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Study Says Fracking is Safe In Theory But Often Not In Practice
First time accepted submitter chadenright writes "A university study asserts that the problems caused by the gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking,' arise because drilling operations aren't doing it right. The process itself isn't to blame, according to the study, released today by the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin."
So, who payed for it? Are there any ties with the oil-industry? Via-via-ties do count. I ask this because every other investigation I have seen all have the same thing in common: Putting about 3000 different chemicals (mostly very toxic) into the ground is a mayor threat to drinkingwater and should never ever be repeated again. Except in Texas apparently. Only that is reason enough to just not continue this. The cost don't weight up to the benefits. (Not even on an economical scale)
In all seriousness, though, "safe in theory but not necessarily in practice" suggests that maybe the theory is wrong...
"Fracking is Safe In Theory But Often Not In Practice"
The solution is obvious. Only do theoretical fracking.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There is nothing intrinsically unsafe about it in most cases, but if you frack a stranger without a condom, you can get cooties.
In all seriousness, though, "safe in theory but not necessarily in practice" suggests that maybe the theory is wrong...
Or, horror of horrors, government isn't stepping up to the plate. This sort of thing is the poster child for why pure Libertarianism don't work. Over at the Oil Drum there are many discussions on fracking - and from the couple of folks actually doing it, they would agree with TFA - it can be done safely, but often isn't.
Apparently Texas, who has been regulating fracking since the 1950's does a reasonable job of it. Significant fines for dumping wastewater, regulators that know what they're looking for. It shouldn't be rocket science to hire a couple of oil field guys (or some ex - Texas regulators) and come up with a best practices document.
Hell, the EPA might even be able to do it. But this is what really frosts me about the current state of affairs. Even if industry and government should have similar goals (keeping the screw ups and cheaters out of the game), they can't seem to get together and put up some fairly simple regulatory frameworks.
Maybe this is what Tainter means by too much complexity causing our eventual downfall. Humans are just too stupid sometimes.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The article stated that one of the main problems was bad cementing jobs, but from what I've gathered from reading and talking is that it is really hard to get a good cement job. There are things you can do to screw it up, but even if you do everything by the book, you can still end up with an imperfect seal. According to the US U.S. Minerals Management Service, cementing problems were associated with 18 of 39 blowouts between 1992 and 2006.
So, if doing fraking "right" requires you to have perfect cement jobs everytime, then it isn't possible to do fraking right.
I live in one of the most geologically stable places on the planet. And we still have earthquakes here. It's called the Canadian shield. But hey, you know if you frack properly, you don't get any problems. And I'm sure you're also going on about that BS movie where people were lighting their taps on fire, but guess what, people were doing that before. Hell there's places around me where that's possible from naturally occurring methane in the water. Mostly well water, and you need to back pressure it in your well.
Really though, next I'm sure you'll go on a rant about how the tar sands are evil. But gloss over the fact that oil has been leeching into the rivers in Canada for thousands of years. Hell, there's enough oil leeching naturally that people used to(and still do) patch their boats with it.
Om, nomnomnom...
The role of government here is supposed to be that government imposes regulations, the industry follows the regulations, and then nobody sues anybody as long as everyone was following the regulations.
Wrong. Regulations exist to try and minimize harm, not indemnify the regulated.
Following regulations is never a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Or if you are really a believer in big government, you might think that government inspectors prevent accidents.
I can't think of any historical examples where we've ever had enough Government inspectors to really provide a baseline.
historically, we've had no inspections, but never really gone to the other extreme of full inspections.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It isn't anything inherent in government that people are trusting; it's that they wouldn't have a conflict of interest. If the restaurant finds out that they poisoned people (we assume it was accidental) then the best thing for them to do is fix the problem silently and say nothing. If you have a society where the restaurant polices itself, those people stay sick and don't know why. If you have a society where the restaurant pays a third party, it is still in the third party's interest that the restaurant stay in business. But if the government gets involved, their livelihood isn't on the line, so they can be expected to expose the poisoning and the patrons seek treatment. You never want to depend on people to choose to act against their own self-interest, which is what most proposed implementations of Libertarianism would require.
I thought that was the sort of stuff that libertarians hated -- laws that say what they can't dump into the land, what they can't dump into the water, what they can't dump into the air, etc.
Most libertarians, when discussing pollution, bring up the Tragedy of the Commons. If nobody owns a resource, everyone feels they can dump stuff on it or into it.
If someone owns the water rights, and I dump poison into their water, they can sue me for putting poison in their water. If we are living on a river, and he's downstream of me, his river water rights probably give him standing to sue me for dumping junk in the water.
The other tine of the fork is the option to sue for harm. If I sell tainted water, my customers can sue me for the potential or actual harm suffered.
But actually, you might have noticed that I never said that I personally believe that the pure libertarian society is perfect and likely to be problem-free. I just was bothered by the conflating of "libertarianism" with "desire for total anarchy".
I personally have conservative tendencies. If something has never actually been tried, I'm suspicious of it; that's one reason I don't really believe in anarchocapitalism. And I do not believe that the pure libertarian model can really solve everything; for example, I'm not sure that private roads are really as practical as government-owned roads. I do see a role for government in enforcing air quality standards; I am not a pure enough libertarian to think that somebody should own the air, or that people will always voluntarily do the right thing. ("People will shun you if you pollute" or whatever. Eh, ask an anarchocapitalist how that would work; since I don't believe in it, it isn't fair for me to try to explain it.)
