Unprofound Thoughts on Fracking 466


I hope I don’t pretend to have expertise on everything. On fracking I have none. My entirely amateur views on the subject are that the major risk appears to be pollution of aquifers. The UK seems too seismically stable for earthquakes or volcanoes to be a serious concern. I am not terribly worried about the local environmental consequences of the installations – human activity of all kinds detracts from the natural environment in a sense. This spot was doubtless a great deal more pleasing aesthetically before Dundee was built upon it. But then Dundee has a great deal more human utility.

It is also plain to me that humans are going to have to burn fossil fuels for a while yet, despite the very obvious fact that we also need to put much more energy and resource into developing renewable alternatives.

So I am not opposed to fracking in principle, which I know will upset some people. But nor can I understand the hurry. Fracking is being undertaken on a very large scale in the United States and elsewhere. Onshore fracking is not actually a new technology at all, but its widespread use is new. Given concerns especially about the effects on underground water supplies, why don’t we just wait for thirty years and see how it turns out elsewhere? That should give time for a good accumulation of evidence.

The hydrocarbons are not going anywhere – they will still be there in thirty years time and I predict will be a good deal more valuable. So my entirely unprofound, non-fundamentalist and dully pragmatic view on fracking is that there should be a thirty year moratorium. Then we can think about it.


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466 thoughts on “Unprofound Thoughts on Fracking

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  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    “Mike”

    “So the Total CEO wasn’t averse to trading oil in euros. And then he died. Whoopsy!”
    ____________________

    Same question to you as the one Republicofscotland is apparently finding it so difficult to answer : are you saying that Christophe de Margerie was murdered?

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    “Mike”

    “Press TV’s Serena Shim dies in a car accident in southern Turkey this week while investigating that country’s active support for ISIS.”
    _________________

    Is that your way of saying you think Mrs Shim was murdered?

    Yes or no? 🙂

  • Ishmael

    “That is a lie, Mary, and I challenge you to back up your lying claim by referring to reputable sources*.

    Thank you”

    Why so defensive. So what if Mary believes something. Must you pick? What are you here for?

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    If we waited until the Palestinians develop offshore oil and gas resources, we’d still be waiting in thirty years time.

    A bit like agriculture in Israel, really – empty, sandy wastes for centuries and then……when the Jews came, the desert bloomed and bore fruit.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    Ishmael

    You would do better to ask Mary and others why they are here (all day long, day in and day out). How about it?

  • Ben E. Geserit Muad'Dib Further Confounding Gender Speculators

    “when the Jews came, the desert bloomed and bore fruit.”

    Kinda like a viral swarm, eh? It’s too bad they blew the opportunity to elevate themselves above killer status. It would have been nice to see a Solomonic Israel rather than the war monger David.

  • Ishmael

    And if they are here day in day out what help are you digging at them?

    Steel on steel works but steel on blunt lead? It’s just old ground really. So tiresome, I agree.

  • Ben E. Geserit Muad'Dib Further Confounding Gender Speculators

    David, the impaler was not only a war-monger but an adulterer who covered his crime by sending his paramour’s husband into battle hoping he would be killed. He was, of course.

  • Ben E. Geserit Muad'Dib Further Confounding Gender Speculators

    2nd Samuel chapter 11

    ” 15 He had written in the letter, “Put Uriah in the front, in the face of the fiercest fighting, then draw back from behind him so that he may be struck down and die.”

    16 When Joab was besieging[j] the city, he put Uriah toward the place which he knew there were valiant warriors.[k] 17 The men of the city came out and fought with Joab. Some from the army from the servants of David fell; Uriah the Hittite also died. “

  • Ben E. Geserit Muad'Dib Further Confounding Gender Speculators

    One of the main reason YHWH did not allow David to build the Temple. A peaceful Solomon was chosen to do that.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    Ishmael

    “And if they are here day in day out what help are you digging at them?”
    _________________

    Well, one of the reasons is that it’s good for them to understand that their views cannot go unchallenged on this blog (they are of course more than adequately challenged by others in the real world).

  • Ben E. Geserit Muad'Dib Further Confounding Gender Speculators

    “one of the reasons is that it’s good for them to understand that their views cannot go unchallenged on this blog ”

    We need better trolls for the challenge. Your challenges lack anything except tumescence.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    “If we waited until the Palestinians develop offshore oil and gas resources, we’d still be waiting in thirty years time.

    A bit like agriculture in Israel, really – empty, sandy wastes for centuries and then……when the Jews came, the desert bloomed and bore fruit.”
    ________________

    Gosh, it didn’t take long for the usual suspects to get rather hot under the collar, did it. 🙂

    But the truth is always uncomfortable for some.

  • Ben E. Geserit Muad'Dib Further Confounding Gender Speculators

    “Gosh, it didn’t take long for the usual suspects to get rather hot under the collar, did it.”

    Just challenging your infantile mythologies. Are you up to responding to the pushback?

  • Mary

    Another lie from the troll – ‘You would do better to ask Mary and others why they are here (all day long, day in and day out). How about it?’

    My posts today

    5.15 am
    5.27 pm
    9.55 pm
    10.40 pm

    Time spent at my local general hospital today for a variety of appointments – 11.00-16.15 hrs

    OK?

    Number of troll’s post on this page alone – 15 out of 55 comments.

  • Ben E. Geserit Muad'Dib Further Confounding Gender Speculators

    Uriah, no doubt had Palestinian roots.

