Oklahoma Acknowledges Reality

For a long time it's been fashionable for conservative governors in states like Florida and Wisconsin to issue fiats against state employees saying the phrase "Climate Change." They seem to think climate change is like Beetlejuice: if you say it three times it will suddenly appear.

So it's refreshing to see the conservative governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, finally acknowledge the reality that disposing of fracking waste by injecting it into the earth causes earthquakes. They even have a website that admits it:

Oklahoma experienced 585 magnitude 3+ earthquakes in 2014 compared to 109 events recorded in 2013. This rise in seismic events has the attention of scientists, citizens, policymakers, media and industry. See what information and research state officials and regulators are relying on as the situation progresses.

This is hard for Oklahoma to admit because they depend heavily on fossil fuel production for tax revenues, and they've been heavily pressured to keep denying reality by major employers and campaign donors in the oil business.

Fracking takes millions of gallons of clean water and fills with carcinogens and radioactive elements.

The basic problem is that fracking oil and gas fields takes millions of gallons of water that has been laced with toxic and carcinogenic chemicals. To top it off, fracking fluid also dredges up a lot of radioactive elements. This polluted waste water has to be dealt with, and for decades the cheapest solution was to just pump it into the ground and forget about it.

But Oklahoma has pumped so much waste water into the ground that the fault lines under the state have become lubricated, allowing them to move. That causes earthquakes. These are now happening several times a day in Oklahoma, making it impossible to ignore the problem any longer.

The picture on the Oklahoma earthquake website (shown above) shows a wheat field. That's supposed to make us think that Oklahoma is a state filled with clean air, fresh water and amber fields of grain.

But the reality is more like the picture on the right: barren fields of ugly pump jacks, giant plumes of flame from natural gas flaring, and ugly black smoke.

Extracting fossil fuels from the earth is a dangerous, dirty, ugly business. Moving it around the country is a dangerous, dirty, ugly business. Refining it is a dangerous, dirty, ugly business.

It's necessary business, no question about it. But just because we need oil and gas and coal doesn't mean we have to allow the people who produce fossil fuels take all the profit and pass off all the risks to the rest of us. The risks from fossil fuel extraction include not only earthquakes, but also polluted aquifers, increased air pollution around drill sites, pipeline explosions, oil train explosions, mine explosions, emissions of carcinogens from refining operations, massive coal fly ash spills that kill millions of fish and pollute streams and lakes. And that doesn't even consider the environmental damage from burning the oil, gas and coal for energy.

Fracking takes a lot of water and much of the American West is in severe drought.

The fracking waste disposal problems underlines another problem, particularly in Texas and the American West: drought. Fracking takes a lot of water, and much of Oklahoma is in severe drought.

As the earthquakes around the country show, injecting fracking waste into deep wells is foolish and shortsighted. But it's worse than that. Fracking takes millions of gallons of desperately needed clean water, adds carcinogens, pumps it into the ground, pulling up radiation and other toxic chemicals and then injects it miles deep somewhere else. All that clean water is made filthy and is lost. Forever. Well, we hope it's forever...

Can the West really afford to waste that much water for fracking? Don't Oklahoma farmers need that water to grow their wheat?

It seems there's a simple solution: instead of dumping this water, frackers should filter the water and recycle it for use in fracking.

Yeah, it would make gas cost more. But the people who cause problems -- poisoned aquifers, earthquakes, pipeline and rail explosions, air pollution -- should pay for the damage they're causing.

Why should they get all the profit and pass the costs off to everyone else?