Watching the Democrats - it's Fun and Macabre!

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by Adak

@Recipies? Might be a good distraction eh?

@Griff and @SamIam: Thanks for the welcome back.

@SamIam: In fracking, you bore a hole VERY deep (way past any ground water), and then you can bore horizontally, wherever you want to go, to get to the shale that has the oil, and fracture it.

There is NO strip mining!

It's like a hole for a water well, but much deeper. Everything else is hundreds to thousands of feet below the surface, and you see nothing of it.

I don't mean to turn this thread into an expose' of environmental crimes now being committed in the American West, and I'll try not to turn my reply into something nobody else but tw can understand. But your statements are so completely wrong that I can't let them go unchallenged. I live here and it's happening to the mountains and back country plateaus that I love. It breaks my heart and I have VERY strong feelings about it.

You obviously know nothing about current oil shale and natural gas extraction methods in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Fracking is used to extract natural gas, not oil shale. Fracking often leads to the pollution of ground water with methane. As a result of this contamination, some communities in my part of the world - Colorado's Western Slope - have tap water that can actually be set on fire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEQMA0zwMM4



Out here, burning water is like burning $100 dollar bills. Water is a precious commodity in this land of little rain. It's bad enough that the energy companies come in and contaminate our water supplies, but the crime is compounded when outfits like Halliburten and Shell steal our water completely. Farmers and ranchers are being driven out of business because they can no longer afford the high costs of water rights - a price skyrocketing thanks to drought and energy exploitation methods.

That's just a few of the evils of fracking natural gas.

There is nothing responsible or sustainable about oil shale either. The process of extracting oil shale is similar to tar sands. The land is strip mined, then the oil is baked out of the rock by heating it to high temperatures. This is a process that destroys the land, uses massive amounts of water, and uses massive amounts of energy.

You'll be pleased to hear that this is one area where the Obama administration is in bed with the big oil and energy corporations. Obama's decision to allow big energy to pillage our public lands is worthy of Republicans like James Watt and Dick Cheney. While I supported Obama in the election, he was merely the lesser of two evils. I and other Western environmentalists are fighting a losing battle to keep our backyards from becoming slag pits.

The first two pix that follow are of my beloved Uncomphaghre Plateau - two hours drive to the north of me. It's spectacular and one of Colorado's best kept secrets. Few tourists venture up there and I usually have the entire Uncomphaghre to myself when I go there - or so it feels. The Uncomphaghre is also a rich source of oil shale and falls under the Bureau of Land mis-Management (BLM). Obama is turning BLM lands into national sacrifice areas in the quest for so-called alternative energy sources.

Pix three and four are of shale debris and a shale strip mine, respectively. Obama wants to delete pix one and two and replace them with pix three and four.

Y'all can go back to the budget thing now. I think I'll go outside and look at the mountains for a while.