Hope As A Gas

What if we could frack for natural gas without polluting the drinking water tables? I don’t think it’s as easy as this article suggests. Your only concern cannot be the material used to cause the fracturing, it has to be the fracturing itself. There are plenty of materials in our ground at different strata that we don’t want mingling with our drinking water tables. Johannesburg, South Africa is facing a catastrophe where mines that are flooding, may make the city uninhabitable.

“Up until now, there’s only been crisis management,” said Mariette Liefferink, a South African environmental researcher who has become an outspoken campaigner on acid mine drainage.

“The government is merely lulling the public into complacency and apathy,” she said in an interview. “That failure to make a decision could lead to disaster.”

Couldn’t that quote describe Canada’s actions around climate change?

I continually find Canadian adults who do not realize that economic solutions from the past may not be the solutions for the future. Economics is not a science, and it does not work with physical constants like chemical reactions.

IanStumpf:
@saskboy Save humanity? And leave millions of people in 3rd world countries living in poverty? I want the industrial revolution everywhere.

Saskboy K.:
.@IanStumpf you’re applying an eighteenth century solution to a twenty first century problem with seven billion people sharing one Earth.

Ian Stumpf:
@saskboy Of course, increasing people’s quality of life and the economies of their countries is a “18th century solution” #cdnpoli #sarcasm

Saskboy K.:
@IanStumpf The industrial revolution worked to raise the living standard for billions. Simple math shows it cannot work for other billions.

@IanStumpf Ian Stumpf:
@saskboy What sort of math are you using? The people in Africa deserve the same chances we had, to build up their economies.

Saskboy K.:
.@IanStumpf It’s selfish reasoning to console yourself that the Industrial Rev. and consumerism of 20th Century didn’t have unintended problems.
You can’t pretend you’re all about providing a fair chance for others, & argue for more air pollution to cause #climatechange
They don’t get the same chance, sorry. Oil is a non-renewable resource, it doesn’t come back. Nice climate too.

It’s not complicated to understand that humans removed solar energy from the Earth, used it, released pollution that is causing our climate to change, and we cannot put the pollution back into the Earth without expending more energy (planting trees/crops being the only temporary storage methods available to us on an industrial scale). No permanent pollution storage solution even exists, to put that burned carbon back underground at the same rate we took it out. It’s plain to see that our non-renewable resources and many lifeforms (fish) are on pace to be consumed/killed within my expected lifetime. It’s not only insane to want the Industrial Revolution to take place for billions more people, it’s not physically possible for those people to use oil that has already been burned, or eat animals that are extinct and endangered, or drink water that is now poisonous.

You can insist that you can add 2 + 2 to get 4 as much as you want, but if there are no more ‘twos’ left, good luck trying to complete your foolproof equation ;-)

This does not mean that I want developing countries to suffer, or for Canadians to suffer while cutting back on their consumption, but our expectations must come into line with scientific and ecological realities, quickly, or reality will put us into less desirable lines we’d rather avoid. I want my future to include polar bears, cod, whales, and organic corn among other living things I’ve enjoyed and want future people to enjoy too. We can’t ethically decide that we’ll be the last generation to experience those wonders, while pretending that we want a higher quality of life for poor people as an excuse to continue the wrong things we do.

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Bonus thought:

In Canada, unlike South Africa, there has been co-operation between governments and the mining industry to prevent a catastrophe from acid mine drainage, Ms. Liefferink said. She attended a conference on acid mine drainage in Nova Scotia last week and was impressed by the Canadian response. But if anyone in Canada is tempted to slacken their efforts against the acid mine water, they only need to look at South Africa to see the potentially disastrous consequences, she said.

That implies that if there is a stoppage in labour attending to mine pumping in Canada, we’ll end up with contaminated aquifers near unattended mining activity that has not been fully closed with a plug the depth of the well.

ADDED: Maritime fracking

ADDED: Alberta lawsuit against EnCana for fracking water into fricking oblivion.