Placards for Hazardous Materials

Petrochemicals will give W.Va. more harm than help

Opinion-Editorial by S. Tom Bond, Charleston Gazette, May 4, 2014

Tom Witt’s article “Petrochemicals can boost state” (March 23) is a fascinating picture of economics cut loose from reality. The reality includes real costs not mentioned in his article and serious morality issues.

One is global warming. If you don’t believe in it after the American Association for Advancement of Science, the world’s foremost scientific organization, the Royalty Society of the United Kingdom, NASA, and the U.S. Military have published strong statements that it is happening and it is caused by industrial man, you are in a class with people who believe in extraterrestrials, black helicopters and faith healing.

The amount of waste being produced is so great the EPA had to throw up its hands and exempt it from federal law. Ten barrels of waste for each barrel of oil or oil equivalent energy. If it had to be handled like other waste producers’ offcast it would not be economically feasible to do shale drilling. Landfills are overflowing, and so much liquid waste is pumped below the surface earthquakes are occurring in some places.

The industry doesn’t have to put up bonds sufficient to plug the wells. Judging by West Virginia history from the earlier gas and oil drilling and coal mining, operators will find a way to wiggle out of it, and the public will have to pay. If so, it will get done later when it is far more expensive. Maybe these deep holes in the earth will just be abandoned for all time.

Then there are the health effects. The shale drilling technology burst onto the scene without the usual “scale up” that attends most industrial processes. Health effects have never been studied by the industry. Now that it is going on a huge scale, there is a very large number of anecdotal reports, and the industry has public relations going at full scale, not to deny them, but to cover them up, and to make it difficult for scientists to do research on air, water and noise pollution. One organization in Pennsylvania has a list of over 5,100 health incidents. Numerous scientists are looking for access to make measurements and people to run tests on.

It is dangerous business. The industry has eight times the accident rates other industries have. Exploding pipelines and huge train wreck fires abound. Insurance companies pay for this. In some areas they are refusing to insure farms where fracking takes place, because they don’t want to be caught with property losses.

The public is exposed to constant boosterism advertising and public relations which neglects these matters. I suggest Dr. Witt’s op-ed is far short of the whole reality of shale drilling. It is a narrow vision that will help some West Virginians a little, out-of-state investors a lot, but hurt far more honest citizens than the number it will help. It will hurt farm, forest, game and fish, clean water, the retirement and tourist industry essentially forever.

These are all very real externalized costs.

>>> S. Thomas Bond, of Jane Lew, is a retired teacher with a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry, a member of the Guardians of the West Fork and the Monongahela Area Watersheds Compact. <<<