The Worst Way to Power the Planet

I think the most important environmental issue is Fracking. It does damage to the environment, families, and the over all ecosystem. Fracking is by far the most dangerous of all the methods of getting energy. The lawyers say that it safe for all of the people in the area. They deny any claim of the water being flammable and turning to plastic as their fault. The wastewater from the fracking is being dumped into streams and fields illegally. Hydraulic Fracturing wastes an exorbitant amount of water. There are 400-600 tankers full of hydraulic fracking water sent to each well. Two hundred to four hundred trucks of water are left in the ground. They seep into the ground and the water is sprayed into the air to evaporate it. The water itself is infused with several life threatening and deadly chemicals. These chemicals leak into the whole water table for an ecosystem. Animals and people are getting incredibly sick from all of the diseases and problems it is causing. Animals are reducing in weight and losing hair patches. The water coming out of the faucet is flammable and could easily blow up a house. The people who drink the water are given defects that will travel through them and their children. This is why in my opinion Fracking is by far the worst way to power the planet

Nuclear Energy or Oil?

Nuclear Energy is extremely dangerous and toxic. It creates waste that is hard to deal with and it can wipe out a whole city if left unwatched. Yet at the same time it is the most efficient fuel source out there. The small amount of toxic waste it produces is easily sealed underground never to be touched. The amount of nuclear waste produced since the beginning of nuclear industry is only enough to fill a football field 15 yards deep. Any nuclear disaster is a rarity compared to the dozens of disasters oil has caused. Nuclear energy accounts for nearly a third of the world’s energy. And is obviously an amazing and low pollution source of energy.

         Oil is a nasty business. For foreign oil whole countries are invaded just for the purpose of unearthing the precious resource. This valuable fuel source is a must have for every modern day society. Everything runs off oil, cars, boats, and planes. The list could go on, various products of oil power each of these machines. While oil is a “fairly easy” to access resource it is an extreme pollutant. The amount of damage done to the environment just in the process of acquiring it is vast. When an accident like an oil tanker crashing happens, which it does quite frequently it seems, there is massive ecological damage if it is not sustained within minutes. The goopy oil destroys whole ecosystems and kills many animals. Not only does this hurt the ecosystem it also hurts the economy. The people who rely on the ocean as their trade are hurt severely. Fishermen are put out of jobs for months. Even the method used to clean the oil spill, corexit, is hazardous, about 4 times as hazardous as the oil itself. All of the people who had worked on the oil spill that happened on the exxon valdez have all died as a side effect from interacting with the horrible chemical. This is why in my opinion oil is far worse for the environment.

Global Warming hype, or is it man made fact?

Is Global warming just hype or is it a man made byproduct of our daily lives. I think that humans are at fault for the rise of global warming. Our ridiculous amount of power that we go through including oil, coal, and natural gas, produces so many pollutants that it is causing a rise in global temperature. The effects of global warming are obvious and staring us in the face. Every winter we seem to have either no snow or barely any. There used to be massive snowstorms or at least more then a few a winter. The past couple of winters have only had a small amount of snow and the snow has come too early or not at all. The recent decline in snow and increase in temperature are obvious signs of these changes rapidly taking affect. I believe that all of the pollutants that we are pumping into the air are definitely having a physical effect. Several cities have pollution so bad that the air is filled with thick smog. A fog made thick because of smoke in the air. These are directly linked with pollutants like coal or gas burning. This process is happening on a much grander scale, the earth’s atmosphere is filling with these gasses and making a barrier for sunlight. The suns rays are bouncing off of the thick atmosphere. The sunrays that do make it through are often trapped because of the barrier, in turn this heats up the Earth. 

Fracking vs. Coal

Natural gas and Fracking is one of the most dangerous sources of energy. This method of gathering natural gas known as fracking is extremely detrimental to the environment. Fracking is the term for hydraulically fracturing the earth to extract natural gasses. The process of fracking requires massive amounts of water and chemicals. There are 400-600 tankers full of hydraulic fracking water sent to each well. Two hundred to four hundred trucks of water are left in the ground. They seep into the ground and the water is sprayed into the air to evaporate it. These wells are numerous and spread all through out the U.S. The water used by the wells is infused with a mix of harmful substances including formaldehyde, petroleum, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and others. All of the water that is left over inside of the ground is incredibly polluted with these chemicals. These chemicals destroy the surrounding areas. The chemicals wreck the water system through out the area. This ends up poisoning all of the animals and even the people in the surround land.

Coal is one of the most widely used power sources in the world, it accounts for about 41% of the worlds electricity. One of the main methods for acquiring coal is too remove the top of a mountain off and extracting the coal from the base of the mountain. This destroys the surrounding valleys by filling them in with rubble and debris from the mountain. Also when coal is burning it produces a massive cloud of deadly smoke and 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide for every mega-watt hour.

In my opinion Fracking is the worse of the two because of the damage that it does to the whole area near the wells. They are destroying the earth wherever they are located.