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> Fracking and the deep-well injection of its waste waters have been widely linked to earthquakes. Yep. Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California. htt

> Fracking and the deep-well injection of its waste waters have been widely linked to earthquakes. Yep. Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California. https://www.npr.org/2015/04/26/402413137/oklahoma-now-has-more-earthquakes-than-california https://www.npr.org/2015/04/26/402413137/oklahoma-now-has-mo... Why do we still allow fracking?

sambull 7y ago
A religion bent on dominionism by the party in power, and the idea that the earth was here to be exploited by humans. Just my peronsal opinion. Relevant passage: "And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth."
- gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
  That's straining credulity, especially considering the waning influence of religion in modern societies.
  - chachachoney 7y ago
    >> That's straining credulity, especially considering the waning influence of religion in modern societies. Not in the least. Dominionist and dispensationalist theology has had a huge influence on modern American evangelicals who in turn have a very significant influence on American politics.
    - gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
      I still disagree, but even if I did agree that religion has heavy influence, it's hard to say this is only a product of the right. Modern American government is largely a product of the victories of the Progessives (early 20th c.), which as a movement had heavy evangelical influence (read up on the social gospel). The idea that religion is somehow exclusive to the right is an oversimplification and ignores somewhat recent history. Of course evangelicals did a 180, but even so it's hard to see our relation to the environment as being mostly defined and controlled by the religious right.
      - chachachoney 7y ago
        Seems like you're both disagreeing that religion has an influence on modern American government, and arguing that religion isn't exclusive to the right-wing of American politics. I don't think anyone was suggesting that religion only influences the right-wing, but rather that dispensationalism and dominionism have a greater influence on politics than you're accounting for, and that those movements have a much greater influence on the right-wing than you're accounting for.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  Dominion (ownership/power) isn't (just) a licence for exploitation, but also implies responsibility. There is a growing movement within christianity that recognises this, and has thereby found a way to environmentalism along the right flank of politics. The pope is all in, and so are many protestant churches in Europe. It's mostly just US protestants/born-again reactionaries that continue to only read the unwritten parts of the bible that align with Ayn Rand.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
hesdeadjim 7y ago
I live in the front range of Colorado. There is a fracking epidemic out here in the areas outside of the metro area. Ignoring the "it creates jobs and grows the economy" argument, the oil and gas companies basically bribe communities to allow it. The town of Erie has a gorgeous new high school and rec center, and it is almost entirely paid for by fracking revenues. One of their summer festivals is heavily subsidized by the same industry. Given that most people think of only themselves, I am not remotely surprised that fracking bans or setbacks fail at a state level here.
- nine_k 7y ago
  "Bribing communities" or "being socially responsible and improving lives of people around"?
  - toofy 7y ago
    I’m not sure if your post was meant to challenge op’s idea or support them, but it isn’t clear to me that your statement contradicts them in anyway. There are so many absolutely terrible things we could do which help us immensely in the short term yet ultimately lead to immense harm. The two often go hand in hand.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Since the sole purpose of the modern corporation is to maximize shareholder return, its the former.
  - earthscienceman 7y ago
    As someone who has lived in Colorado for his entire life and is closely involved in local politics: If your idea of "being socially responsible and improving lives of people around" is giving kickbacks to the local school to the tune of 0.0001% of your profit... I don't want to be part of your society. These businesses are absolutely anything but socially responsible.
- golemiprague 7y ago
  If the community was not happy with it from some reason would you also say that they only think about themselves? or is it going just one way when it is not aligned with your ideas of what is good or not good for the world? Maybe they think it is both good for them specifically and for the world because gas is much cleaner than coal?
bpodgursky 7y ago
Becase: - Natural Gas from fracking produces less CO2 and other pollutants than oil or coal alternatives - It's produced domestically, so you don't fund Wahhabism or other oppressive regimes by buying it - It's produced domestically, so you don't have to burn filthy bunker oil on oil tankers just to transport it to the US - Fracking happens primarily on rural land, and pays royalties to individual landholders. Oil drilling in Saudi Arabia pays out only to the megacorp doing the drilling. Almost like there are tradeoffs and costs to complicated decisions like energy policy. Obviously we'd all love to be in a post-carbon future with Nuclear / Wind / Solar grids, but in the short-term, I'd much rather have a LNG-based energy economy than a coal-based one, fracking and all.
- cagenut 7y ago
  Hi, w/r/t your "short-term" comment, please read here: https://ipcc.ch/sr15 https://ipcc.ch/sr15 Particularly the graph in the bottom left corner here: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1_figure-final.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1... There is no more time left for the fracking/gas transition argument. While the argument is true in the abstract, and was true in a logistical sense 10 - 20 years ago, to continue to advance the argument after that report was published (which to be fair was only a year ago this week) is to be misinformed and spread misinformation. We should have used nuclear and domestic gas to power the 00's and 201X's. We didn't. Its too late now. The remaining available carbon budget does not afford for a two-step transition. All investment in carbon emission producing generation needs to be replaced with investment in non-carbon-emitting generation, starting "in 2020" but honestly that's just politician talk. The real deadline is "fucking yesterday".
  - rayiner 7y ago
