Finding Fault With Anti-Fracking Science Claims 505
A widely carried Associated Press article (here, as run by the Wall Street Journal) reports that some of the convincingly scientific-sounding claims of opponents of fracking don't seem to hold up to scrutiny. That's not to say that all is peaches: the article notes, for instance, that much of the naturally radioactive deep water called flowback forced up along with fracking-extracted gas "was once being discharged into municipal sewage treatment plants and then rivers in Pennsylvania," leading to concern about pollution of public water supplies. Public scrutiny and regulation mean that's no longer true. But specific claims about cancer rates, and broader ones about air pollution or other ills, are not as objective as they might appear to be, according to Duke professor Avner Vengosh and others. An excerpt: "One expert said there's an actual psychological process at work that sometimes blinds people to science, on the fracking debate and many others. 'You can literally put facts in front of people, and they will just ignore them,' said Mark Lubell, the director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior at the University of California, Davis. Lubell said the situation, which happens on both sides of a debate, is called 'motivated reasoning.' Rational people insist on believing things that aren't true, in part because of feedback from other people who share their views, he said."
If it is as safe as you claim... (Score:2, Interesting)
force the executives to live on that land, breathe that air, and drink that water for the entire time they are fracking it. No bottled water, or filters either. If there are no dangers, then they should do it willingly. My bet is they won't.
Viable alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)
Alternatives would become more financially competitive if more work were put into them. I'd love to see the money oil companies spent on defending their dirty businesses go to research and development of cleaner technologies.
i'm conflicted on this (Score:5, Interesting)
the marcellus shale has so much natural gas, we could all start driving cars powered by natural gas and all of the geopolitical headaches of oil would just go away. plus, with no incentive to safeguard foreign petroleum, we could just not care about security in the middle east
however, that's all fine and dandy until you consider the possibility that you are trading energy security for poisoned underground aquifers. i like my water supply clean, thanks
but the fracking goes on on a level far below the water table
still, it's like puncture holes that can induce mixing between layers. the poisons are not necessarily just from the fracking chemicals, there are all sorts of completely natural nasty minerals you don't want mixed up and introduced into your water supply with some artificial mayhem underground
the need then becomes that states and local governments REQUIRE drilling companies to go through a process whereby
1. they absolutely guarantee they follow procedures to carefully puncture the water table,
2. then seal their operations off from the water table, during operations,
3. and finally, when operations cease, to make sure they have a seal that is inspected and certified as the best we can technologically do
the problem is people acting too quickly and shoddy efforts and abandoned responsibilities, the usual lax standards when there is no fierce regulatory body around: you get the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
this is a case where strict government regulation is an absolute must. government regulation something that is apparently evil according republicans. i guess republicans don't have to turn the faucet on in their home!
finally, there is the issue of the chemicals they are using your fracking. a lot of these mictures are trade secrets. well, that trade secret veil needs to be pierced: if it goes into the ground near my water table, i don't give a flying f*ck about your trade secrets, i want to know what you are pumping down there, and my right to know that my water is safe supersedes your capitalist imperative
however, i was recently amused to find out one major componet of the fracking brew:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/world/asia/fracking-in-us-lifts-guar-farmers-in-india.html [nytimes.com]
Guar gum!
Yes, the same thing you see listed as a thickener on your ice cream!
Which makes sense, you want to shove something down there thick and rigid and with a high viscosity to shove the natural gas back up: water laced with sand and thickeners. Makes sense.
So this relieves my worry somewhat. But I still want to know every chemical going into the ground. I don't care about your trade secrets, it's my water!
Re:Motiviated reasoning? (Score:4, Interesting)
Reasoning, motivated or not (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no such thing as "motivated reasoning", there's only "reasoning", and it's not a good way to make policy.
Science is based on observation, and as a result we get "evidence-based" decisions. Knowing the likely result because you've done it before makes for good decisions.
When you have a lot of observations, you can sometimes discover underlying laws, rules, and insight into the mechanisms of outcome. This results in "analysis-based" decisions.
"Analysis-based" decisions are only valid when the rules and insight are properly applied. In any situation, you have to correctly identify that the rules you use is valid, and you *also* have to know that no other rules apply. No one does this perfectly and at all times, and so "analysis-based" decisions are less likely to be correct.
