The good news this afternoon for opponents of fracking regulation or a moratorium is that this debated – but not necessarily debatable – form of oil drilling can continue unabated, perhaps even distantly into the misty future.
For several years, ginned-up environmentalists successfully have been recruiting hungry, often instant believers. The new converts, sincerely stentorian, merely are loud. Analogously, they are hollow. They cannot advance beyond peachy sounding mantras because they don’t have meaningful research or evidence. Their claims only are activist-tested.
They have been neutralized possibly because hydraulic fracturing is not nearly as perilous as they assert. If it is dangerous, the Kill Hydraulic Fracturing Now army has been unable to present convicting evidence. I can find marching bands that can shatter my ear drums. Noise seizes. It does not retain attention.
The anti-fracking side, sinking in unseemly internal chaos, is as confused, dazed and disorganized as it accuses drilling proponents of being.
The anti-fracking boys and girls earn A’s for their passion and other attention-stealing emotions. It is the thinking and composition of effective regulations that stalls them every time.
Don’t you find it startling that 12 anti-fracking-related bills heaved and staggered into the Legislature this year before 11 of them committed self-immolation.
The only one left – Senate Bill 4, by Fran Pavley, a West Hills Democrat elected during McKinley’s second term – packs the strength of a pre-digested noodle dipped in stale honey. Her deflowered bill not only is weaker than a corpse, its strength has been sapped to doing nothing naughtier than pouring a tincup of water over the head of an oil industry CEO.
Even the rigorously anti-fracking Los Angeles Titanic urged Gov. Brown, who has it on his desk, to kill it. “The key regulatory element of the bill was so weakened that it is no longer recognizable,” the Titanic summarized.
Disappointed that hand-wringing fails to attract converts, the anti-fracking partisans freeze when forced to elaborate in hysterical – and unproven – assertions that hydraulic fracturing irreparably pollutes the atmosphere and soils the underground beyond reclamation.
Except that theory does not a regulation or a moratorium make.
Precision is demanded. It must be hiding in a Syrian labor camp for having disputed Putin.
Justifying their stance to normal people – this is where anti-fracking forces have frustratingly been spectacular failures, beyond mouthing sensible sounding worries (fearing for the health and safety of 330 million Americans). Makes you want to salute in the direction of a flag. Or at least sing “I Love L.A.”