    According to that chart, it’s too late to do anything now. (Arguably, it’s always been too late. There is nothing we could’ve done even starting in 1990 that would avert climate change while accommodating the industrialization or China, India, and Africa.) If you turn off the natural gas plants now, the economy shuts down whenever the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. The alternative energy storage you need to back up renewables simply doesn’t exist yet. Yes, we needed to use nuclear back in the 1970s. We would be much better positioned today if we had done it. But the same type of environmentalists that want to ban fracking today are the folks who stymied nuclear uptake. We shouldn’t listen to them this time.
jcoffland 7y ago
Maybe we should be fracking in California to let off fault pressure. If we could create many small earth quakes maybe we could avoid the big one.
- greggman2 7y ago
  Assuming you weren't joking, I'm only guessing but the amount of pressure fracking releases is tiny. For example assuming there is pressure for a magnitide 7 earthquake building up, to stop it you need 1000 level 4 quakes or 10000 level 3 quakes, or 100000 level 2 quakes or a million level 1 quakes. Believe fracking is even below that (and my numbers are probably off)
  - mokus 7y ago
    For the moment magnitude scale, I believe the (typical; it doesn’t actually correspond directly to energy release) ratio is even steeper than that, at around a 32x factor for each point in the scale. So to equal the energy of a 7 you’d need roughly 1 billion magnitude-1 quakes.
  - jcoffland 7y ago
    Then why are people complaining so much about fracking caused earthquakes?
    - freeflight 7y ago
      Because having more earthquakes on-top of the natural ones, in addition to all the other negative side-effects like pollution, isn't exactly a great situation for the people affected by it.
      - macintux 7y ago
        Especially when there aren’t natural ones in your area.
    - matttproud 7y ago
      If you have seen how hard Oklahoma has bit the dust in recent decades from local and macroeconomic changes, the place doesn't need anything more working against it --- least of all more "make a buck today at the expense of tomorrow." Allowing itself to incur damage to low-value buildings whose owners can barely afford to maintain them sounds like a self-inflicted wound. Even in spite of this recent extraction boom, schools are operating four days a week instead of five. What's going on is resource extraction exploitation with the costs externalized --- plain and simple. It's incomprehensible. That place needs to modernize and adapt but without petroleum and its trappings. It's had 35-50 years to adapt from these changes; why should I believe that petroleum will be this place's saviour again? I grew up with pumpjacks operating down the street (their ambient background sound as natural as the crickets and katydids and cicadas). The smell of petroleum, too. It wasn't until I moved away and returned to see how unnatural this was.
Nasrudith 7y ago
The number of earthquakes is less significant than the direct impact. Mine blasts cause it regularly technically so just going by earthquake count is sensationalist. It would be like counting the number of explosions in a city including car engines and every bullet fired, firecrackers, car bombs, artillery shells, and every airdropped bomb or warhead equally. The groundwater contamination and greenhouse gas releases are more significant reason why to disallow it.
rayiner 7y ago
> Why do we still allow fracking? It allows extraction of natural gas, which will have to be part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future. Natural gas plants not only emit less CO2 than the coal plants they replace, but can serve as peaker plants to back up renewables. We’re a long ways away from battery technology being able to serve that function. (The US is also not independent in terms of critical minerals needed for battery technology.) Fracking also allows the US to be energy independent, and reduce its dependent on unstable middle eastern regimes. Thanks to fracking, the US has the most flexibility in its Middle East policy it has had in half a century.
- ehnto 7y ago
  Is fracking sustainable? Are problems that are caused by fracking likely to get less as we get better at it, or are they likely to get worse as we try to get at riskier deposits?
  - hannob 7y ago
    > Is fracking sustainable? Is that an honest question? It's used to extract a fossil fuel. That should answer your question in case you know the definition of "sustainable".
    - ehnto 7y ago
      Sorry, poor choice of word. I meant short term, will it even be a stable source until it is finished being tapped or will it increase in instability to communities around it.
      - pvaldes 7y ago
        We are talking about injecting heavy metals to aquifers and at the same time surface radon patches from deep areas. Mercury in water that somebody will drink later and Radon that kills silently people when accumulates in basements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMsLEqjVbgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMsLEqjVbgA And is known that had caused earthquakes in dense populated areas from Mediterranean coasts (see Castor Project) or US, so is a danger for infrastructures also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PHVhjaNRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PHVhjaNRI And there is also this thing that I don't even have words for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvJAKVnK4qM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvJAKVnK4qM All for a source of gas that could last one or two years in many cases, and then is exhausted and left contaminated. But is heavily subsidised by taxes in many cases Fracking is greedy monkey stuff. Is a nonsense from any human point of view in any historical period (past or future) to pay for deliberately allowing a few people poison your own drink water.
chachachoney 7y ago
>> Why do we still allow fracking? Good question. Seems like a bunch of opportunists are taking advantage of irrational fears about nuclear power.
crispinb 7y ago
> Why do we still allow fracking? Because our political systems are catastrophically corrupt.
Spooky23 7y ago
A: Because the extractors keep Senators in certain states in power or have the ability to take that power away.
mercurywells 7y ago
Oklahoma earthquakes stopped after they banned wastewater injection which is related to (but different than) fracking.
pr0tonic 7y ago
>Why do we still allow fracking? Because people want to drive cars, fly on airplanes, make use of advanced materials, and have goods shipped across the world to their doorstep in a week among other things. The oil industry exists because people want the quality of life the use of oil enables them to have. Until we have just as cost effective alternatives to all the things the use of oil lets us have it will continue to exist. Another poster uses Erie, CO as an example how the oil industry are bad actors. The poster fails to mention Erie is a bedroom community full of people living in big new suburban houses and driving their vehicle (very likely an SUV) into Denver for work everyday
andygates 7y ago
Investors buy into the notion of gas as a transition fuel. I'm not sure we have the time for the luxury of that sort of transition any more.

