At this time huge areas of the United States are being destroyed in order to get natural gas out of the ground with a process where they drill holes in the ground, a lot of holes and inject batches of toxic chemicals down the hole and then explode the stuff. This fractures up the underlying rocks usually shale of some sort and then the natural gas in the vicinity can be sucked out of the ground. I have seen pictures of these fields in Montana on the Rocky Mountain front from the air and it is almost unbelievable, miles and miles and miles of hilly prairie lands first covered with roads snaking every which way and then big bulldozed areas with wells almost every 500 or 1000 feet in a grid and next to each well a bunch of small utility building and usually a dug out retention pond for the toxic liquids, and all these wells are then attached to pipelines that form a pipeline spider web across the landscape. It is unbelievable that anyone in their right mind would conceive of such a way to get some gas out of the ground and unbelievable that all these wells could be built, roads put in and pipelines laid could be put in and actually have any return to anyone unless heavilly subsidized, which of course they are as the companies are not paying the real cost now or in the long term for all the damages they are doing.
This Natural Gas Fracking craze is the latest stumble in our societies addiction to oil. We are going in to the late stages and demanding our drug of choice be delivered no matter what the price or the consequence.
In our stupidity we are destroying huge swaths of our country and destroying the water tables for gas mostly to heat homes which are built to really low standards and mostly just radiate all the heat energy to the outside air. A great thing if you are a gas utility that wants to sell lots of Gas at high prices to people who don't know any better.
But we know better.
We could have a building code that requires all heated buildings to be designed and insulated to use 75-90% less energy to heat. This is a technology and know how that we have right now this very minute.
We could have a program to bring all existing buildings up to the same standard over the next ten years. This is a technology that we have right now his very minute.
As for all those drilling companies we also have a technology that could then take the buildings which would be 75% more energy efficient and make those 80% more efficient. It is called the geo thermal heat pump. That means right now today all bull shit from politicians and the energy industry pushed in the shit can, we can have buildings that use 90%-95% less energy! Really, truely, and with technology that is 1000's of years old. So when some sleaze bag from Exxon Mobil or some Right Wing Think Tank policy Wonk gets on the soap box and pours fourth the pablum that we must invest billions and billions in research and development for decades and decades before we can think about getting off the oil and gas it is pure 100% nonsense.
We could make it the building code that all buildings where it is possible have geothermal heat pumps. Look out your window, is there ground out there? Yes? Well OK, you could park one of those natural gas drilling rigs on that ground and drill a hole 100-400 feet deep and insert pipes in that hole and connect those to a box about the size of a refrigerator next to your house and it would heat your house for about 20% of what your current heat system does. This is technology we have right now this very minute. This could be applied to about 80% of all heated buildings in the entire country. Maybe more if engineers could figure out how to put in a lot of deep holes under major cities.
We use I believe about 30% of our energy to heat buildings. If that were cut 80% then we could grow our economy for another 50-100 years and have energy use go down.
The solution of drilling for heat pumps instead of drilling for natural gas.
And by the way heat pumps work in reverse so they also cool homes and buildings 80% more efficiently than conventional cooling systems and with the same equipment.
Then at some point in the future after we have efficiently designed buildings and heating systems and homes we can work on ways to get new high tech energy resources to provide for sensible use of , but in fact we could double the US population and have energy use go down for the next 50 years.
Why do we not do this? Because gas and oil and electric utilities are huge capital intensive corporations which make a lot of money and pay a lot of dividends and the idea of a half century of declining returns scares the hell out of them and their bought off employees in Congress and the Senate.
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