Full throttle into the abyss

There’s a great essay on view at Counterpunch today by Steve Horn, who writes for the DeSmog Blog.

Steve has got his knickers in a twist over government collusion in the master plan to turn Appalachia into a “petrochemical hub.” Looks to me like the entire project is predicated on more fracking and fracking deeper.

Fracking, just in case you don’t know, is about injecting toxic chemical cocktails deep into the earth under extreme pressure to break up rock formations that harbour gas and oil that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Fracking critics correctly point out that our freshwater aquifers are down there somewhere, and that fracking threatens our potable water supply.

Which it does.

More fracking means a greater threat to the water supply.

So what’s the problem? If some ballsy entrepreneur can get rich by poisoning your water supply for the next ten thousand years, that’s just “the American way.”

It’s the free market at work, don’t you know.

It is a searing indictment of our world view that we permit a handful of “free market” hustlers to put our clean water at risk in perpetuity. Horn’s article spells out the revolving door phenomenon wherein today’s public servants are tomorrow’s fracking lobbyists, and “democratic process” is circumvented.

That’s just wrong.