Sandra Steingraber, one of the many intelligent, articulate ladies who are campaigning against fracking, gave a speech in Boston a few days ago. QUOTE (abstract): The problem is that fracked wells are fragile wells. Too often, they leak. The brutal actions of fracking itself, which uses a slurry of highly pressurized water, chemicals and sand as a club to shatter the shale in order to free the oil or gas—can sometimes deform or crack the cement gasket around the wellbore. That’s how fracked wells can lose their integrity. That’s how they leak. And once they start leaking, you can’t turn them off. That leakage can include natural gas itself—methane—which wafts from the wellhead, or from the compressor station, or from pipelines and flarestacks, into our atmosphere. In short, each wellhead is an inextinguishable methane cigarette in the Earth. And there are no non-smoking sections. This is a big problem for the climate because methane is highly potent greenhouse gas—86 times more powerful at trapping heat over a 20-year period than its more famous big brother, carbon dioxide. The only good news about methane is that it doesn’t last as long as its sibling. It lives fast and dies young. At the end of 20 years, methane is pretty much gone. ecowatch/2014/08/24/steingraber-fracking-peoples-climate-march/?utm_content=buffer92080&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=buffer
Posted on: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 00:25:13 +0000
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