Sunday, December 16, 2012

Prescription for Canadian prosperity: more fracking!

The Conference Board of Canada is a blue-chip business lobby. When they speak, the Harper gang pays attention.

The Conference Board knows what it's going to take to revive Canada's moribund natural gas industry.

Fracking!

Now the reason that Canada's natural gas industry is moribund in the first place is because the wholesale adaptation of industrial-scale fracking in the US has created a glut in the market. They've got the solution. They figure we can over-produce our way right out of this glut.

Canada has to diversify away from selling all it's oil and gas to the US. What we need is a network of Liquified Natural Gas terminals up and down the West Coast, to deliver that surplus gas to the energy-starved Asian economies.

And while they don't say so, why not supplement that with a few LNG terminals on the East Coast?
Hell, just building all those LNG terminals will keep the economy afloat for a generation!

There's one little nagging doubt I have about this fracking mania that has overtaken the world. Seems to me that fracking more or less involves pumping various toxins into the earths skin under extreme pressure.

Isn't the world's fresh water down there somewhere?

When the US House of Representatives held hearings into fracking practices in 2011, they came up with a list of 650 carcinogens that were commonly used in fracking solutions. So what the Conference Board of Canada is telling us is that we should not hesitate, we should not dilly-dally, we should not lose a moment before pumping 650 carcinogens into the earth's mantle at 15,000 PSI.

Is it just me, or does that seem like a really stupid idea?

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