Growing up in Texas in the 1970s and ’80s, I fondly remember the bumper stickers on grimy pickup trucks that read: “Lord, please give me one more boom, and this time I promise not to piss it all away.”
With gas still under $2 a gallon, I’m hoping only that the most recent generation of Texas roughnecks and Western Colorado gas drillers have invested their wages wisely, since I will admit to a certain feeling of — what? — not delight but relief that the bottom has fallen out of the energy market in the past two years.
Of course, there’s the negative: the loss of jobs for thousands of cash-flush, free-spending gas-patch workers who definitely have pumped up the nation’s economy.
On the bright side, cheap fuel has been the equivalent of a universal pay raise for the rest of us, and, perhaps more importantly, the environmental onslaught has slowed to a trickle.
Because no matter how much the energy industry’s Astroturf groups proclaim in ads that they’re behaving “responsibly,” there’s no denying that the boom earlier this decade has left new scars of roads, drill pads and pipelines on the landscape, habitat fragmentation, surface spills and the likelihood that the toxic cocktail of fracking fluids injected at high pressures to fracture rock will ultimately end up in water supplies.
The latest indictment against the industry is this week’s publication by the U.S. Geological Survey of an earthquake-hazard map that for the first time shows regions affected by “induced” tremors caused by the underground injection of millions of gallons of contaminated wastewater left over from fracking.
“Earthquake rates have recently increased markedly in multiple areas of the Central and Eastern United States … especially since 2010, and scientific studies have linked the majority of this increased activity to wastewater injection in deep disposal wells,” according to the study led by Mark Petersen, chief of the agency’s National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project.
Some 7 million Americans now live in areas potentially affected by the induced earthquakes, according to the statistics generated by the study.
Colorado, with its major fracking operations in the Julesberg, Raton, Piceance and San Juan basins, is at particularly high risk, along with Wyoming, New Mexico, Kansas and Texas. Parts of Oklahoma now have a greater risk of earthquakes than notoriously shaky California.
Now, the science of earthquake forecasting is on notoriously … um … shaky ground, and lots of natural factors can contribute to temblors and their severity. But there’s little denying the strong correlation between increased energy exploration and increased seismic activity — unless you’re the industry-backed propaganda outlets Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development (CRED) or Protect Colorado (the same people).
Parsing the evidence that the fracking process itself hasn’t been linked to earthquakes — ignoring that the related wastewater injection has been implicated — CRED blithely answers its own rhetorical question on its website: “Does fracking cause earthquakes? The answer is no.”
Such dissembling is standard operating procedure for an industry that at every turn has fought efforts to tighten environmental regulations, push operations back from schools and homes and allow for greater outside monitoring, all while crowing (and even seeming to take credit) that Colorado already has some of the toughest rules on exploration.
Look, I’ll concede to a certain hypocrisy since, yes, I drive a car, heat my home and consume products that rely on affordable, obtainable, secure energy.
I just know that we’d be better off if we had an honest assessment of the true costs and risks of energy development here and abroad, without industry spin and obfuscation.
The latest energy bust is nothing but a respite, perhaps a chance to re-evaluate and reflect before the onslaught is renewed.
Meanwhile, we should all aspire to efficient, clean, renewable energy: hydrogen-powered vehicles, solar-heated buildings and the promise of a day when we’re not hoping for the next energy boom strictly to line the pockets of the drilling companies.
Steve Lipsher (slipsher@ ) of Silverthorne writes a monthly column.
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