 Americans very year !!!! And the government is doing NOTHING to stop or get rid of this menace !!! Can you believe this !!! What an outrage!! Where do we sign to ban this horrible machine ???? …… and what is this machine ?? …… The automobile . But you say, “Well, we can’t ban automobiles, I depend on it to get around.” You are right – you depend on it, even though there is a risk you may die in it.
This is called cost-benefit analysis & it is something enviros simply do not get or acknowledge. Anyone & everyone will get the above example. You decide to drive a car because the benefits far outweigh the potential risks. It is no different with fracking or CAGW, for that matter. The benefits of cheap nat gas far outweigh any potential risks – which, for the record, are incredibly small. It’s just that the average Joe has too little understanding how much benefit they are getting from cheap hydrocarbon fuel & how little risk there is.
The far left would like society to believe that we should live in a risk free environment and there is no such thing as a cost-benefit analysis. Sorry to say, but that is not how the real world works nor how the rational human mind works. Don’t believe me? Then why don’t you try to ban automobiles & you will find out that people to understand cost-benefit analysis & in fact most decisions made by humans ultimately come down to some form of cost benefit analysis.
So, our collective job is to do a better job educating people on the costs & the benefits, both when it comes to fracking ( which David puts some nice data out on the benefits side in this article) and when it comes to CAGW (which this blog does on regular basis). Next time you encounter someone who is anti-fracking or believes in CAGW, bring up the automobile analog & get them thinking in terms of cost-benefit. If everyone would think this way, we will win this war.
Stepping back off the soap box now …..
Fracking is simple, and certainly not inherently dangereous. There is a problem in volume we’re seeing— instead of single stage fracs, we are doing 20 stage fracs. If that works on one well in a shale, it will work on 30,000 more. The analogy I use is imagine suddenly pumping out 500,000 septic tanks. Eventually, someone will make a mess, even if the the technology to do it right exists.
Thr challange we face is in doing all those fracs, dealing with all that fluid, and minimizing the mistakes. Then, when the mistakes occur, we need to prevent the Yoko-Loco type of spin from getting to our fourth grade kids.
@Coach Springer, thats a good motto for these folk,
“Too stupid to operate a toaster.”
I like your thinking, these characters keep invoking the precautionary principle as an excuse for abusing our rights as citizens, so lets apply that same stupid principle to their useful idiots.
Electricity is dangerous therefore it must be disconnected from the homes of the, self identified, mentally deficient enviro-(expletive of choice).
Is Yoko protesting the Obama supported lithium ion battery? Seems like those may be more dangerous:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/dreamliner-fires-spark-new-doubts-about-a-green-energy-technology/article/2519353#.UQAC6Ce0DSj
And it contributes to Sea-level rise, and the flooding of New York, by removing all the gas holding up the surface of the Earth. /sarc
Who hates fracking?. Arab countries like Qatar, and yes, they are funding the groups against it. Dah
“And it contributes to Sea-level rise, and the flooding of New York, by removing all the gas holding up the surface of the Earth. /sarc”
Cool
Gases OTHER THAN natural gas (Methane) are condensing out; the Methane proper is not condensing (under pressure in the pipelines) …
Just to be clear; these are often called NGL’s (natural gas liquids), gases other than Methane (e.g. propane, butane, etc.) that condense out as the pipeline is pressurized and experiences abnormal cooling.
.
Karen says:
January 23, 2013 at 3:41 am
“Why do you think many people are concerned about fracking ?”
Because it’s successful.
It’s been practiced in Lower Saxony in Germany since the 1960ies (we had some oil in the Lueneburger Heide for instance). Only without horicontal drilling.
Only now that it becomes a significant threat to the “No Energy” future desired by the Greens does it become protestworthy.
The “No Energy” future they desire is of course the crisis that they wish to inflict on us; only to explain AFTER everyone is starving in the cold that it was evil capitalism who dunit and that now is the time to embrace the wonderworld of the socialist killing fields, ahem, wait, strike that, socialist utopia, yeah that’s the word.
How long before the Government takes over the energy companies in the USA? I need to your answer, I own Duke Power and Energy stock and will need to sell it soon. With the new energy policies of the president, oil, coal and ng usage will be eliminated by the EPA