The entrepreneurs who brought the Marcellus shale gas drillinginto existence DID think about a lot of things. They knew they wouldbe in trouble over water. So they arranged to excuse themselves fromthe Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Clean Water Act. They knew theywould be making a toxic mess, because they arranged to excusethemselves from the Brownfields Act.
And they knew from previous experience they should spill a lot ofmoney around the drilling area in places like universities,especially extension services, also social organizations, civicgroups and the campaign chests of politicians. There is a site,Marcellus Money, which tracks the donations to politicians. It makesvery interesting reading. Millions passed in the last few years inPennsylvania alone, to groups known as "opinion leaders." It'salways best to have them helping you.
But the entrepreneurs badly misunderstand the number and natureof people who have an interest in the countryside. Did it occur tothem that the people who like to fish would object to having thefinest trout streams in the East destroyed? Did it occur to themthat urban folks would object to drilling within a few hundred feetof the reservoirs where their water is stored, as the folks of NewYork City and the Delaware River Basin? Or the folks near Beaver,Pa., and now Morgantown? Did they understand the emissions fromcompressor stations would be so irritating?
They surely missed in recognizing how much some people likeliving in the rural quiet, enjoying the progression of the seasons,hunting, working with animals, building up a piece of property,keeping the family together. Seeing their grandchildren and theirfriend's grandchildren. And how much they would be upset when thisway of life was interrupted.
They surely knew the toxicity of the stuff they were sending downthe hole when fracturing. Toxicology is a highly developed science.But did they have any idea of what would come back up when thepressure from a mile down drives out a part of that fluid? Did theyknow what would dissolve from the very hot, high pressureenvironment down below, a veritable pressure cooker? It's theperfect place to dissolve a regular zoo of ions that are rare on thesurface but present in the shale. Things like barium, strontium,bromide and even some of the uranium, thorium and radium, whichgives the Marcellus its distinctive radioactive signature.
Executives, like the rest of us, have to learn from theirsurroundings. They get paid, figuratively speaking, for thinking,but they have a problem most of us don't have. They work in a closedenvironment where information is fed to them by subordinates whoknow what executives want to hear.
One of the most visible promoters of gas fracking, went on TheDaily Show claiming that he personally has fracked over 3,000 wellsand never witnessed any contamination cases.
Of course not! He'd get his shoes dirty. That's what hierarchy isfor, to take care of details. It also prevents the boss from beingbothered too much by unpleasant aspects of reality.
Maybe you can win the lawmakers with sugarplum promises. At onetime there wasn't much hoi polloi could do about it. They were notconnected. Democracy was an ideal, but people were simply too remotefor organization to come together to work on common problems.
No longer. The internet, printers, telephones and cars meanpeople can research what they are interested in and share.
We who live in the out-of-doors are not so isolated as before.And the level of education is much higher than it was in ourgrandfathers' or even our fathers' day. People understand and cantake action. Maybe this was the most important thing the executivesdid not think about.
Evidence is accumulating. There are real problems out here.Bentonite in streams, gas in the aquifers, speeding trucks. It'stime for effective regulation of horizontal drilling andhydrofracking!
Bond is a retired chemistry professor in Jane Lew.
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