Earth Day, Fracking, and the welfare of North America.

Ah, Earth day. The day of the year environmentalist hippies rejoice and join together to save the earth with an all-natural puff of Weed. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for doing things to protect our earth and it's resources but Earth day has become, and you could say it was from the start, a day dedicated to the Liberal Agenda.

"Fracking" (http://tinyurl.com/6afkj5v) has been attacked by the Left for years now as being enviromentally "unsafe" and causing "pollution" to the water. The Left have turned Hydraulic Fracturing into an evil occupation done by evil, greedy people. Now I'm sure many people have seen the video of the fire coming out of the water faucet caused by a Natural Gas leak. And I'm not going to deny that Fracking has risks, but generally it's worthwhile and safe.
As with any operation involving chemicals and potentially harmful substances, the problem isn't necessarily with the process, but with the precautions taken. Fracking in and of itself is is safe and has been used in America (especially in the Midwest) for years.The pollution everyone is complaining about come from how well the precautions were. Technically,  a well that isn't built competently could give you trouble just like Fracking could.

I have decided that the best explanation the could be given of this would be in the video below. It clarifies and highlights many of the main points of this post.

                                     

So while the process is generally safe, there are environmental risks involved, but they are not nearly as bad as the Liberal Left would have you believe. So why is it so important that we keep fracking? According to the Institute for Energy Research, we have more than 1.3 billion barrels of oil that are technically recoverable in the United States with existing technology. The largest deposits are located offshore in portions of Alaska and in shale deposits in the Rocky Mountain West. This means the United States has more recoverable oil than the rest of the world combined, outside of North America. The Heritage foundation says this to fuel every passenger car in the nation for 430 years. Therefore, “ it is merely semantics—not a scientific assessment of what America has the capacity to produce-- that allows critics to claim repeatedly that America is running out of energy.”

Right now we are becoming more dependent on foreign oil. President Obama claims that we have very little "recoverable" oil. but he overlooks much of the oil that could be reached through fracking and offshore drilling. Fracking in the Rocky Mountains has already proved very beneficial, and has created lots of jobs, in addition to providing oil. The benefits of fracking far outweigh the risks involved. And if done competently and by properly trained individuals, fracking is completely safe. It remains a mystery to me why we haven't tapped into the resources even more.

 President Obama, though, has been caving to the far left environmentalist group for a long time. He has imposed strict regulations on fracking making it harder to get into the industry. The Left-wing media has demonized it and have caused many to believe that the Fracking process will destroy our country's nature, as well as contaminate water and land. It is important that the American people realize that we do not need to spend billions of dollars to get oil from other countries, many of which are not our best of allies. 

I believe that for our country to grow and prosper, it needs to become more independent. But our President doesn't see it in the same light. rather than anger the environmentalist groups and people(Al Gore anyone?) that helped get him into office, he would  impose regulations and turn down importants projects that would help achieve more independency. This has been proven numerous times, whether it was a moratorium on deep sea drilling in 2010, or the more recently delaying the Keystone XL Pipeline that would run from Canada to the U.S. with the potential to deliver up to 590,000 barrels per day of Canadian crude oil into the Mid-West refining markets.Even though the majority of Canadians and Americans support the pipeline.

I finish today with a quote from a great business man "What's right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity - intellect and resources - to do something about them". Henry Ford. We have the resources and the means. So a question to the President, What's holding us up?