sambull 7y ago

A religion bent on dominionism by the party in power, and the idea that the earth was here to be exploited by humans. Just my peronsal opinion. Relevant passage: "And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth."

gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
That's straining credulity, especially considering the waning influence of religion in modern societies.
- chachachoney 7y ago
  >> That's straining credulity, especially considering the waning influence of religion in modern societies. Not in the least. Dominionist and dispensationalist theology has had a huge influence on modern American evangelicals who in turn have a very significant influence on American politics.
  - gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
    I still disagree, but even if I did agree that religion has heavy influence, it's hard to say this is only a product of the right. Modern American government is largely a product of the victories of the Progessives (early 20th c.), which as a movement had heavy evangelical influence (read up on the social gospel). The idea that religion is somehow exclusive to the right is an oversimplification and ignores somewhat recent history. Of course evangelicals did a 180, but even so it's hard to see our relation to the environment as being mostly defined and controlled by the religious right.
    - chachachoney 7y ago
      Seems like you're both disagreeing that religion has an influence on modern American government, and arguing that religion isn't exclusive to the right-wing of American politics. I don't think anyone was suggesting that religion only influences the right-wing, but rather that dispensationalism and dominionism have a greater influence on politics than you're accounting for, and that those movements have a much greater influence on the right-wing than you're accounting for.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
Dominion (ownership/power) isn't (just) a licence for exploitation, but also implies responsibility. There is a growing movement within christianity that recognises this, and has thereby found a way to environmentalism along the right flank of politics. The pope is all in, and so are many protestant churches in Europe. It's mostly just US protestants/born-again reactionaries that continue to only read the unwritten parts of the bible that align with Ayn Rand.
dang 7y ago
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hesdeadjim 7y ago