For an example, consider predicting the behaviour of an electrical circuit. The rules and insight for electronics are straightforward, but consider how often a real-life circuit fails to work as predicted. The same is true for software: setting aside bugs and misunderstanding of requirements, how often does a piece of software exhibit unpredicted behaviour?
And finally, there's "story-based" reasoning. That's where you make predictions based on gut feel and experience using insights from other disciplines, and then make decisions based on that. Economics is reasoning based on stories, as is Intelligent design.
For this example, in economics it's well known that a little inflation is good, a lot of inflation is bad, and negative inflation is very bad. What is the optimal value? Is the value exact, or can it be a little off (ie - is the plot of good/bad sharply peaked, or relatively flat)? How does one even *calculate* inflation?
Economics is all opinions and "schools of thought" with no predictive power. It explains why something happened, but it never seems to tell us what will happen next.
We need to get away from "story-based" decisions and rely more on evidence. Civilization is at a point where we now have unprecedented levels of information and data which could be mined for evidence and used to make decisions, so long as we ask the right questions.
For questions for which we have no readily available evidence, we should be gathering it. In cases where the risk/reward equation yields a high risk, such as permanently damaging the water supply over a wide swath of the country, it might be prudent to hold off until proper evidence has been gathered.
Why peer review is increasingly broken (Score:5, Interesting)
From the mid 1990s by the Vice-provost of Caltech: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html [caltech.edu]
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."
More like that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science [pdfernhout.net]
Also:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/26/peer-review-as-censorship/ [counterpunch.org]
All reasoning is also based on emotion, which relate to perceptions, assumptions, priorities and preferences which are, to some extent, outside of pure rationality (which why "technocracy" has many issues).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error [wikipedia.org]
But the biggest issue is that our socio-economic-political system is not well-adapted to handle "externalities" including systemic risks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality [wikipedia.org]
Any reasonable projection over the next twenty years shows we will almost certainly have dirt-cheap PV given exponential growth of that industry and rapidly dropping costs. We may even have hot or cold fusion in that time (and other things). With alternatives on the way, there is not a very good case to be made for risking destroy our groundwater for just a bit more fossil fuels:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/ [cleantechnica.com]
http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices [solarbuzz.com]
http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power-the-world-in-16-years [bigthink.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Solar_power [wikipedia.org]
http://pesn.com/2012/07/19/9602138_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_July19/ [pesn.com]
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/414559/a-new-approach-to-fusion/ [technologyreview.com]
And so on...
Accounting for externalities (including US defense spending for long oil supply lines), renewables (and energy efficiency) have been *cheaper* than fossil fuels since the 1970s... Two resources on that from around 1980:
Re:One Sided science (Score:4, Interesting)
The journals and their readers absolutely love a good scientific controversy, and the citations you give are good examples of that. But, all sides are required to be equally rigorous in their treatment of data and the construction of their arguments, no exceptions. Anyone who can't manage to do that is likely to go away mumbling about politics and conspiracies, as we've seen here.
Re:Reasoning, motivated or not (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm I thought the Austrian school's primary tenant is that you can't predict economic results.
Also anyone with any market experience could have predicted the dot bomb market crash. It was OBVIOUS that there was a lot of excess in the market and it was going to end badly.
The appropriate guideline here is "trees don't grow to the sky".
Re:Common sense (Score:2, Interesting)
Bluestrat already tore you a new one about the need for dependence on government healthcare, let me attack more directly.
We have already heard the inspiring story that of the twelve dead, three were MEN who did the only honorable thing their government left for them to do, die in the service of their womenfolk; taking the bullets in their body that others might live. But imagine, if you can, what might have been had one or two of the people in those seats been legally allowed to bear arms. Yes a sudden attack by a determined evil man would have resulted in deaths, no doubt of that. But would the madness have continued until his damned gun jammed? Riddle me that.
Ok, somebody might have got trigger happy. Somebody might have been an incompetent who shouldn't have been carrying and shot somebody by accident in the confusion. As compared to to the body count we are watching on the news that sounds like a price every survivor would have been willing to pay.
