No fracking way.

AuthorKohn, Lynn Mitchell
PositionLETTERS - Letter to the editor

It is easy to see the appeal of fracking, as [Ted] Nordhaus advocated in last month's interview ("The Monthly Interview," July/ August 2013). It is relatively clean compared to coal and holds out the promise of energy independence. But these benefits come with the real risk of irreversible contamination of groundwater. Those dangers are harder to ignore in North Carolina, given the proximity of natural gas reserves to sources of drinking water such as Jordan Lake in Chatham County. The practical and political obstacles to effective regulation are also apparent here.

The debate in North Carolina exists in the context of a time when new methods of energy exploration are moving to the densely populated East Coast and the water supplies of major cities there. At the same time, regulations on the federal level are riddled with loopholes. State governments may not have the resources or political will to take up the slack. It is a situation where a lot of people, to borrow Nordhaus's phrase, could get "mugged by reality."

Lynn Mitchell Kohn

Durham, NC

Nordhaus makes no mention and gives no credit to the long list of bona fide environmental concerns about fracking. It's true that the resulting natural gas replaces coal, which reduces carbon emissions. That, however, could be a net loss to the environment in total when...

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