I live in the front range of Colorado. There is a fracking epidemic out here in the areas outside of the metro area. Ignoring the "it creates jobs and grows the economy" argument, the oil and gas companies basically bribe communities to allow it. The town of Erie has a gorgeous new high school and rec center, and it is almost entirely paid for by fracking revenues. One of their summer festivals is heavily subsidized by the same industry. Given that most people think of only themselves, I am not remotely surprised that fracking bans or setbacks fail at a state level here.

nine_k 7y ago
"Bribing communities" or "being socially responsible and improving lives of people around"?
- toofy 7y ago
  I’m not sure if your post was meant to challenge op’s idea or support them, but it isn’t clear to me that your statement contradicts them in anyway. There are so many absolutely terrible things we could do which help us immensely in the short term yet ultimately lead to immense harm. The two often go hand in hand.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Since the sole purpose of the modern corporation is to maximize shareholder return, its the former.
- earthscienceman 7y ago
  As someone who has lived in Colorado for his entire life and is closely involved in local politics: If your idea of "being socially responsible and improving lives of people around" is giving kickbacks to the local school to the tune of 0.0001% of your profit... I don't want to be part of your society. These businesses are absolutely anything but socially responsible.
golemiprague 7y ago
If the community was not happy with it from some reason would you also say that they only think about themselves? or is it going just one way when it is not aligned with your ideas of what is good or not good for the world? Maybe they think it is both good for them specifically and for the world because gas is much cleaner than coal?

bpodgursky 7y ago

Becase: - Natural Gas from fracking produces less CO2 and other pollutants than oil or coal alternatives - It's produced domestically, so you don't fund Wahhabism or other oppressive regimes by buying it - It's produced domestically, so you don't have to burn filthy bunker oil on oil tankers just to transport it to the US - Fracking happens primarily on rural land, and pays royalties to individual landholders. Oil drilling in Saudi Arabia pays out only to the megacorp doing the drilling. Almost like there are tradeoffs and costs to complicated decisions like energy policy. Obviously we'd all love to be in a post-carbon future with Nuclear / Wind / Solar grids, but in the short-term, I'd much rather have a LNG-based energy economy than a coal-based one, fracking and all.

cagenut 7y ago
Hi, w/r/t your "short-term" comment, please read here: https://ipcc.ch/sr15 https://ipcc.ch/sr15 Particularly the graph in the bottom left corner here: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1_figure-final.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1... There is no more time left for the fracking/gas transition argument. While the argument is true in the abstract, and was true in a logistical sense 10 - 20 years ago, to continue to advance the argument after that report was published (which to be fair was only a year ago this week) is to be misinformed and spread misinformation. We should have used nuclear and domestic gas to power the 00's and 201X's. We didn't. Its too late now. The remaining available carbon budget does not afford for a two-step transition. All investment in carbon emission producing generation needs to be replaced with investment in non-carbon-emitting generation, starting "in 2020" but honestly that's just politician talk. The real deadline is "fucking yesterday".
- rayiner 7y ago
  According to that chart, it’s too late to do anything now. (Arguably, it’s always been too late. There is nothing we could’ve done even starting in 1990 that would avert climate change while accommodating the industrialization or China, India, and Africa.) If you turn off the natural gas plants now, the economy shuts down whenever the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. The alternative energy storage you need to back up renewables simply doesn’t exist yet. Yes, we needed to use nuclear back in the 1970s. We would be much better positioned today if we had done it. But the same type of environmentalists that want to ban fracking today are the folks who stymied nuclear uptake. We shouldn’t listen to them this time.

jcoffland 7y ago

Maybe we should be fracking in California to let off fault pressure. If we could create many small earth quakes maybe we could avoid the big one.