Show me a mass killing and I will show you the sign on the wall declaring the 'gun free zone.' CO has a concealed carry law but Aurora forbids guns to anyone but a LEO. The State had finally passed an override over that local law so perhaps someone caught carrying could have contested it and got off with just a no-contest conviction for the remaining law against any discharge. But it was all moot because the multiplex was private property and the politically correct corporation had declared it a 'gun free zone.' Notice who that sign failed to convince, but all the law abiding DID obey and the rest is history.
Think about it, these guys are evil, some are even deranged, but the ones who get a body count worthy of national media aren't totally stupid. They know where they can find unarmed targets.
Re:One Sided science (Score:3, Interesting)
> The data was not manipulated and was cleared of all wrongdoing.
That would be a neat trick since the key raw data at CRU was destroyed.
So we have nothing left but "trust me" to decide to redirect a very sizable portion of world production into a project that just happens, total coincidence btw, to be exactly what socialists have been demanding we do for most of the 20th Century.
Way I see it is if we give in we get world socialism which would result in the Hell on Earth that has occurred every single place it has been tried as Option one. Option two is to tell the eco nuts to FOAD and we guessed right that it was a scam. Good times. Option three is they were both wicked and right, which means a future that is going to suck. But it would take a pretty vivid imagination of think of a eco doom worse than socialism, especially since we would have a robust economy to pay for mitigation or geoengineering.
So try to reason me out of that decision. Namecalling won't do it, in case you haven't noticed your team is losing the PR war and the shrill "you fools are going to DIE" stuff just sounds desperate at this point in the debate. Show me a higher probablility of things being worse on a warmed earth than the probability of death camps, mass graves, poverty, war, etc. that have always marked the terminal stages of socialism. The Earth has neen much warmer than today and much cooler. Life would be different but it would be life and we would be Free.
Re:Motiviated reasoning? (Score:0, Interesting)
Consensus has no place in science, as Feynman pointed out long ago. further, the Oregon statement, which found little support for AGW, was signed by 32,000 scientists. The few specific predictions made by warmalist hoaxers have all failed. In 1988, James Hansen predicted that by 2008, the West Side Highway in New York City would be underwater due to rising ocean levels. this failed. Kevin Trenberth, leader hoaxer at the Univ of East Anglia, has been proclaiming rising temps publicly, while privately emailing fellow hoaxers lamenting the lack of any global warming after 1999.
Re:One Sided science (Score:5, Interesting)
The additives also do other things, such as controlling the viscosity.
Another point is that it wouldn't thelp very much to use pure water. When the pressure is removed, a lot of the water which was put down into the bore hole will come up again. Most of this will have been in contact with oil-containing rocks, and will be polluted with oil. So even if you put pure water down, you will not get pure water up.
Re:One Sided science (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, since everyone seems to have abandoned themselves to the emotional discussion there are the simple facts on Fracking
(1) It represents pumping underground between 10 and 20 Acre feet of solution and sand into an area usually in the order of about 20 to 40 acres in area. This jacks up the land by about 0.5 feet. This definitely "fractures" hense the term "fracking" the rocks breaking the "impermiable barriers" involved. This is done with massive pressures in the order of 45,000psi.
(2) Fracking is massively more efficient for recovery of natural gas and oil.
(3) Fracking does cause earthquakes during the process typically in the order of 4.0 but has been higher. Sites in Arkansas have been shut down from too many earthquakes. Having nearly 10,000 in one year.
(4) Fracking isn't necessarily bad or good and highly varies in effect from location to location. That is some locations have no problems many other locations have problems.
(5) By the industry's own reports they estimate that Fracking will destroy 50% of the ground water resources of North America in the next 5 years polluting them beyond use without use of heavy purification technologies. This is why the oilmen have invested heavily in water purification technologies so that they can profit from the cities and towns and individuals who need drinking water to replace the pollution destroyed sources they have.
(6) The Fracking advocates plan to extract and export most of US production. This means the USA will get a trivial amount of resources in return for massive cost.
(7) The Fracking process is very likely doing very serious damage to the actual geological structures rendering much of the hydrocarbon lost by this damage. It is probably true that fracking is causing the loss of much of the USA resources on a perminant basis.
Now people seem to be reading this issue on the basis of some political bias. None of what I just said has anything to do with any bias. It is just from the investment and technical papers of the industry. It isn't even written by critics of the industry. It is in fact what the industry is saying internally.