Do you want such a tap?

1. No
2. Yes
3. I don't care
4. I'm a looser with no onion

Well, we're yet to see evidence of water contamination. It does however highly increase earthquake frequencies, that's a fact.
But oh well.. Wall Street makes money, and some businessmen make money. So who cares?

You forgot the part where consumers get their petroleum fix. This whole thing reminds me of the people fighting "unclear energy" in spite of the alternatives causing acid rain etc.

In Bavaria fracking is forbidden. That was realized with the law about clean groundwater.

"Clean coal" is the future. Now it's even delivered straight to your house! Only the liberal media would complain about such a feature.

"Clean" coal creates more CO2 for energy produced than any other fuel, because all the energy comes from burning carbon. With natural gas, you get heat from four hydrogen atoms (producing water) along with each carbon atom.

Please tell me you noticed my rampant sarcasm.

Coal has sulfur, soot, nitrogen, mercury, and even bits of uranium. It also kills people every year who mine for it.

A "clean coal" power plant has never actually been implemented, even though the "theoretically possible" power plant has been touted in advertisements. The one plant they said was going to be installed and bragged about? Too bad, they decided "climate regulation was too ensure and the economy too weak" so they scraped it--but not till after getting $330 million in DOE grants to start the project. They then put it on a smaller test bed, only to shut it off after they proved it could work--even while bragging about the 50,000 metric tons of CO2 they captured in two years.

That's right. They both bragged about saving the environment, and shut off the very thing they were bragging about.

Coal, like other parts of the energy industry, is rampant with self-serving lobbyists that don't care how many people die, or how much our ecosystem gets damaged.

Fracking releases trapped gas so of course some of it can get into a water well if that well is above a gas deposit. Gas well protections can fail, but there must be some blame that can be placed on poorly constructed water wells.

States like Oklahoma that use fracking are actually experiencing their highest number of Earthquakes on record.

Bummer.

It's a pretty obvious result. Fracking uses high pressure to fracture large areas of rock to release the gas. Of course its going to cause some instability. Yeesh.

The contamination of the groundwater seems even more dangerous to me than earthquakes. An earthquake lasts a short time, to purify groundwater may take much longer.

German government is still discussing, it seems they may allow fracking with water and sand in special cases, but they are not going to allow groundwater contamination with chemicals.

Forget about purifying the groundwater. It is now pretty much permanently contaminated. Even if they only use water/sand for the pressurization, there are still a lot of hydrocarbons stuck in the rock that are now going to contaminate the water table.

Apparently fracking is destroying many states aquifers.

But that's okay, right? Because power companies have our best interests at heart.

Not even power companies. mining/drilling companies.

What do we, animals and plants drink when the groundwater is a chemical cocktail? Coca Cola?

Probably invade another country that still has good water.

Canada is already getting demands from the US about water rights...

I was under the impression that the aquifers were being depleted by excessive extraction of water.

The one's that aren't contaminated (yet)

Though, a lot of that extraction is being done for bottled water. It's funny. Companies like Pepsi, and especially nestle are starting to get into "hot water" due to their abuse of local water regulations. They essentially pay nothing for the water, deplete as much as they can, then sell it for as much as possible.

I'm afraid Coca Cola isn't as well represented in the Congress as Exxon Mobil is, so I bet you'll be drinking petroleum. I assure you they'll find some doctors who'll find enough arguments for the judges to believe replacing water with oil does not harm your health.

The nation is failing in its duty (protecting the interests of the people that inhabit its territories), the result of corruption.

Making jokes about it just relieves pressure which helps the exploitation continue.

You're right. Tell me how all my letters to my congressman concerning Edward Snowden made a significant impact on society.

The cause of these problems with fracking is again the different philosophy.

Everybody has a philosophy, if he wants or not. These people who are responsible for the fracking have the philosophy of pure materialism. They believe they are material bodies and when the material body dies everything is over. Then they don't need to care what happens decades later. To earn as much money as possible in the moment appears as the only sense of life for them.

People with a wider spiritual view have a deeper understanding. They know at the death of the material body the soul lives on. It is useless to collect loads of money and other material things for the few years the material life will last. It is much more important to satisfy God to have a good existence after death ("go to heaven").

To satisfy God it is necessary to respect nature, protect the groundwater and to care for the ecological balance on earth. That way we can show we have an intelligence and are able to use the ressources wisely God has given to us.

I don't really believe in a soul that goes on, or a god. but I do happen to care about humanity's future, especially my descendants futures.

"I" think of the soul as a more abstract representation of what was, is, and ever will be of ("my"?) existence. It has been granted to me by my ancestors, entrusted to me while I am here, and will either move on to descendants or.... stop occurring.

Having said that... fracking is stupid, but currency, jobs, economy and national pride are way more important than trying to be smart so just stop it and get a hair cut.

After the Vedas the soul is a spiritual (immaterial) particle with the size of a ten thousandth tip of a hair. It can build any spiritual form around it. For a human incarnation it builds a form that is exactly the same like the material body. As long the human lives these two bodies take the same place, they are so much connected that one could think they are the same. When the material body dies the spiritual body stays alive. Thats what people have named a "ghost".

It is right, following the philosophy of the Vedas, fracking is by far not the only problem of mankind. In almost all aspects of modern human live there would be changes necessary. But as long as people follow the philosophy of pure materialism nothing will change, it will only get worse.

