Gee, what’s it like to live in a country where permanently draining and poisoning the watershed isn’t an acceptable cost of natural gas? Guess I should go to France and find out:
Companies that currently own permits for drilling in oil shale deposits on French land will have two months to notify the state what extraction technique they use. If they declare to be using fracking, or if they fail to respond, their permits will be automatically revoked.
Okay, I know, the French are a bunch of damn socialists. Except there’s nothing more “social” than poisoned, explosive water coming out of your tap due to gas fracking, or the methane fracking releases into the atmosphere, or the fresh water that fracking injects into the ground and forever removes from the water cycle. Grist:
Texas is experiencing the driest eight-month period in its recorded history. But in 2010, natural gas companies used 13.5 billion gallons of fresh water for hydraulic fracturing, and that could more than double by 2020. Where’s all this water coming from? Oh, it was just lying around, in these aquifers! You guys weren’t using it to drink or irrigate or anything, right? Guys?
There is nothing “free market” about fracking except the profits. The “externalities” — the cancer, birth defects, neurological damage, and ruined properties that total up the true cost of fracking — are left to the society that gets fracked. Vive la France!
