Second in a series
Re “Fracking Is Being Protested Because Scientists Have Found ? and ? and ?”
[img]1792|right|Jim Clarke||no_popup[/img]Beyond fear of the unknown, what, precisely, has spurred an emotional five-year frenzy against the oil drilling method of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking?
No clear answer is on the shelf.
City Councilman Jim Clarke, running for his first full four-year term in the April 8 election, acknowledges that research has failed to link fracking to the numerous health and safety setbacks that freely are alleged.
He said that Mayor Jeff Cooper recently attended a presentation by seismologist Lucy Jones, the just-appointed earthquake czar for Los Angeles. “Jeff said that they are trying to go back, look at data and see if there is a correlation between oil drilling and earthquake seismic activity here in Los Angeles,” Mr. Clarke said. “The reality is they don’t have the data yet that they need to confirm…
“They have been keeping records on earthquakes for a long time, but not necessarily on oil drilling.”
Question: Is it troubling that, after years of heated public discussion, experts have been unable to lay a cause for health and safety problems at the doorstep of fracking?
“Well,” said Mr. Clarke, “this may be a bad analogy. Look at various diseases in medicine. How long did it take them to determine what was causing Aids or anything else that is sort of new? It takes a fair amount of time and research to weed out things, whether there seems to be a correlation or there doesn’t.”
As for an answer to what, if anything, fracking causes, “it is up in the air,” Mr. Clarke said.
“Another issue is, ‘what are the chemicals being placed into…?’ These chemicals generally are there not only to help with lubrication of the drill bits but also to help prevent corrosion, rust and other kinds of things.
“Questions are:
• “What are the chemicals?
• “Do they stay in the ground?
• “Do they come back out?
• “Do they vent in the air?
“We don’t even know what the mixture of chemicals is. We think there are some bad actors in there,” Mr. Clarke said.
“Is there a correlation? Is the drilling having any kind of impact? We don’t know.”
Is the problem complicated enough to warrant such a lengthy delay while protestors gin up their strident marchers and letter-writers?
“Studies have been done by both sides,” Mr. Clarke said, “and the conspiratory kind of folks may feel, ‘These studies were paid for by the oil industry to show that fracking is safe.’ Folks who want to draw a correlation have done different kinds of academic studies.
“We need to look at what is happening back east and in the Midwest. It is different from the norm. It is different from geological formations and different from extracting primarily natural gas.”
In the meanwhile, anti-fracking demonstrations blanket the country while research conclusions linger in a netherworld.
“For years,” said Mr. Clarke, “the question has been, ‘Is the process of getting the natural gas doing more damage to the environment than we are saving from the burning of the natural gas?’”
And there it stands.
