Global heating the trump card

By ALLAN RUBIN

As the prospect of natural gas drilling in our area looms, the public is forced to turn to government to rule on the safety and necessity of this procedure. Should companies be permitted to send thousands of shafts more than a mile into the earth below this vast watershed serving 15 million citizens, remove billions of gallons of fresh water from the surface waterways, mix into that drinking water millions of gallons of toxic chemicals, inject that mixture past the aquifer, recover some portion of it back through the aquifer, remove the resulting vile brew for “treatment” and finally re-inject the result under the ground or into the streams, lakes and rivers that we draw our drinking water from?

Even though, to the average citizen, this seems like an insane proposition, there is no public agency that has yet recognized that insanity and ruled to prevent it. Bureaucracy being what it is, tasks are spread out in such a way that each regulatory entity can escape ultimate responsibility and blame. Politicians concern themselves with the necessity of collecting taxes. Chambers worry about promoting business and creating jobs. The press directs its attention to the conflicting facts delivered by competing interests and is accountable to both the public and its advertisers. Regulators are conflicted between statutory directives promoting industry and protecting the citizenry.

The ingredients in the recipe for another great failure of democratic institutions are in the bowl, ready to mix and pop into the oven, only to emerge half baked. There are many strong arguments for and against allowing natural gas exploration with hydraulic fracturing to proceed in the river basin. However, there is one overarching issue that trumps them all: global overheating.

Oil and gas are fossil fuels. Burning of fossil fuels are known to be the greatest cause of global heating and therefore the greatest threat to the continuing existence of life on earth. When considering the expanded use of any fossil fuel, the first and only question should be, “Will this harm the environment and hasten the extinction of life on earth?”

At this moment in the history of the planet, any public policy decision that promotes or permits new exploration and development of fossil fuel resources is an immoral act. To the Delaware River Basin Commission, I say: you must not compromise with an industry motivated by greed alone. You cannot compromise with a public that has been fed misinformation by that industry and by misguided public officials. There can be no compromise in your duty to protect the water. Your job is to keep our water undiminished in quantity and quality. You cannot permit a little bit of pollution to cause a little bit of cancer that leads to a little bit of death in a few citizens.

Natural gas development using hydraulic fracturing is completely incompatible with drinking water supplies and must be banned in the Delaware River Basin, period. You may find that if you impose this ban, that some time after, the industry will return with new, more costly and less profitable techniques that use less water and no poisonous chemicals. But that will still not make fossil fuels tenable as a future energy source because of the global heating it causes. Hopefully, by that time, research into and development of renewable, sustainable alternative energy sources will have made natural gas an option that is no longer a reasonable or competitive. Then, the air we breathe will have been protected, our landscape will remain unscarred and the DRBC will have acted morally in carrying out its one mandate: to protect the water.

(Allan Rubin is a resident of Cochecton, NY.)