Upstate New York’s looming natural gas nightmare

“On May 29, top state environmental officials assured state lawmakers that plans to drill for natural gas near the watershed that supplies New York City’s drinking water posed little danger. A survey of other states had found “not one instance of drinking water contamination” from the water-intensive, horizontal drilling that would take place across New York’s southern tier, the officials said.

DEC officials told ProPublica and WNYC they were not aware of those incidents, even though that information could have been found through a rudimentary internet search. They apparently hadn’t understood that the new drilling techniques pump trace amounts of toxic chemicals into the ground, and they couldn’t say for sure how New York would dispose of the millions of gallons of hazardous fluids that are the byproducts of this type of drilling.”

Read more here…

“Maybe it’s actually not liberal claptrap to want to move toward alternative, sustainable, less pollutive energy sources, to upend the ultimately fatal petroleum economy. Maybe it can be profitable and sound and reasonable and even slightly healthy to disallow Shell and Exxon and the rest from slashing into remote wildlife preserves for no valid reason other than the usual: power, cash, distortion, a brand of outmoded gluttony that shames the world’s spiritual core. You think?

Yes, I realize what I’m asking is sort of futile, that trying to cut and paste a paragraph of logic and common sense and humanity into a bloody, violent book consisting solely of power and greed and deeply ingrained, world-class deceit is a fool’s game. The thoughtful utopian in you can sprinkle all the fairy dust of hope it wants, but the devil just laughs and keeps right on drilling.

Then again, if we don’t ask, if the media doesn’t investigate, if we just sit back and hope market forces take care of everything and let the economy choose our path out of our own self-made disaster, well, do we not merely invite more corruption, a deeply deformed sense of who we are and where we want to go? Or, to put it more technically, are we not just thoroughly f–ed?”

Read the whole column: http://tinyurl.com/5jj2ne