greggman2 7y ago
Assuming you weren't joking, I'm only guessing but the amount of pressure fracking releases is tiny. For example assuming there is pressure for a magnitide 7 earthquake building up, to stop it you need 1000 level 4 quakes or 10000 level 3 quakes, or 100000 level 2 quakes or a million level 1 quakes. Believe fracking is even below that (and my numbers are probably off)
- mokus 7y ago
  For the moment magnitude scale, I believe the (typical; it doesn’t actually correspond directly to energy release) ratio is even steeper than that, at around a 32x factor for each point in the scale. So to equal the energy of a 7 you’d need roughly 1 billion magnitude-1 quakes.
- jcoffland 7y ago
  Then why are people complaining so much about fracking caused earthquakes?
  - freeflight 7y ago
    Because having more earthquakes on-top of the natural ones, in addition to all the other negative side-effects like pollution, isn't exactly a great situation for the people affected by it.
    - macintux 7y ago
      Especially when there aren’t natural ones in your area.
  - matttproud 7y ago
    If you have seen how hard Oklahoma has bit the dust in recent decades from local and macroeconomic changes, the place doesn't need anything more working against it --- least of all more "make a buck today at the expense of tomorrow." Allowing itself to incur damage to low-value buildings whose owners can barely afford to maintain them sounds like a self-inflicted wound. Even in spite of this recent extraction boom, schools are operating four days a week instead of five. What's going on is resource extraction exploitation with the costs externalized --- plain and simple. It's incomprehensible. That place needs to modernize and adapt but without petroleum and its trappings. It's had 35-50 years to adapt from these changes; why should I believe that petroleum will be this place's saviour again? I grew up with pumpjacks operating down the street (their ambient background sound as natural as the crickets and katydids and cicadas). The smell of petroleum, too. It wasn't until I moved away and returned to see how unnatural this was.

Nasrudith 7y ago

The number of earthquakes is less significant than the direct impact. Mine blasts cause it regularly technically so just going by earthquake count is sensationalist. It would be like counting the number of explosions in a city including car engines and every bullet fired, firecrackers, car bombs, artillery shells, and every airdropped bomb or warhead equally. The groundwater contamination and greenhouse gas releases are more significant reason why to disallow it.

rayiner 7y ago

> Why do we still allow fracking? It allows extraction of natural gas, which will have to be part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future. Natural gas plants not only emit less CO2 than the coal plants they replace, but can serve as peaker plants to back up renewables. We’re a long ways away from battery technology being able to serve that function. (The US is also not independent in terms of critical minerals needed for battery technology.) Fracking also allows the US to be energy independent, and reduce its dependent on unstable middle eastern regimes. Thanks to fracking, the US has the most flexibility in its Middle East policy it has had in half a century.

ehnto 7y ago
Is fracking sustainable? Are problems that are caused by fracking likely to get less as we get better at it, or are they likely to get worse as we try to get at riskier deposits?
- hannob 7y ago
  > Is fracking sustainable? Is that an honest question? It's used to extract a fossil fuel. That should answer your question in case you know the definition of "sustainable".
  - ehnto 7y ago
    Sorry, poor choice of word. I meant short term, will it even be a stable source until it is finished being tapped or will it increase in instability to communities around it.
    - pvaldes 7y ago
      We are talking about injecting heavy metals to aquifers and at the same time surface radon patches from deep areas. Mercury in water that somebody will drink later and Radon that kills silently people when accumulates in basements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMsLEqjVbgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMsLEqjVbgA And is known that had caused earthquakes in dense populated areas from Mediterranean coasts (see Castor Project) or US, so is a danger for infrastructures also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PHVhjaNRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PHVhjaNRI And there is also this thing that I don't even have words for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvJAKVnK4qM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvJAKVnK4qM All for a source of gas that could last one or two years in many cases, and then is exhausted and left contaminated. But is heavily subsidised by taxes in many cases Fracking is greedy monkey stuff. Is a nonsense from any human point of view in any historical period (past or future) to pay for deliberately allowing a few people poison your own drink water.

chachachoney 7y ago

>> Why do we still allow fracking? Good question. Seems like a bunch of opportunists are taking advantage of irrational fears about nuclear power.

crispinb 7y ago

> Why do we still allow fracking? Because our political systems are catastrophically corrupt.

Spooky23 7y ago

A: Because the extractors keep Senators in certain states in power or have the ability to take that power away.

mercurywells 7y ago

Oklahoma earthquakes stopped after they banned wastewater injection which is related to (but different than) fracking.

pr0tonic 7y ago

>Why do we still allow fracking? Because people want to drive cars, fly on airplanes, make use of advanced materials, and have goods shipped across the world to their doorstep in a week among other things. The oil industry exists because people want the quality of life the use of oil enables them to have. Until we have just as cost effective alternatives to all the things the use of oil lets us have it will continue to exist. Another poster uses Erie, CO as an example how the oil industry are bad actors. The poster fails to mention Erie is a bedroom community full of people living in big new suburban houses and driving their vehicle (very likely an SUV) into Denver for work everyday

andygates 7y ago

Investors buy into the notion of gas as a transition fuel. I'm not sure we have the time for the luxury of that sort of transition any more.