  • Tony M

    I think if the government permit fracking, it gives them some wriggle room on gas supplies, to engage is further senseless antagonisation of Russia, counter to our best interests. Supplies to Western Europe of Russian gas all through the long cold war and the times when the false tension reached peaks of belief in our own and the world prevailing propaganda of the virtuous west and the tainted east, lead to real danger for most if not all of mankind, in the name of believing in our own hype too much. Fracking empowers only the dangerously psychotic who infest government, security services and military food chain, to convince themselves and think they can mitigate consequences at home, so the country remains blissfully unaware that they are contemplating world war three as something to look forward to, something they can limit to world war two weaponry, to take us all and keep us on the brink and not beyond into armageddon, when our reckless, quite mad, filthy lucre obsessed very own military-industrial complex, in combination with the high finance overlords and puppet politicians they own and who serve them, cackle with destructive malign intent. A very good reason not allow fracking at all, all by itself, fracking unties their hands to risk retributive loss of Russian gas, though once they’ve fracked wherever and however adverse the consequences, and the ‘big show’ gets cancelled, the environment could well be so degraded, nuclear annihilation might seem considerably more attractive than it does at present. We’re fracked if they frack, the kid gloves will be off, the guns will take over and will turn on us natives in the fracking zones, if we get uppity or hang around suspiciously on the company property that once was our beauty spot or island home.

  • Ishmael

    Exactly, I don’t see a real challenge at all. Firstly to challenge someone you really have to get on with them. Present something other than just being ‘challenging’ to gain any respect. Some substance.

    Otherwise it seems like more of a deliberate interference and disruption. What’s the point. Are you going to be arguing with most of the world after we are all ‘challenged” to death. Get all the reputable sources you like, the general picture of world opinion seems set, and set to get worse, unfortunately.

    Even if we all give up there will be another blog. There is already. Many.

    ——–

    I agree, I think it’s a lie. If there is adequate challenge in the ‘real world’ then why bother? “day in day out”, Just to show us what it is to be adult? Who the hell do you think you are. Grow some.

  • Mary

    Let us hope that the Russian gas keeps flowing.

    Didcot Fire Puts The Squeeze On Energy Supplies

    Experts are warning that another power plant disaster could lead to an energy supply crisis in the UK this winter.
    Monday 20 October 2014

    Video: Didcot Power Station On Fire

    The huge fire which swept through Didcot Power Station has increased the likelihood of an energy supply crisis this winter, according to analysts.

    Half of the gas-fuelled plant – which supplies a million homes – will remain out of action indefinitely putting further pressure on the UK’s already squeezed electricity network.

    The blaze is the third fire at a UK power station this year following similar fires at the Ironbridge plant in February and at Ferrybridge in July.

    Together with spine cracking problems at Heysham and Hartlepool nuclear power stations, some 4.3 gigawatts (seven percent) of the UK’s conventional and nuclear energy plant has been taken offline.’

    http://news.sky.com/story/1356667/didcot-fire-puts-the-squeeze-on-energy-supplies

  • John Goss

    Arbed, I did mean to comment on your off-topic post about the defence team’s response on behalf of Assange, just to say thank you for posting it, but I got caught up in other things. I’m sure Craig won’t mind, because it is on a previous page, if I post it again and urge those who visit this great blog if they do not read all of it to at least watch the video on the last page. The conniving conglomerate of confederate con-men and con-women conspiring to condemn a conscientious critic of extrajudicial murders to death for speaking the truth is really where conspiracy theories have their origin.

    http://www.swedenversusassange.com/IMG/pdf/p.pdf

    I make no apologies for the alliteration and assonance.

  • Ishmael

    So…I hate lots of txt on screen. Can someone sum up. Are they going to let him go already?

  • Tony M

    I see the thing has rewound the tapes and is giving us repeats of golden oldies such as the Desert Blooming, or is it Desert Booming song, it’ll be ‘a country full of people, for a people without a scruple or shame’, up next. I’m not ruling out stupidity, but it’s still and outside chance, what we have here instead though, more certainly, is hypocrisy, spite, lies and glorification of the worst sustained persecution and genocide of a people, humanity will ever know which even the inevitable retribution in justice that assuredly must follow, could hardly surpass. A manifestation of pure evil, shorn of all religious and obfuscatory baggage, at heart, organised murderous intent, for its own sake, a compulsion to kill.

  • Sofia

    Humankind has not woven the web of life.

    We are but one thread within it.

    Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

    All things are bound together.

    All things connect.

    ~ Chief Seattle, 1854 ~

  • Ben E. Geserit Muad'Dib Further Confounding Gender Speculators

    “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

  • John Goss

    As almost everybody on this blog knows I oppose what the USA and the UK are doing to the Islamic communities with laws designed to imprison them without any evidence, for no reason, in its war on Muslims. It is sick. However there are things about Islam I find particularly objectionable as well as Sharia law. This is not a video for the faint-hearted.

    https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=807296772647568

    No good God would want animals mercilessly killed like this. Is it Halam? Is it Kosher? These are religious arguments by dumb creatures that militate against dumb creatures. They separate rather than unite. Any animal that is prematurely killed is dead. It cannot be brought back to life. That is one reason I am a vegetarian and abhor any kind of slaughter, from Islam butchery through to US drone attacks. It is the same thing. Non-human animals have no voice in the parliaments of the world. If they could protest they would. Grow up world! Or the killing will never end.

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