"Fracking creates jobs"
This has to be one of the worst justifications for doing something.
It is short-term thinking. No, it's public relations and rationalization.
Brooks tries to be clever by casting environmental concerns as "moral corruption".
But such words are really divisive ploys.
Realistically, the fracking industry is planning for thousands of wells.
We already know that even in relatively smaller areas ,
the number of wells is in the 100's (e.g., 400 in Cooperstown).
The primary question to ask is: How many wells can be drilled / operated
without incident?
By incident, I don't mean just a "broken pipe" or "leak" in the well casing.
I include the spread of fracking compounds into ground water via natural fractures
AND via travel through old, abandoned wells as has been found by the
EPA studies in West Virginia.
I am convinced such incident(s) are inevitable.
Fracking wells are not like coal mining. It is more like nuclear power.
When an incident (eventually) does occur, the clean up problems will be enormous.
Not only will the problems be wide spread, they may be technically un-solvable.
Permanent contamination and abandonment may be the outcome.
The fracking industry has already faced crowds of skeptics,
but I am unaware a single idea being put forth in any forum,
how the industry proposes to decontaminate a polluted water resource.
Plastic booms are sort of difficult to put in place several hundred feet underground.
I have not heard of a single company that is in business to contain and/or
remove fracking chemicals from contaminated ground water resources.
I do agree though, such a company would create new kinds of jobs.
Politically, I ask myself, if fracking in innocuous and safe,
why has the industry lobbied to prevent governmental oversight, and
maintained secrecy about the fracking chemicals used under the blanket
of "proprietary information" ?
Somehow, a rush to begin industrial-strength fracking seems to me to be naive,
except to those companies and investors who think only in terms of $.
.