An example I like to bring up: 19th-century technology proved sufficient for hunting some species of whales to extinction. 20th-century technology is sufficient for overfishing some species of fish to extinction. I personally believe government should regulate fishing to prevent this, and I am suspicious of libertarian daydreams that say the free market can solve that problem. (And if we just agree that Bill Gates owns all the oceans or something, he might prevent the overfishing but I'm not sure we would be better off.)
The government of the USA used to be a whole lot smaller and do a whole lot less. I personally believe that we could drastically slash the size and scope of government and net be better off, but I don't believe we can do away with government completely.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The real problem is that we have seen a number of examples of little or un- regulated markets, and nearly every time they cause some problem or another. The most recent example is the banking industry which put is in the current recession. The reason the invisible hand is invisible is because it doesn't exist.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Are Libertarian courts going to magically work differently than other courts? You get hauled into court for poisoning your neighbor's water supply, you hire kick-ass legal team and sufficient "researchers" to con a judge and/or jury into believing your neighbor is a whining asshole, and regardless of whether it's a Libertarian state or not, you win. Your neighbor's water is still poisoned, he has insufficient resources to continue the battle, and the tiny, impotent state is utterly incapable of evening the playing field even a little bit. In other words, he's just fucked, you make lots of money, which allows you to build even more kick-ass legal teams and hire even more "researchers".
At least with regulations there is some sort of baseline, as opposed to putting your faith utterly and completely in a political ideology that no more seems to be able to stop abuse of process than existing political systems. Things always sound lovely in theory. In theory Communism creates a wonderfully fair system that sees much more even distribution of wealth. In reality it's been a failure, and I suspect a pure Libertarian state would do no better. At the end of the day, you have to have a certain degree of flexibility and pragmatism in your political and economic system, otherwise you will end up riding your ideology into the gutter sooner or later.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Current system: regulators are supposed to catch violations before they occur, so people don't get poisoned and saving the company from it's own greed.
Current regulatory capture: regulators come from the same industries they are supposed to regulate, so they do industry favors so they'll get cushy jobs when they go back to the private sector. See: Robert Rubin, Clinton's Treasury Secretary that went straight to CitiGroup.
Libertarian system: oligarchs avoid any and all responsibility using middle management and mules. Company policies are such that sacrificial lambs, I mean employees, must cut corners if they want to keep their jobs. When the shit hits the fan, the company points to their other (unenforced) policies to cover their own asses, leaving the mules to take the fall.
Case in point: how Wal-Mart gets sued every few years when one of their stores is caught forcing employees to work off the clock. Wal-Mart promptly points to their written policy that hourly employees must be paid for all hours worked. Nevermind that other policy on how all work must be completed without paying any overtime. So a middle manager decides to cheat on payroll to keep his own job.....
Here's your sign: the Cigarette Company Defense. For decades, the smoking industry never lost a liability lawsuit. How do you know your Uncle Joe got cancer from smoking two packs a day when it could have been genetics, or asbestos?
So, how do you know that your contaminated ground water came from Shell, and not that Exxon operation in the next county? Or that BP well on the far side of the aquifer?
Just how many communities, much less individuals, could afford years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, paid studies and expert testimony to prove that yes, it was indeed Shell that poisoned your water?
Well I can tell you a friend was hired to make models for the wildcatters and what he learned and showed me was quite disturbing. he was handed pretty much all the data on the area so he could make his models of the geology they would be working with and when he laid a copy of the map the local college had of earthquakes and the map he got from the wildcatters he could overlay them and it was a perfect match, one for one with the wells. Also this is an area with tons of bedrock, and the highest quake measure by the local college since they started setting up stations and taking readings right after WWII was in the 1.9 range with one 3 every twenty years or so, after the wildcatters it was tons of 3s and some 4s and the machines are registering tons of hits so this fracking is really causing some slippage down below.
The final problem which my friend was bit in the ass by and which is REALLY SCARY is that these groups have already set up a way to avoid paying damages if they cause an environmental disaster which means not only do they have ZERO reason to give a fuck about environmental safety but that they are already expecting shit to go bad and are prepped for it. How did they pull this off you ask? Simple they have set up shell corps that own ALL the assets, from the mineral rights and drilling equipment down to the office furniture and then the drilling "company" which is just a front leases the equipment from the shell. As my friend found out when this bunch ran up a couple of bills and people starting trying to sue they simply burn the front company and are back in business the next day with a new front company!
Mark my words at best we are looking at future superfund sites that We, The People will get stuck with while the money men laugh their asses off while walking away counting the cash and at worst we are gonna have our very own Bhopal when these guys set off a major quake or poison all the water for an entire area for decades to come. Thanks to the far right gutting regulations left and right and dodges like the above there simply is NO incentive for them to give a flying fuck. I'm all for increasing domestic production but I don't want us to become another China, with land poisoned and water that you can light on fire. We HAVE to have the regulations in place to make those that drill responsible for any messes they make WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS or they will simply not give a fuck.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm sorry, but your argument does not logically lead to your conclusion. Your argument is basically, "Why do you think that people would be any less corrupt in a Libertarian society than they are in our society? See, government intervention protects you better than the libertarian theory would." You grant that in the current system those with more financial resources are able to use those resources to avoid suffering the consequences for thies actions. Then you postulate (reasonably) that courts in a libertarian society would be just as corrupt (using the word loosely). Finally you conclude that our current system is better. You start by postulating that a flaw that exists in our current system would also exist in a libertarian system (a reasonable postulate), but then you conclude that our current system is better because of this flaw that would exist in the libertarian system.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison