Letterman telling it like it is.
Yea, I know… where was I.
I didn’t get to see this 2012 clip until it was posted by a friend on Facebook.

I remember when Gasland came out and it was said by industry types in Australia, that coal seam gas would be extracted in a different and much safer way than that depicted in the film. Well guess what, that was just spin; the Frackers are doing it in exactly the same dangerous way. Even taking a benign view of Fracking in Australia, it still involves the waste of vast quantities of precious groundwater just to produce the gas. This groundwater depletion for coal seam gas production has by itself, made the extraction of water for human consumption and agriculture much more difficult.

The past informs the future and that tells us that no industrial process is without risk, it’s just a matter of deciding how much you’re willing to lose. No matter how safe offshore drilling was said to be, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico still happened. No matter how safe nuclear power plants are, according to proponents of nuclear power, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster still happened.

Whereas Fracking elsewhere in the world might contaminate one of many aquifers, in Australia, Fracking contamination anywhere in Queensland and northern New South Wales would destroy the world’s greatest aquifer, The Great Artesian Basin.
“The Great Artesian Basin provides the only reliable source of freshwater through much of inland Australia. The basin is the largest and deepest artesian basin in the world, stretching over a total of 1,700,000 square kilometres.” (Wikipedia).
• Also see here for a map of the Great Artesian Basin.

The Qld and NSW governments need the Fracking tax cash so in this age of short-termism, they’re prepared to give Australia’s Frackers the benefit of the doubt right up to the point when Australia’s Great Artesian Basin is totally fracked. When that inevitably happens, they’ll squeal: “it was a terrible accident” or “the company responsible will be held to account”. But by then it’ll be too late and as inland towns, livestock and crops die, who will hold our politicians to account. In the meantime, some chemical contamination of the groundwater, as a consequence of Fracking, is inevitable. It’ll just be a matter of ‘authorities’ determining how much carcinogenic water we’re prepared to tolerate.

So good on Letterman for having his rant but he forgot to mention we elect governments to prevent this sort of economic rape, so wherever it’s happening, there’s a fracking government watching.

More:
• Gasland the Movie
• Artists Against Fracking.
• More Views on the Gas Rush and Hydraulic Fracturing
(by Andrew Revkin, NYT July 2, 2012)
• Buru seeks approvals for new round of fracking in the Kimberley
(By Ben Collins, ABC 16 May, 2013)

From now on, I think I’ll replace the ‘u’ with ‘ra’ and use frack, frackers, fracking instead. Hey, it’s PG enough to use round kids and you never know it might become a byword for this evil industry.

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