German Government Agrees To Ban Fracking Indefinitely (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, the German coalition government agreed to ban fracking for shale gas indefinitely. Reuters reports: "Test drilling will be allowed but only with the permission of the respective state government, officials said. German industry is keen to keep the door open to fracking -- which involves blasting chemicals and water into rocks to release trapped gas -- arguing it could help lower energy costs, but opposition is strong in the country, where a powerful green lobby has warned about possible risks to drinking water. If the law is approved by parliament, Germany will follow France, which has banned fracking, whereas Britain allows it subject to strict environmental and safety guidelines. The two parties agreed on Tuesday to an indefinite ban, but the compromise legislation calls for the German parliament to reassess whether the decision is still valid in 2021, said Thomas Oppermann, who heads the SPD's parliamentary group. CDU officials confirmed that a compromise had been reached. Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) criticized the proposal and said that by setting a date for a fresh look, the coalition had essentially agreed to allow fracking in five years." Last year, Bloomberg published an article making the case that the U.S. must consider the earthquake situation in Oklahoma a national security threat.

Comments

Re:Putin rejoices

[rtb61]

So Russia allowing the US to grab the Ukraine because they were sick of subsidising the Ukraine economy to the tune of tens of billions of dollar per year, to maintain access to the Crimea, that was stolen by the Soviet Union and given to the Ukraine, after hundreds of thousands of Russian died fighting to defend and then retake it from the Nazis (Russians got exactly what they wanted, the Crimea and the end of the huge fiscal burden that was the Ukraine, as for the Baltic states, all crap, they are just playing a game to get as much NATO cash as possible, soldier tourists spending big on rotation, outside of that they spend bugger all on defence).

Perhaps Germany sees fracking as just another Ukraine, it originally seemed like a good idea but the actual consequences are quite undesirable. From accelerated geologic movement (you are actually accelerating the system to the next major event via the relocation of stresses), to extensive pollution of the environment, which of course will be hugely magnified when there is a major earthquake in those affected regions.

Fracking should definitely be contained to unpopulated zones only and should be required to recover and store for reuse all fracking fluids. Most likely reason why the ban, https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... Considering the seize of the Australia, just why the fuck did they allow fracking in a populated rural zone, just fucking why?!? So what is happening to that river in the driest country in the world, as fracking gases and fluids disperse into it, hmm, tasty.

Re:that makes Bernie evil

[silentcoder]

>Voting for a better person when no possibility to win gives better results.

Sadly - it does not. In fact, most often, it has led to the worst possible candidate winning. Gore may not have been a good president (I have my doubts about the guy behind the PMRC crap being a good leader) - but Bush II was terrible, and he got the job in 2000 mostly because so many people who would otherwise have voted for Gore voted for Ralph Nader instead.
I think Nader would have been a better president than Gore but he was always a no-hoper and he caused 8 years of the shrub instead. On the other side of the dark, dangerous ally one of the only cases in the last 70 years of an incumbent not winning re-election was when Bush 1 lost to Clinton in '92 - a loss almost entirely caused by Bob Dole.

So either way - voting for a non-mainstream candidate ends up, most often, ensuring your second choice loses. This is a major problem in the US system. A better system would let you rank candidates by preference.
If you voters could list Nader as first choice, Gore as second and Bush as third - chances are Nader may actually have won, and even if he hadn't, Gore would not be as terrible as Bush was.

In such a system, if your number one choice doesn't get enough votes to win - your vote still counts for your number 2, they don't end up being - effectively, a vote for the person you LEAST want to win.
It doesn't much matter if you're a liberal (like me) or a conservative, either way the current system is bad but as long as this is the system the ONLY chance to get somebody else elected is in the primaries. In the general you HAVE to vote with your brain or you end up voting for the thing you wanted least. Right now, any vote not for Hillary is a vote for an avowed fascist who eagerly spouts policies taken straight out of mein kampf and actually can't even be bothered to come up with any explanation of why they may be different.