I direct your attention to an article in today's Boston Globe entitled "Shale oil helps revive East Coast refineries. Offers cheaper gas; US could top Saudi output" See link to this article here or below:
A rightwinger says one thing; a progressive says another as to the efficacy of the various energy alternatives. What is one who really wants the truth without an ideological bent to think?
From the articles I have read fracking seems simply awful and lethal since SO much ground water is polluted by the chemicals used to extract the oil and gas from the abundance of shale within the earth. It is so polluting it causes tap water to become flammable. It increases cancer rates, immunological problems, and pulmonary diseases of both animals and people who have been duped by corporate power to sell their land or parts of it for this nefarious purpose. Fracking seems fantastic for the US economy because it could propel us to be the premier energy producer in the world. That seems absolutely dazzlingly wonderful but I suspect it is not so because getting to the shale is, so far, unsafe at any speed.
Nuclear energy comes with huge risk especially as the plants that make it age. God knows oil is climate change polluting. It is, whether the wingnuts want to believe it or not, changing our planet’s climate and not for the better. We can see that all around us every day of every month of every year.
Those who are invested in the immense corporate power of oil want the digging of the oil pipeline from Canada to Louisiana to proceed and they want the fracking of shale to be explored no matter the cost to human life.
The lamestream media keeps the negatives of these things out of the news except for a paucity of sensationalist headlines here and there. The Chernobyl-like Fukishima disaster in Japan, which is still emitting radioactive material, has gone off the media's radar screen. The Fourth Estate should be critical of power but are wimps who bow to the presence of the almighty buck. Beware of those bearing Trojan Horse gifts. They may not be gifts at all but a one-way ticket to an early grave for those of us who are not born into vast sums of money to escape the devastating disasters these pollutants bring.
What to do? We could use those energies we have now as long as we have a plan to minimize them and develop endless alternative sources of energy in the form of wind and solar that could be made available now. But we do not, of course, have a plan as we hold off until the last gong show which may, in fact, ultimately, for all of us, be too late.
