When President Obama told The New York Times over the weekend that too many Republicans deny science, implying that they reject reason and fact-based policies, who knew he’d be vindicated so quickly?
There are more than a few seemingly acceptable ways to defend fracking. Nearly all of these defenses are nearsighted, and some are wrong, but they’re not necessarily insane. However, if your goal is to defend the controversial process of harvesting natural gas using “hydraulic fracturing” or “fracking,” it’s probably a smart idea to avoid defending flammable tap water, a terrible yet iconic consequence of the process.
During the Western Conservative Summit in Denver this week, State Sen. Randy Baumgardner, a Colorado Republican, was asked about fracking by a right-wing activist named Gordon “Dr. Chaps” Klingenschmitt. His response?
I’ve been to a lot of the fracking seminars, and if people, they’ve never been and they really don’t understand it. Most of these seminars are free they can go to — they can learn about fracking. They can learn that the myth of, you know what, nine or 11 thousand feet, that fluid is gonna come back to the surface. And since 19 — the 1940s when they first started fracking, there’s never been one recorded incident. They talk about methane in the water and this, that, and the other, but if you go back in history and look at how the Indians traveled, they traveled to the burning waters. And that was methane in the waters and that was for warmth in the wintertime. So a lot of people, if they just trace back the history, they’ll know how a lot of this is propaganda.
What a colossal bucket of horseshit. And what he said was pretty stupid, too. (I’m here all week, folks.)
There’s no historical record showing… CONTINUE READING