PA Nightmare - Green Dreams

When it comes to oil, gas, and fracking wells, the petrochemical industry wants you to think of green. That is the primary color of the US Dollar.

They don't want you thinking of rainbows and clear glass.

A rainbow sheen on to of water means that there is gas or oil on it.

Clear is the color of methane gas. As best as I can tell.

And they want you thinking of Texas in the movies where the oil and gas wells are huge and generally away from where people are living.

They don't want you thinking of the natural gas disaster that is Pennsylvania where there are so many oil and gas wells drilled that the state doesn't even know where they all are. That is because many off them were drilled in the first “oil boom” in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The companies were busy drilling and no one thought that they would go bust.

Well, now Pennsylvania has a number of problems related to the oil and gas industry that it helped give birth to.

All these old wells are leaking methane – a know greenhouse gas that is four times as dangerous as carbon dioxide. Worse yet – nobody knows where the wells are, for the most part.

Some wells are obvious because of the rusting derricks that sit idle. There are many others that no one even is aware of. And they are leaking a dangerous gas and can explode. Methane is also highly flammable. Can you picture a fire starting at a well from a lightning strike in a dry forest? I'd rather not.

Since these wells are abandoned and unmapped, the people of Pennsylvania have no idea what might be happening on their property. Some wells were properly capped, but the years of neglect from companies that have gone bankrupt means that the concrete is failing. Others had dirt, garbage, or – as reported in many cases – cannonballs dumped down them. (I really don't want to be around if that well goes off.)

In addition to all the environmental problems from oil and gas spills are the health effects that unsuspecting people that live around these mystery wells suffer from – breathing problems, cancers, birth defects, and so on.

So Pennsylvania has started to try and map these wells by having fracking companies document and map all wells within one thousand feet of a new fracking site. If I understand the regulations correctly, new fracking wells need to be a certain distance from an existing well or it can't be drilled because of problems that could result from the old well being disturbed.

New York did make a good choice in banning fracking because of the damage that fracking can do to water tables and the environment.

New York needs to go further. It needs to ban the pipelines that transports fracked gas and oil from Pennsylvania to Canada and other locations.

It needs to enact more stringent laws for tanker cars that use the railways and rail yards in NYS.

It also needs to enact more stringent staffing requirements for trains that are transporting carbon bomb oil cars. Remember the disaster in Quebec? That train had only one person on it. Imagine if there was a second engineer to man the emergency brake system while the other was inspecting the train?

No matter what, the burning of fossil fuels must stop if we are to save this planet that we are living on.

New York also needs to make it easier and more affordable for home owners to put up solar panels and wind generation systems. (I dislike saying turbines because people think of that huge “Steel Wind” turbines in Lackawana. There are much smaller and more inconspicuous systems that are coming out that work well with smaller properties and urban settings.)

So while Pennsylvania is picking up the pieces from the carbon bomb that exploded over it well over 100 years ago, New York needs to either lead, follow, or get out of the way of the people that want to save the planet from the impending carbon nightmare that is waiting to explode over the whole planet.