Externalities Exposed!
omb,
Exactly! Fracking is an ecological disaster already happening and within a few more years of documentation NIMBY will steamroll the industry with a vengance, as it should. You can have 99 out of a hundred wells working relatively safely, but that hundredth well where stuff happens can devastate the ground water over a whole ecological basin. Multiply that inevitable possibility by the 500,000 new wells projected over the next dozen years and you have a horror. The same revulsion that is starting to happen vis-a-vis GMOs will happen to fracking, as the public starts to realize that the ecological costs are way too high and demands regulation that eventually makes the costs way too high.
I have a friend in Colorado fighting fracking in the mountains there. The locals want nothing to do with it and are willing to do what it takes to stop it. Here's an interesting speculation on his part. He thinks that the biggest energy companies see the writing on the wall and are buying up underground leases, not necessarily to frack, but eventually to control the area's fresh water supply. Isn't it interesting that a state that claims to own the water that comes off your roof is turning a blind eye to this? A not so blind eye, I suspect.
