The scientific consensus is that burning fossil fuels causes global warming. Fracking reduces the price of oil by making more oil available to the market. Reduced price produces more people burning fossil fuels. The scientific concensus is that we should burn less fossil fuels.
There are additional issues, but that should be enough to oppose fracking.
LOL. This is a good example of mindless jumping to glib conclusions (and without googling them up, too).
In reality, it so happens that fracking reduces CO2 emissions. The way it does this is by providing cheap gas which replaces coal at the power plants—and that replacement leads to a fall in emitted CO2.
Since burning gas emits no lethal soot or sickening toxic metals and about 50% less carbon dioxide than coal, the displacement of coal generation by natural gas slashes the amounts of major air pollutants like mercury, lead, arsenic, soot, and carbon dioxide. America’s carbon emissions have dropped 800 million tons since 2007 and are back to 1995 levels, with gas displacing coal and some oil responsible for about half of the total reduction.
It also releases a good 5% of the gas that goes through the well uncaptured and unburned into the atmosphere, according to a recent paper I saw in Nature. As methane is many many times as potent at retaining atmospheric heat as CO2 on a timescale of decades, this makes energy gained by fracking worse than coal in the net in terms of greenhouse effect (rather than simply CO2 emissions).
The scientific consensus is that burning fossil fuels causes global warming. Fracking reduces the price of oil by making more oil available to the market. Reduced price produces more people burning fossil fuels. The scientific concensus is that we should burn less fossil fuels.
There are additional issues, but that should be enough to oppose fracking.
LOL. This is a good example of mindless jumping to glib conclusions (and without googling them up, too).
In reality, it so happens that fracking reduces CO2 emissions. The way it does this is by providing cheap gas which replaces coal at the power plants—and that replacement leads to a fall in emitted CO2.
Here is a relevant quote (emphasis mine):
Since burning gas emits no lethal soot or sickening toxic metals and about 50% less carbon dioxide than coal, the displacement of coal generation by natural gas slashes the amounts of major air pollutants like mercury, lead, arsenic, soot, and carbon dioxide. America’s carbon emissions have dropped 800 million tons since 2007 and are back to 1995 levels, with gas displacing coal and some oil responsible for about half of the total reduction.
It also releases a good 5% of the gas that goes through the well uncaptured and unburned into the atmosphere, according to a recent paper I saw in Nature. As methane is many many times as potent at retaining atmospheric heat as CO2 on a timescale of decades, this makes energy gained by fracking worse than coal in the net in terms of greenhouse effect (rather than simply CO2 emissions).
There are also studies showing a strong correlation between distance to well-bores and dangerous methane levels in well water, contrary to industry reports. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3100993/