Fracking wrecks the environment

(Leslie, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-react-to-the-editorial-boards-green-new-deal/2019/02/28/9f72a302-3b77-11e9-a06c-3ec8ed509d15_story.html , 2-28)

Seriously? The plan to use fracked gas, laid out in the editorial board’s vision, is a better plan than the Green New Deal? The huge ships are still coming in, docking a mile offshore, and fracked gas is piped into the holding tanks. Let’s not forget one of the starting points, the fracking wells in Pennsylvania, which will turn huge tracts of fertile farmland into poisoned wasteland where — who knew? — people actually live. The wells are poisoned from fracking contamination, the air is nauseating, and the massive trucks move in and out, bringing ruin and irreversible damage to land and lives. The toxic fracked gas gets piped through our communities, passing through massive compressor stations, showering local residents with tons of toxic emissions and unrelenting noise. Its final destination is Cove Point, where it is refined — call it what it is, the plant is a fracked gas refinery — spewing more than 20 tons of carcinogenic chemicals into the air, land and Chesapeake Bay per year. The plant guzzles fresh water from our aquifer at a rate of 250,000 to 350,000 gallons per day and is voiding its wastewater — 149,000 gallons per day — into a creek that feeds into the local marshes that kiss the bay. Happy thoughts when you feast on crabs, oysters, rockfish and bluefish in the coming summers, presuming they, and we, survive the onslaught.