I wonder how does this happen though. I really can't stop laughing.
It makes me think the whole sanctions crap is initiated by major western oil companies who don't want to get too crowded with their drilling projects in Russia.

& by the way.. I actually disagree it relieves pressure. It's a kind of joke that may provokes some anger, thus fueling the will to change something.

Since it shouldn't be necessary to dissect that bit of utter horseshit, I'll simply post this in response instead:

What is said in the Video at the end "God has buried those treasures there because he loves to see us mine them and put them to use." that must be true, because if he wouldn't want it he could hinder it. But for sure he can see the difference between wise and unjustifiable mining.

I would like to see you dissect my writing yourself, because i can't see how the video is doing it.

You know they commonly find fossils in mines, so it's Satan that put the minerals there to help mislead us.

So why does God like child rape?

Naturally this leads again to the general question "why does God allows all the bad in the world ?"

The "good" needs its opposite to exist, because it is only good compared with the "bad". If there would be no "bad", "good" would be normal. And similar in all life the bad experience is needed, so that we can enjoy the good. The game of life needs the possibility to loose to be an adventure. Otherwise it would be boring. It's like a computer game. You need to master this level, then you are ready for the next.

Don't get me wrong, I think I have a potential answer for that "hard" question. But saying, "People do it, so God must be okay with it" I think is a fallacy that assumes God would stop anything he didn't like.

My hypothetical solution for that disparity is this:

God is growing raising humanity the same way you would a child. That is, he allows bad things to happen so that we learn from them as a society and adapt ourselves to the moral thing. He is tending to us so that we are less and less dependent on his direct intervention.

Initially, he was hands on with everything because we were an infant species. By time the new testament hit, he was more in the background but still prominent. Now, he's very much in the background influencing us through, say, our conscious.

That seems like the logical way to both have a group of people behave the way you want, and yet still have "free will." Guide them overall in the direction you want, but not force any one person to do anything they don't want to.

Of course, anyone and everyone is welcome to disagree--and obviously this only applies to those who follow Christianity--but since God calls himself "the holy Father" it's not too much of a stretch to say humanity is being raised like a child.

Bear in mind that the universe is much, much bigger than our planet. There are more than 70 trillion stars and many of them have planets and beings on it. And thats only the material universe, there are even immaterial parallel-universes, our modern scientists have already accepted their existence. In this gigantic, gigaparsecs wide universes our planet earth is nothing but a dust grain.

God has created this all, so that we can conclude no simple soul here on earth can fully understand him with all his unimaginable powers. But thats not necessary for us at the moment, we only need to know parts of Gods plan concerning our planet.

The Seers in old india have found out this plan and they have written it down in the Vedas. The most important parts were translated in english and later in german, although the quality of the translations is very different.

What you have written is reasonable, but it's only a few aspects of a system that fills hundreds of volumes...

The final conclusion of the Vedas is very simple: Be a servant of God and he will take you to heaven.

debatable

I don't think religious reasons are the only reasons why one could be opposed to fracking. They shouldn't dominate this thread. Especially when they're voiced by ... a Bavarian (you are a Bavarian, aren't you, Striker?)!

They aren't.

Most of us are capable of discussing terms on both a political, humanitarian basis, as well as religious one. Some of us even in religions we don't believe in.

Polybios, i am prussian, born in Berlin, and i have no problem if you deliver arguments that dominate the thread. However, we will find out they are somehow related to religion.

Only because zealots like to tie EVERYTHING to religion even athiest zealots.

And for you religion is like minigolf, something you do or do not, doesn't matter?

Religion is not a thing I need to cope with life.

To some, it matters.

There's nothing wrong with religion excepting the missionaries.

@Striker:
Of course you are Bavarian, no one else would speak of Prussia today.

I bought a shirt and a cookie jar from a bibles for missionaries thrift store yesterday... felt weird about it because I don't support that, but it's only $6 right?

Do you feel weird when you watch a movie with actors who believe 9/11 was a coverup?

Nah, I went through that loop myself in the stretch between 2003-2008 or so.

{"name":"thumbs_bibles_for_haiti_looks_delicious.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/e\/8eb17c08f860a2dca3b34d32165295b7.jpg","w":500,"h":444,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/e\/8eb17c08f860a2dca3b34d32165295b7"}

Thomas, everybody has a philosophy/religion, you too. For the most here it's materialism and egoism together with morally elements from the christians.

However, everybody with intelligence should be against fracking, even those who make money with it.

Sorry, but religion doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

I do have beliefs, and my own ideas about the universe, but I do not have a religion. Agnostic is like the exact opposite of a religion

Now going from Fracking to Religion is.....priceless.

Every thread in A.CC goes all over the place. And honestly, lot's of good discussions... and some of the best conversations I've ever had with people in person, were all over the place.

It usually means everyone is capable of light-heartedly discussing many topics without going into rage mode the second someone picks a hot subject, like politics or religion.

I disagree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

In other words, gnosticism can be interpreted as a "spirituality", not in the sense of ghosts or spirits, but sort of an intuitive outlook on the way things should be.

Some people assign their ideas of what should be onto some sort of icon, using it as some sort of authority, like "Mom said, so you'd better do it!". Some people go so far as to claim they have conversations with supernatural beings, whether they themselves believe these conversations to be real is moot.

In other words, Gnosticism and Agnosticism are not really related.

What Polybios said. You're not entirely wrong though. Beliefs and faith are not the same thing as religion. I do have beliefs, but I do not believe in religion. not just any specific religion, but religion in general.