The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    FRACKING AS A CAUSE FOR EARTHQUAKES?

    By Richard Day on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 4:03am |

              Gaia, by Anselm Feuerbach (1875)
    Gaia, by Anselm Feuerbach (1875)

    FRACKING

    I am beginning to turn into a green guy.

    I just read something that astounded me.

    It is all well and proper to be lulled into this Gaia_hypothesis

    The earth is an organism unto itself.

    Why no, detractors might say.

    There are many organisms upon the globe but that does not make the globe a living organism unto itself.

    But damn.

    Our own bodies are covered by other organisms! Inside and outside!

    And catch one bad alien organism, and the individual is toast!

    My wife and I were in town visiting my 96-year-old grandmother and felt the mid-afternoon rattle shake the roof for five to 10 seconds.

    What makes the minor rumble newsworthy is that until 2011, Youngstown had never had a recorded earthquake.

    What changed? Fracking...

    n 2010, the natural-gas industry triggered $11.2 billion in economic activity in Pennsylvania and 140,000 jobs, including over a billion dollars in state and local taxes, according to Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/03/youngstown-rocks-is-fracking-causing-earthquakes-in-ohio.html

    UNTIL 2011 YOUNGSTOWN HAD NEVER HAD A RECORDED EARTHQUAKE!

    Damn!

    Can you imagine this?

    But all these jobs and such.

    Are we that powerful?

    We, that is human beings, are causing earthquakes?

    And this cause has nothing to do with pole dancers or porn on the internet or mostly naked gays in New Orleans during annual festivities. ha

    I don't know why, but this scares the bejesus out of me!

    Why the poisoning of water and air in the surrounding areas by T. Bone Pickens' experiment in megalomania did not scare me enough, I have no comment.

    As if the air is somehow localized any more than the water is!

    Green rabbits?

    Well mistakes are made!

    But when the earth moves under our feet....

     

     

    What in the hell have we gotten ourselves into?

    I have always viewed Avlon at the Beast as a prick of the first order.

    But I swear to almighty God I have never heard of a technological feat of man actually causing earthquakes.

    I mean I had assumed that atomic bombs and such could cause tremors of a sort, but damn!

    We all know the fallacy of the proposition known as: POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC.

    I mean if the price of melons in Bolivia falls by 55%, that does not necessarily mean that my oatmeal will boil over onto my stove as I prepare my morning gruel.

    But, a fallacy does not mean and never meant that after this therefore because of this is not an indicator of things going awry in most circumstances!

    So returning to Youngstown; there has never been a recording, a video, a scientific example of nor a newspaper account of an earthquake in Youngstown! Until now!

    Now, I put it to you.

    You can employ some 140,000 folks with some fracking.

    Or you can worry about pissing off the gods of the inner earth and risk the death and destruction of your entire city?

    I can see some board meeting, behind the scenes, and including a bunch of politicians and some corporate asshole says:

    WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

    Comments

    Compared to the poisons fracking adds to the water tables, the earthquake risk seems mostly negligible. In fact, it might even reduce the chances of big earthquakes by encouraging smaller ones, although that's purely me making sh*t up. It's also important not to be overambitious to blame the earthquakes on fracking. How close is Youngstown to the closest fracking site? When people were trying to pin the blame on fracking for our recent Virginia "big quake", the nearest fracking site was hundreds of miles away (in West Virginia).


    by Verified Atheist on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 8:30am

    Pollution of water reserves and the air should cause enough concern. I do think we are going to hear more about this earthquake business though.

    In the end I cannot believe that the profit motive along with the creation of jobs will not trump any environmental concern.

    I am beginning to believe that the majority of Americans will vote against the environment every time.


    by Richard Day on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 2:24pm

    The IEEE just covered it. That definitely gives it some credibility.


    by Verified Atheist on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 9:03am

    Thank you for the link!

    damn!

    Youngstown was not some isolated series of incidents!


    by Richard Day on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 10:44am

    I don't know about ya'll but I had to play those fracking Eastern Europeans  from Youngstown in high school football and I still have the bad shoulders to prove it.They were some big sums of bitches. wink

    So they can frack that town all the way to West Virginia for all I care. 


    by Oxy Mora on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 2:06pm

    I recall that stupid Sifi series where they substituted the f word with fracking. hahaha

    It is funny though, I mean i am in the middle of taconite mining and the explosions are heard and felt almost every day.

    We are one dangerous race for Gaia to contend with!


    by Richard Day on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 2:27pm

    Stupid? Stupid?!?

    You, sir, are dead to me. Dead!


    by Verified Atheist on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 3:10pm

    Ahh, Jewel Staite. On Firefly, they cussed in Chinese, too. Though I have no idea if it was real Chinese, or real Chinese cussing.


    by Donal on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 3:41pm

    I actually took Mandarin in college, and they were speaking something close enough to Mandarin that it was conceivably what Mandarin would become in the future, after being assimilated into a western culture. I.e., they dropped the intonations, but that's actually quite realistic, in my opinion. However, one does have to fret about the fact that without intonations, it becomes harder to differentiate gōngzhǔ (公主 = princess) from gōng zhū (公猪 = boar or male pig).


    by Verified Atheist on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 4:04pm

     

    I think it's alarming

    The earth we're harming,

    But if you're tracking

    the effects of fracking

    it's only fair cuz the clock is ticking,

    to measure the effects of fricking. 

     

    You Frick, you Frack,

    You shake things up and they'll hit you back.

    Now your garden's gone, there's no more cabbage,

    Fracking's caused collateral damage.

     

     


    by MrSmith1 on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 2:39pm

    Okay Smith. hahahahah

    I figured a frick and frack reference would turn up sooner or later.

    Great take!


    by Richard Day on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 2:40pm

    Hey, somebody had to do it, and I'm just the guy to count on for an homage to the classics.


    by MrSmith1 on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 2:55pm

    Frackquakes? Earthfracks? Earthfrakes? ...

    No, since they're after natural gas: Earthfarts!


    by Donal on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 4:43pm

    Okay donal, hahsahahhah

    I hereby render unto Donal the Dayly Line of the Day Award for this here frickin Dagblog site, given to all of him from all of me.

    SILLINESS! hahahahaha

    I feel like I am back in the 5th grade, but it kind of feels gooooooooooood!


    by Richard Day on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 5:02pm

    Perhaps you could host the next big TV game show: 'Are you sillier than a 5th grader?' 

    (The answer, needless to say, would always be 'Yes'.)


    by MrSmith1 on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 5:29pm