When a young man from an honorable organization in San Francisco known as “Earth Justice” stepped to the microphone in Council Chambers last evening to roar against fracking, you knew we were in the deep weeds of true believers.
The 18 persons who importuned the relatively helpless City Council to outlaw fracking – equating it with robbing banks, death, destruction, tripping blind quadriplegics – doubtless are sincere contributors to society.
Luckily, no speaker was interrupted and asked to submit to a lie detector test. His mama would have been so embarrassed.
Piety flowed like wine at an A.A. meeting. It was nearly like being in church or synagogue.
Piety was piled as high as golden Kansas cornstalks on the Fourth of July.
Each speaker’s reverential claims about globe-girdling weird diseases supposedly traced to the evil horrors of Frankenstein fracking. These yarns could have been cribbed from a Dr. Seuss children’s book.
Despite the daily verbal, physical, emotional histrionics of the true believers of anti-frackers, there isn’t a skinny string of evidence that fracking is killing off people, higgly piggly, across southwest Los Angeles. It is not precipitating earthquakes in Ohio. It is not endangering whole countries or even whole households. Nor is it the cause of persistent bad breath among toothpaste-spurning Democrats in Kenya or bad grades among illegal aliens.
Every one of the 18 speakers brimming, we trust, with sincerity, was one mile wide of even remote truth when he or she colorfully blamed life’s mundane and spectacular setbacks on fracking.
Evidence was invisible.
Activists described scary scenes that would have made a healthy listener choke at the unimaginable ugliness of what the wretchedly unfortunate storyteller must have endured.
For them, the debilitating news is that while wading through acres of supposedly darning evidence, scientists have been unable to attach fault to fracking.
At least yet.
