Gasland is a documentary written and directed by Josh Fox. It all starts when he receives a letter from a gas company to offer him a deal to rent his land for US$100,000 to extract natural gas. Basically, the fact that he could receive that amount of money without any effort, seemed a little too good to be true. Things like this just don't happen by any chance, which is why he thought there was something suspicious behind this proposal. Therefore, he decided to look more into this situation.
Since he could't get anyone from the gas companies to speak to him at first, he decided to go on a road trip to places where this situation had been present for a while. Throughout his journey, he discovered some alarming stories. People who have rented their land for gas extraction purposes have started to get severely ill because the water was contaminated. To extract gas in this lands, gas companies use a technique called hydraulic fracturing. This method pumps tons of water, and a great variety of dangerous chemicals to the ground to push the gas through pressure. Naturally, the fact that they push all this harmful chemicals into the ground, can bring some drawbacks to the environment. In this case, the contaminated domestic water from this people's houses is proof of this drawbacks.
.jpeg)
In my opinion, it seems unacceptable that these companies and the U. S. government haven't taken proper measures to address this terrible issue, which has left me with some questions. Although people seem to be taken a stand towards this problem, there are still people who are not well informed, or even aware, of what's going on. What can they do once they start seeing signs of contamination? Meaning, if they start getting sickness symptoms from drinking water, what are the specific steps they need to take to solve a problem with such an unclear solution? Just to think that something like this could happen to you, it's really scary. Also, lately, I've become more aware of all the existent technology for renewable energy that could potentially replace gas as one of the main fuels, which makes me question the following. If gas could be replaced in the future, is it really worth all the trouble the extraction of gas will bring to the environment and the people? Also, if this is true, would't it be better to stop this type of extraction and using all the money and resources (especially land) that were going towards gas and invest them in clean and renewable technologies?
What can they do once they start seeing signs of contamination? Meaning, if they start getting sickness symptoms from drinking water, what are the specific steps they need to take to solve a problem with such an unclear solution?
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing that these people can do once they start to see signs of contamination. Once natural gas companies build their facilities within eyes-length of homeowners, their property values plummet due to the visual obstruction and the water and health implications of fracking to the potential homebuyer. The majority of the landowners are farmers and the fracking procedure destroys their land, their livestock, and consequently their livelihood. These people couldn’t move even if they wanted to so the only course of action for them to do in the short term is to not drink the tap water and hope for the best. The people exposed to dangerous fracking chemicals have no power to save their own health; only through proper regulatory policies can these people’s health be salvaged.
In response to your last question regarding the validity of spending money and hurting people/the environment to drill for gas versus renewables, I agree that we should be focusing on the future of energy, which is renewables. Unfortunately, this is not how society works, especially when money is involved. Due to our current dependence on fossil fuels, we cannot simply abandon the harvesting of natural gas because we do not have the resources necessary to fuel our consumption without it. The development of renewables is going to be much more expensive than the infrastructure we already have in place for natural gas. Furthermore, we can create a significantly larger amount of energy from natural gas than the current level of efficiency of renewables. Over the coming years as renewables are more efficient, more common, and the gas levels have depleted, we will then be able to stop ruining the environment and people's health with fracking.
ReplyDelete