Saturday 9 February 2013

fractuous

Some factions of the government in Germany want to selectively open up some regions to the controversial method of extracting natural gas and disinterring other useful resources from the ground, known as fracking—hydraulic fracturing, much to the dismay of members of the public and environmentalists, who fear that they are trying to rush through the policy-reprieve, untested and under-studied ahead of national elections in the Fall of this year. It sounds, unfortunately, like some pandering and ill-conceived rallying-cry, akin to “drill, baby, drill!” and not at all keeping with the move towards the greening of the dirty business of cleaner energy.
While critics of the procedure across the Atlantic where it is in wide use often cite real but possibly dramatized and diversionary effects, like giant, marauding sink-holes and increased seismic activity, German opponents point to fundamental concerns, like the potential for contaminating ecology and ground water, and well as the extraction being retrograde, releasing huge stores of carbon already successfully sequestered by Nature while engineers and scientists are struggling to find ways of keeping the current spillage in check and entombed. I wonder, too, whose backyard these operations will be in.