Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Any technology can be abused. As we have seen, people are dying right now because of bad practices
in the wind turbine production chain. It is irrational to say that because a technology or practice can be
abused, it ought not be used.
I call this the abuse-use fallacy. It is a blueprint for opposing any technology. For example, Fox could
make
Carland,
which could show car crashes and then blame all of them on “Big Auto.” Then he could
argue that because car crashes are possible, we don't need cars. In fact, Fox could make a far more alarm-
ing movie than
Gasland
based on supposedly risk-free solar and wind technology. Imagine a scene at a
rare-earth mine in a movie called
Wasteland.
Defenders of fracking often point out that the “abusers” Fox cities are false attributions—the next fal-
lacy we'll discuss. But the pattern of argument would be wrong even if Fox wasn't fabricating particular
abuses; individual abuses do not prove that an entire technology should not be used—they prove it should
not be abused.
The abuse-use fallacy is deadly because it can be used to attack anything a group opposes. As citizens,
we hate to see even one coal mine accident, one spill of hazardous liquids, one example of industry corrup-
tion, but we must use that feeling to advocate for proper laws and best practices, not to drive us to outlaw
crucial technologies.
THE FALSE-ATTRIBUTION FALLACY
False attribution is claiming that one event causes another, devoid of proof. For example, in
Gasland,
Josh
Fox famously showed people lighting their water on fire—a phenomenon that, unknown to many, is a fre-
quent natural occurrence almost always stemming from the natural presence of methane (natural gas) in
the water.
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But it gets falsely attributed to fracking, as do many groundwater problems that are actually
due to natural contamination of standard water wells.
A U.S. Geological Survey study conducted between 1991 and 2004 examined the quality of water from
domestic wells and found: “More than one in five (23 percent) of the sampled wells contained one or
more contaminants at a concentration greater than a human-health benchmark. . . . Contaminants most of-
ten found at concentrations greater than human-health benchmarks were inorganic chemicals, with all but
nitrate derived primarily from natural sources.”
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In other words, more than one in five wells are naturally
contaminated according to our government's standards. Yet we are taught to treat “natural” water as clean
and blame all dirty water on industry, especially the fossil fuel industry.
Attributing water issues to fracking is almost always disingenuous. Here's the truth about groundwater.
Every technology uses raw materials that must be mined from the ground, and anytime we drill or mine or
dig underground, groundwater can be compromised. Of all the things you can do underground, fracking is
the least likely to affect groundwater, because it takes place thousands of feet away from it. As President
Obama's former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson acknowledged, there is no “proven case where the frack-
ing process itself has affected water. . . .”
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If an oil company causes contamination at a fracked oil or gas well, it almost certainly has nothing to
do with the fracking element of the process, but rather something near the groundwater, such as a surface
spill of oil or some other liquid. So why single out fracking? Because attacks on fossil fuels thrive on
technophobia—the fear of new technology—which is exploited by using unfamiliar, unknown terms like
