Parenting Petroleum

By Chad Marvin

Have you ever met a spoiled kid that you kind of wanted to kick in the head? The one who has obviously always had it their way and without meaning to be is just blatantly rude. In many ways this personality type is analogous to that of the oil and gas companies. Things have never been that difficult for them. Since their establishment they have been set in a lifestyle that has presented them with anything they could ever imagine themselves needing; namely money. However one thing they did not imagine, or maybe they did is the noxious backwash their actions would spew onto the environment. Oil and gas companies have recklessly burned though almost all of the world’s fossil fuels, and now like the bratty child they have acted like, they are throwing one last big fit; its name, hydrologic fracturing. We as the people of earth have allowed them to burn a hole in the ozone layer, the economy; turning our heads, trying to go on with our days, hoping they would grow out of it. Bad news, they haven’t grown out of anything, they have even grown smart enough to start sneaking things behind the public’s back. They have set up fracking sites where no one lives, or where too few people live to matter. The worse news; this newest toy they would just love for us to pay for does not just want to put a hole in the ozone layer, or in our wallets, it wants to rip through our bodies and our land… for approximately ten years.

The basic definition of hydrologic fracturing or fracking is breaking rocks below the earth’s surface and injecting liquids and chemicals into those breakages or fractures to extract natural gas or oil. However what this definition leaves out is the fact that in this process, natural gas, oil and chemicals do more than go in and out of the ground. Instead, they move around within it, seeping into the earth and making their way to our crops, our animals, our drinking water and us. The results from this have been extreme damage to people’s internal organs, birth defects in newborn babies and tarnished livelihoods; leaving people with no health, money, or hope because by the way, now that these toxics are obviously prevalent around their homes, their property value is reduced to a dismal zero dollars. This is the misery that can unfold as consequence of allowing a thick-witted addlepate to get their way. 

It’s as if we are unwilling to learn from our mistakes in letting this ignorant infant run wild. Can we not remember Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring where she spoke about another hazardous practice hurting both people and the planet, the usage of DDT. In it she wrote “As the tide of chemicals born on the Industrial Age has risen to engulf our environment, a drastic change has come about in the nature of the most serious health problems.” This was fifty-three years ago in nineteen-sixty-two that Carson warned us about the flux of health problems that would arise from situations using chemicals, yet fracking a process that uses chemicals is currently going on across the country from Utah to Pennsylvania. When Carson was talking about the symptoms of DDT usage in saying “symptoms ranged from impairment of memory to schizophrenic and depressive behaviors” and then followed by saying “Echoes of this sort of thing are still to be found” I’m sure she was only referring to DDT usage. But is it not a little sad that fifty-three years later we are still hearing those echoes of chemical usage, only by a different name, as if our bothersome kid is now asking for the newest iPod as opposed to the Walkman.

Sandra Steingraber, an ecological author who often takes a role similar to Carson’s in confronting environmental issues talks about the problems we face today such as fracking. In her article The Fracking of Rachel Carson she said in an area fracked “the Colorado School on Public Health found elevated benzene levels in the ambient outdoor air of the communities near drilling and fracking operations.” Steingraber here is really just proving how foolish and childlike the oil and gas companies are. That like the substance in pools that turns red when touched by urine there needs to be a system in place that stops these companies from doing something that is so obviously wrong; except we do not have a plug to pull to get rid of the bad air, nor a source of clean air to replenish the atmosphere with. Steingraber continues to generously inform the world that outcomes related to fracking are in fact detrimental to people, “it’s been known for some time that benzene exposure causes leukemia and birth defects.” The message really isn’t hard to comprehend.

Nevertheless, the war on fracking wages on. Not long ago people were showing up by the busloads in New York’s capital, Albany, to fight fracking. Protesting was done by singing, speech giving, picketing, and even by sharing personal stories related to how fracking had put people in positions so gruesome that the stories behind them would not usually be shared. The truth was told and all of it compiled into a documentary entitled Dear Governor Cuomo, clearly directed at the man who would decide whether or not fracking in New York state happened or not. Cuomo banned fracking in New York. However the question of whether fracking should happen elsewhere or not still goes on (here is the time where other parents are saying “hey control your kid.”) It is obvious that fracking does irreparable destruction to everything near it. But what about the fact that it isn’t even worth it?

As said earlier fracking seeks to rip through us and our environment in about ten years. This was not just some randomly selected number. Evidence from a grist article Fracking boom could bust faster than Obama thinks http://grist.org/climate-energy/fracking-boom-could-go-faster-than-obama-thinks/ suggests that all the yelling and screaming oil and gas companies are doing in the store is for nothing, like a cheap toy it is not even supposed to last long. The profits coming from fracking would cease to exist within a decade but the environmental damage would persist for decades to come. 

It is time we say no to oil and gas companies and assert ourselves as the responsible individuals before our pesky prepubescent’s break something that we cannot just pay to repair or replace. The oil and gas companies may get fussy about this, however such noise will be short-lived just like the resources they raced through, as fracking is their last hope to keep their bank accounts afloat. It is our turn to decide what does and does not hold influence over our lives.