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Finding Fault With Anti-Fracking Science Claims
A widely carried Associated Press article (here, as run by the Wall Street Journal) reports that some of the convincingly scientific-sounding claims of opponents of fracking don't seem to hold up to scrutiny. That's not to say that all is peaches: the article notes, for instance, that much of the naturally radioactive deep water called flowback forced up along with fracking-extracted gas "was once being discharged into municipal sewage treatment plants and then rivers in Pennsylvania," leading to concern about pollution of public water supplies. Public scrutiny and regulation mean that's no longer true. But specific claims about cancer rates, and broader ones about air pollution or other ills, are not as objective as they might appear to be, according to Duke professor Avner Vengosh and others. An excerpt: "One expert said there's an actual psychological process at work that sometimes blinds people to science, on the fracking debate and many others. 'You can literally put facts in front of people, and they will just ignore them,' said Mark Lubell, the director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior at the University of California, Davis. Lubell said the situation, which happens on both sides of a debate, is called 'motivated reasoning.' Rational people insist on believing things that aren't true, in part because of feedback from other people who share their views, he said."
I've always just called it "confirmation bias." I see it just as much in the left wing as the right, and nearly every other area of human interaction. Why should sciences be exempt?
I call bullsh*it. If you really believed that you would boycot the evil energy companies. Which would of course mean you wouldn't be posting on the Internet.
You want energy. I want energy. They want to sell us energy. Where is the evil in any of that?
God Damn, man! They are selling gasoline cheaper than milk right now (US). All you have to do to get milk is feed cows and wait, gas needs a LOT of work to obtain, complex chemistry to refine and a complex worldwide distribution network for both crude and the end products. If you weren't a fool you would give thanks for the hard work being done daily by millions to supply the energy you take for granted. And those 'evil' profits flow into pensions, dividends and lots of other productive uses. And never forget that those evil profits are the thin sliver left over after expenses and a shocking amount of taxes flowing into the welfare state that I'd bet good yellow gold YOU depend on.
Democrat delenda est
No rational person is in denial. In general, they marvel at the fact that our energy policy is still controlled by actors' feelings.
Thorium: It is about three times more abundant than uranium and about as common as lead.
http://www.hobart.k12.in.us/ksms/PeriodicTable/thorium.htm
http://thoriumforum.com/explanation-lftr-liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactor
The number one complaint I see about thorium is that we'll have to teach engineers new techniques and safety systems. Really?
Whether fracking is scientifically sound or not, we have just got to stop this desperate scrabbling to dig up any scrap of fossil fuel we can find..
Why, exactly? You have a specific reason in mind as to why we should avoid continued gathering of an existing resource when we've got no currently viable alternative?
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Well, I guess you just stumbled into the Great Liberal Conspiracy that all scientists are required to join before they are granted their PhDs. Why anybody puts any credence in them when ExxonMobil's PR firms are saying something completely different is beyond me.
Seriously, though... Taking a potshot at this data point or that, or citing professional rivalries between climatologists (re: "climategate") isn't going to be enough. It's like pointing to a "gap" in the fossil record and calling it a flaw in the theory of evolution. If you have the requisite training and can produce a bona fide model that takes the body of existing data and produces a different result, then maybe you have something. A Nobel prize even, if one was awarded in climatology. If you've done this, then I'd like to see the citation. Surely there is at least one reputable peer-reviewed journal that isn't part of the great conspiracy and would publish a solid paper that makes a convincing argument.
Ummm... You assert that editors of peer-reviewed journals are refusing to publish quality papers, but you support this assertion by referring to "leftist friends" who post on Facebook, ignoring studies claiming that "fracking is not bad". That doesn't even make sense.
Was there ever a time when the mean global temperature was warmer than it is today, and even warmer than most models project it will be by the end of this century? Of course there was, and for millions of years. What's your point?
No study will ever show that "fracking is always bad" or "fracking is always good" because good and bad are not scientifically defined concepts. Fracking may have repercussions (like seismicity or groundwater contamination) in some instances and not others, depending on the specific geological formations and other factors. The research you'll see will mostly be aimed at characterizing those effects and identifying the situations (if any) in which they are likely to occur. I'm not a geologist or hydrologist, so I have no horse in this race intellectually. But if there is real chance of adverse effects, I'd like to see that investigated before they start fracking underneath my town. At the very minimum, the companies involved should be able to secure sufficient insurance to settle any claims if something goes awry, and insurance companies will need to know how to price those risks.
In all fairness to the DOE, they did develop a breeder reactor system that could meet all of our energy needs for hundreds of years to come, and was passively cooled so that it could avoid the fukishima like meltdown problems the current generation of reactors suffer from. It was just politics that stopped it from being built on a larger scale.
Take, for instance, the recentish revelations that climate models weren't taking clouds into consideration very well, if at all.
Or look at the spread of predictions, with the extreme ones predicting 20-30 foot sea level rise by 2100.
Or the 1970 (?) climate models which predicted global cooling.
It's all just science, nothing remarkable in its variability, but the left wing fanatics take the extreme predictions as gospel and refuse to even admit there's any uncertainty, while the right win uses the uncertainty as excuse to doubt everything.
I figure that all those who take definitive positions are the true fanatics, whether left or right, refusing to recognize the reality that the future is not as predictable as they would wish.
Infuriate left and right
Except that right now, the extreme right end is elected to Congress, and the extreme left end (in this country) is mostly in history books. Can you name a single Democratic Congressman who with politics similar to Hugo Chavez? Not "as reported by Fox News" or in the fevered imagination of that pill-popping-sex-tourist-draft-dodger with the radio show, but actually making speeches, or proposing legislation? There's nothing close. "Hard left" in this country is to propose a 70% marginal rate on very high incomes (not unheard of in our history, and not bad for the economy) and single-payer health care (like those radical leftists Canadians). "Close the carried-interest loophole", whoa, strong stuff.
Note that, since high marginal tax rates are part of our own history, and single-payer health care is just across our northern border, that promoting these things is in no way "to the exclusion of reality". They've been tried, and they work fine. Whereas, the right wing in this country proposes things that, if/when they are measured, are demonstrated not to work well (everything from abstinence-only sex education, to charter schools, to cutting government spending to "stimulate the economy"). The two "ends" in this country are in no way equivalent.