Fracking Getting Celebrity and Mainstream Attention

Hydraulic fracking is bad news. Fracking, if you haven’t heard of it, is

a means of natural gas extraction employed in deep natural gas well drilling. Once a well is drilled, millions of gallons of water, sand and proprietary chemicals are injected, under high pressure, into a well. The pressure fractures the shale and props open fissures that enable natural gas to flow more freely out of the well.

Fracking a well entails the use of “1-8 million gallons of water” and “80-300 tons of [undisclosed] chemicals.” A well can be fracked up to about 18 times. For much more on fracking, visit the link above.

The good news is that fracking is starting to get on the public’s radar, especially from the help of some hollywood stars who have gotten concerned about the topic.

Tara Lohan of Change.org and Alternet writes:

A few years ago, not many people had ever heard of fracking, the process used to get natural gas out of the ground by shooting a slurry of water and undisclosed chemicals underground. But now, this issue is becoming much more well-known, thanks mostly to the fact that the gas drilling industry wants to build thousands of wells in upstate New York (they’ve already been fracking next door in Pennsylvania), home to the water supply for New York City’s millions. And, get this, a few of those million people happen to be famous.

A whole bunch of local residents—farmers, environmentalists, concerned citizens and um, actor Mark Ruffalo—are working on massive public education efforts and are lobbying state and federal governments to step in to halt the practice of fracking, which has been wreaking havoc on watersheds in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas and wherever else fracking has gotten a toe hold.

This month now, “Good Morning America” and MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” have covered the topic. Hopefully, there will be much more coverage and public awareness of hydraulic fracking to come, and hopefully that will generate some real change.

Read more about fracking’s movement into the spotlight and how the fracking industry (including Halliburton) is responding on Change.org.

Photo Credit: beelaineo via flickr under a CC license

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