BETWEEN 6:30 AND 7 nearly every morning, a dark rumble drifts up through the chilled air from the railroad tracks at the bottom of our hayfield in the Adirondack foothills of New York. A line of more than 100 black tanker cars, mostly full of fracked Bakken oil from North Dakota, rolls southward. They will pass the field where our neighbor’s kids play, then close alongside beautiful Lake Champlain, which defines this region, and on to Albany, where the oil will be put on barges and floated down the Hudson River to New Jersey, to be stored or refined.
Tanker cars like these have been blowing up recently. An accident north of us, over the Canadian border, flattened a downtown and killed 47 people. These cars carry a mix of crude oil and volatile compounds arising from the fracking process, making them dangerously flammable. I worry about my small town’s volunteer fire fighters, all of whom I know personally and admire greatly, who do not have the expertise or the equipment to deal with an accident like that.
Watching the tanker cars, I am also haunted by a scene seared into my memory five months ago. We are driving east along U.S. Route 2 in North Dakota, our small camper in tow, trying to pass through Williston, smack in the middle of the Bakken oil fields.
As the sun sets, we see hundreds of oil and gas rigs flaring excess volatile gases in huge plumes of orange flame. Processing plants spew fumes of God-knows-what. There are row upon row of metal trailers, boxes really, actually used as housing for people. Unrelenting traffic beats a path on the undivided highway under furious construction, with no breakdown lanes or turn-offs for miles. Huge water tankers and oil trucks force us to move onward at 60 mph; there will be no rest for us here, as all campgrounds, gas stations, and parking lots are filled with the rigs of the temporary workers.
The surrounding horror is accentuated by remnants of small farms—patches of green with a couple horses and some beef cows grazing in a hay field. A small house, a swing set, an old tractor. Later, we hear about shootings, gambling, theft, and prostitution, the increase in domestic violence, the homelessness of fired temporary workers who had hoped to make a fast and furious buck in the oil fields.
It occurs to us that maybe this is what hell looks like, and we wonder why we ignored the explicit recommendation of the U.S. border guard at the crossing from Canada to assiduously avoid this region. It is a 21st century version of the feverish wealth-seeking of a century-and-a-half ago, but the prize is black, not gold, and the ultimate collateral damage is to the entire planet.
FRACKING, OR hydraulic fracturing, is the poster child for an industry whose dominant discourse seeks to make us forget basic moral issues of justice and caring for our neighbors and the earth. Proponents of fracking feed us slick promises and carefully orchestrated “facts” that conveniently deflect us from discussing the central issue: climate change.
We are told fracking for oil creates jobs, will make our country energy independent, and will reduce the price of gas at the pump. The natural gas produced, we are told, will put less carbon into the air (than coal).
Other people are better equipped to argue with each of these points in nuanced ways. (There are sound arguments countering each.) In the end, few minds will be changed. It is, after all, a matter of each individual’s priorities—and if you do not have a job or are scared of the oil barons in the Middle East, your priorities may come down on the side of fracking.
But why should the words jobs, energy independence, cheap gas, or even less carbon stop discussions about the overall wisdom of fracking? The countering list of concerns grows longer every day: ensuring the safe transport of the oil by train or pipeline; long-term protection of the communities now overrun by the oil boom; diversion of already limited water supplies; disposal of fracking waste water and solids; air pollution near the fracking sites; release of methane; and even earthquakes.
From the point of view of the oil companies, because each of these concerns must be assiduously addressed, they conveniently divert our attention from the central travesty: We are poisoning water, air, and land, risking people’s lives, and destroying communities to get more of something that we should not be using so much of anyway!
No excuse—from jobs to security to cheap gas—can override this central fact: Access to more oil will result in the use of more oil. Use of more oil will increase carbon emissions and exacerbate climate change. And, as always, the poor will disproportionately shoulder the burden.
We are told that extreme weather events—hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, California droughts, polar vortexes—cannot be attributed directly to climate change. This is simply scientists being very careful: Correlation is not the same as causation. This crucial distinction has plagued scientific discussions around climate change from the beginning. Questioning drives the engine of science and legitimizes it. Unfortunately, perhaps due to a shocking lack of scientific literacy in this country, this misunderstanding continues to consume far too much media attention. And it conveniently keeps us off track from the more important consideration: how to slow climate change.
When I come to the table to discuss clean water, air, soil, safety, and a future for my grandchildren, I am dismissed as unrealistic. It seems to me assuming that this problem will fix itself without radical change in our energy consumption is far more unrealistic. Dismissing those who hope for change will not make their arguments go away.
We are told the vested interests of the oil companies must be carefully protected so as to not hinder our slowly recovering economy. As a neighbor, I have a “vested interest” that those trains rolling by our farm fields do not accidentally blow up my neighbor’s children. As an environmentalist, I have a vested interest in a planet that will support future generations much the same as it has so far—(even better, if it can be done more equitably). And as a person of conscience, I have a vested interest in refraining from putting in someone else’s backyard what I would not put in mine.
Aren’t these vested interests as legitimate as those claimed by the oil interests, their legion subcontractors, politicians, and investors? Indeed, supporting community capital and not just monetary capital, I would argue, has considerably more moral legitimacy.
We are told there are ways to mitigate the effects of climate change. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states encouragingly: “Adaptation to climate change is transitioning from a phase of awareness to the construction of actual strategies and plans.” The recently released National Climate Assessment has whole chapters on mitigation and adaptation. So do we ignore the disease as we treat the symptoms? And let’s be real: Options for adaptation are calamitously lacking among the poor.
We are told that if we use oil, we are in no moral position to complain about fracking. But when you live in the middle of a nightmare of misdirected geopolitical priorities, it seems to me that naming them is a moral obligation, even as you acknowledge that it is difficult to extricate yourself from their influence.
We must not let any of these arguments divert us from the reality that all creation is groaning. The bottom line is that these rationales are all trumped by the present and pervasive danger of climate change.
THE TRAINS ROLLING by the edge of our field are symptomatic of a much deeper problem. Local groups around here can’t do much on their own to stop the trains, so they divert their attention to fighting the use of fracking wastewater to melt ice on our roads. There are so many concerns. It is like trying to chase rabbits racing off in all directions. How convenient for the industry.
Meanwhile, high-pressure pumps continue to send water, sand, and chemicals into shale deposits to release gas and oil. As it’s gathered, refined, and burned, the parts per million of carbon will rise. Seas will be drowning small island nations, hunger will increase precipitously due to drought, and wars will be fought over water and arable land.
A century-and-a-half ago this country’s moral judgment drew it into a war to delegitimize and eventually overthrow an entire economic system that was based on the immoral premise that people could be held as property. People of faith were in the forefront of that effort.
Today we live with an economic system based on the extraction and use of fossil fuels. It is not only foolhardy for a number of economic, environmental, and social reasons; it is immoral because it perpetuates the overwhelming injustices of climate change.
People of faith and others need to do some deep thinking in this country about this fossil fuel-based economic system, and we need to begin by defining the discussion on moral grounds. Destroying the planet to preserve the economy is nuts. An economic system that does not specifically aim to alleviate the suffering of the poor and preserve the future of the planet is, at its very core, immoral. And for those that imply that the necessary changes are too radical for consideration, I refer them to the teachings of Jesus, which if nothing else, taught us that sometimes a world must be turned upside down to be redeemed.
Fracking is in everyone’s back yard: We need to redefine the moral state of the union.
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