End of fracking.....economic impact to United States

[Benton]

(04-11-2016, 11:55 PM)michaelsean Wrote: We keep talking about companies investing in alternative energies, and they do, but let's be realistic.  Investing money with little forseeable return isn't healthy for a company. You can't go all out or your stock plummets.  Hell for once let China figure it out and steal it from them.

I don't blame businesses. If there's not a foreseeable profit, don't do it. But I do think that's where the government should be investing. Put a billion dollar bounty on rights to a renewable source, or give subsidies to research companies (which is done to an extent). If we have money to subsidize oil and coal for cheap energy, we have money to subsidize finding a replacement for them.

(04-12-2016, 03:35 AM)Brownshoe Wrote: I think that ending fracking would be a bad idea. I'm a pretty pro-fracking guy, but I think that it does need to be well regulated. A lot of the bad effects of fracking (like the increase of earthquakes) actually isn't from fracking, but it's from the wastewater when they're done fracking and putting it back into the ground. The EPA, and the UKs version of the EPA both cleared fracking of having widespread and systematic pollution of drinking water. There are examples of this happening, but it can be avoided by being well regulated.

Personally I think that the pros more than make up for the cons of fracking. Fracking provides us with MUCH cheaper energy / fuel, and it reduces our carbon footprint by half when natural gas replaces coal power plants. Plus close to every problem with it can be avoided if it's well regulated.

I was at a forum this weekend for our first congressional district race. One of the candidates made the statement 'we've done a good job of defunding the EPA so that they can't enforce their socialist agenda, but we need to do more.' Then he went on to say it was an organization of corporate lawyers and how the only way to handle the EPA is to do away with their funding so that laws passed are irrelevant.

The same thing happened with immigration funding in the 80s and 90s... that worked out extremely well.

I think the thing that really irked me was the statement was made about a week after the CEO who covered up and was responsible for the Big Branch mine deaths received a whopping $250,000 fine. That's about $8,500 for every life ended by his reduction of safety procedures, lying to safety officials and violating safety laws. He was sentenced to a year in jail, but most likely won't serve it.