He puzzled and puzzed till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. Maybe fracking oil, he thought… doesn’t come from a war. Maybe fracking, perhaps… means a little bit more!
Fracking is such a new word, it fails every spellchecker. It also carries a bit of an obscene sound, but it’s not at all improper. Since our dependency on foreign oil comes with risky commitments and dangerous associations (no details needed here), we must resort to looking for an inevitable but necessary source of fuel in closer-to-home locations. Hence the need for research and discovery, acquisition and exploitation of domestic reservoirs of the precious liquid gold we call oil.
Many environmentalists will say this is defacing our landscapes, but they do drive a car. They do fill up weekly at the gas station, and unless they start riding bicycles everywhere, they should come up with a new way of propelling our machines, before they can criticize the fracking of our land.
The choice here is between depending on outsiders or doing it ourselves. Between sending our people to distant and sometimes menacing foreign fields, and trying to be self-sufficient. Both come with enormous cost and sacrifice. But maybe staying home to produce our oil would help in lowering the risk of conflict.
This is not a proven strategy, but a gut feeling. Some say it’s cheaper to buy fuel from Middle East countries. But what about the price of war? In dollars and most of all, in human lives?
French, Spanish and Portuguese explorers came to our continent in hope of finding riches. Pots of gold, mountains of precious stones or metal. Undiscovered lands were a promise of infinite wealth and abundance of hopes, and even the possibility of a new place to settle down.
For the most part, it worked out. Look at us now. The last remnant of an umbilical cord with the old World is the need to buy the most important asset that our society must have, the way to fuel our cars, and other moving and functioning apparatus.
Surely we can find a way to figure this out, I mean, come on, we can send a man to walk on the Moon, but cannot produce our own energy?
Fracking is the industrial way of getting oil and gas from underneath our feet. And yes, it does carry the possibility of damage to the air, the land itself, our water, wildlife and therefore the communities around the drilling sites.
The technology is somewhat new and involves using sand, water and chemicals that are injected at very high pressures into the underlying of the land surface, to blast the shale rock and release the gas or reach the oil from under it. The practice of vertical hydraulic drilling has been used since a long time, but the horizontal technique is a newer way to drill, one causing more debate, in part because of the mini earthquakes it already has, and may cause again.
In order to make fracking safer and acceptable to Americans, there must be regulations and safety accountability put in place, yes. But wouldn’t you rather keep our civilians working abroad and our troops out of harm’s way?
Fracking industry is a source of high revenues for states and farmers, when oil and gas are discovered on their land. It brings hope and thousands of jobs for many struggling workers and communities. A new gold rush of sort. Any new source of energy discovered will bring pollution to a site, due to the techniques involved in getting to them in the first place. We must decide if we want to pollute our own soil, or send our men and our money to foreign oil fields, with other risks involved in that picture.
It’s a hard debate, and an even harder decision to make, but in some coming years, we may not have that choice, maybe we should get ready.
We are not rubbing two stones together anymore, to make a spark. Even a bonfire pollutes, even solar power and wind energy pollute. There is no way out of endangering our environment; we are pollution on the surface of the planet. Unless we want to rely on a cleaner nuclear energy (another debate), we must find safer ways to get our petroleum fix. Unless of course, we stop driving cars, by far the largest eaters of the black gold. And the largest polluters as well.
Nothing can be one hundred percent safe when it comes to technology. But war is the most expensive way in money, and in lives to get what we need. Any little bit we can do to stay within our own borders should appease and reassure the rest of the world that we can make it on our own, like we always knew we could.
Sidonie Sawyer
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