Fracking wastewater now endangers both drinking water and the wells that regurgitate the wastewater

There's an old saying that I won't spell out completely, but which most readers will certainly have heard at least once in their lives, to wit: "Don't sh-- where you eat." It is an all-purpose warning about not pursuing incompatible activities in the same place, particularly activities that produce either physical waste or emotional complications.

In this case the waste part is wastewater emitted by oil wells drilled into shale deposits which must undergo extensive hydraulic fracturing (often called fracking) before the oil can be freed. What most people do not know is that for every barrel of shale oil extracted, three to five barrels of water laden with fracking chemicals and salt, toxic minerals and radioactivity (from the deep rock) also comes up, most of it water originally injected under high pressure to fracture the shale and release the oil.

Some 9 millions barrels a days of shale oil is currently produced in the United States each day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That means between 27 and 45 million barrels of fracking wastewater is produced EACH DAY; in gallons that's between 1.1 and 1.9 billion gallons. And, of course, multiply by 365 and you'll get yearly totals. That's a lot of wastewater and it has to go somewhere and that somewhere is starting to pollute underground water supplies and surface soil and water, and to interfere with oil production itself.

Can authoritarians solve our environmental problems?

If you are deeply concerned about our environmental future, if you believe climate change is an existential issue, if you think toxics in soil, water and air are a major contributor to disease and to rapid fertility decline in humans and perhaps other animals, if you believe that the catastrophic decline of insect populations is something more than a convenient development for outdoor living but rather a sign of biodiversity collapse, if you wonder how increasingly over-exploited natural resources including water, soil, fossil fuels and metals can keep up with growing populations and growing demand, if you are worried about some or all of these things, then you may have been wondering in the last couple of decades whether democratic governments will actually do anything significant to reverse the negative trends in these areas.

The answer so far is not much. Perhaps you have asked yourself if the public and corporations need to be forced to do the right things when it comes to addressing our existential environmental threats. Well, democracies can force them with laws; but so far the laws and their enforcement in most countries do not appear to be anywhere near enough to change the crisis trajectory all of human civilization is now on.

That may be part of why more countries are turning to authoritarian leaders. There are, of course, many other reasons: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, poor response to natural disasters, anger over stagnant or falling living standards, and cultural conflict over the role of women and minorities in society to name a few. But when you look at this list you can see that it can be linked in most cases with proliferating climate change effects (such droughts that lead to migration), rising prices due to over-exploitation of resource supplies including energy (which can lead to falling living standards and crime), and cultural retrenchment which occurs in times of societal stress (in this case, the reassertion of male dominance and dominance for racial majorities that feel they are losing out to racial minorities).

The myth of managing the biosphere

A recent piece in New Scientist has reminded me that it is a myth that humans, if they are wise and clever enough, can learn to "manage" the biosphere.

The piece is about the unfortunate trade-off between pollution reduction and global warming. It has been known for some time that successful efforts to reduce air pollution have resulted in fewer particles in the atmosphere, particles that reflect sunlight back into space. This reduction has actually accelerated global warming even as it has improved air quality and reduced illness and death.

The warning in the New Scientist piece comes from imagining a scenario in which world governments somehow agree on global action to curb warming climate by "spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere that dim the sun. The strategy works: temperatures at ground level stabilise, and life goes on as normal despite escalating carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere."

Wars and rumors of wars: America, Europe, Russia and China

We have the ancient Roman writer Vegetius to thank for the phrase: "If you want peace, prepare for war." The phrase itself was adapted from one found in Vegetius' book on Roman military strategy, De Re Militari (circa 450 AD), the only complete work on the topic to survive to the modern era. The phrase translated literally reads, "Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war."

Whether that is good advice seems less relevant than whether those who prepare for war actually desire peace. I am thinking of something Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, said to Colin Powell, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to wit: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

Which brings us to today: a world decidedly more under the sway of Albright than Vegetius, a world in which everyone seems to be preparing for war, but with little intention of preserving the peace.