If you watched the new Battlestar Galactica, then you know what Starbuck meant when she told Colonel Tigh to “frack off” and wondered “what the frack” those “fracking Cylons” would do next. Surprisingly, it turns out that ‘fracking’ is actually a word for something that’s pretty fracking awful. From Vanity Fair:
“Fracking,” as it’s colloquially known, involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, many of them toxic, into the earth at high pressures to break up rock formations and release natural gas trapped inside. Sixty miles west of Damascus, the town of Dimock, population 1,400, makes all too clear the dangers posed by hydraulic fracturing. You don’t need to drive around Dimock long to notice how the rolling hills and farmland of this Appalachian town are scarred by barren, square-shaped clearings, jagged, newly constructed roads with 18-wheelers driving up and down them, and colorful freight containers labeled “residual waste.” Although there is a moratorium on drilling new wells for the time being, you can still see the occasional active drill site, manned by figures in hazmat suits and surrounded by klieg lights, trailers, and pits of toxic wastewater, the derricks towering over barns, horses, and cows in their shadows.
The real shock that Dimock has undergone, however, is in the aquifer that residents rely on for their fresh water. Dimock is now known as the place where, over the past two years, people’s water started turning brown and making them sick, one woman’s water well spontaneously combusted, and horses and pets mysteriously began to lose their hair. (Emphasis mine)
Terrible? Yes — having your kitchen sink burst into flame is among the more awful things I can imagine.
Dick Cheney’s “Halliburton Loophole” in the 2005 Energy Bill essentially stripped the EPA of all power to regulate fracking. The natural gas industry is free to ignore the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act. They don’t even have to disclose the lethal chemicals they put in your water table. As always, “environmentalism” doesn’t even begin to cover what is a human rights issue.
But as awful as fracking is, the name lends itself to widespread derision: those fracking frackers, thinking they can get away with leaving us all fracked, may yet find their entire industry fracking exposed for the bunch of frackers they are.
