Blog Stage 5: Should Texas ban fracking?

Fracking shouldn't be banned in Texas because fracking's benefits overcome the negative.

Texans should support fracking because of its economic benefits (royalty payments to landowners, jobs, local taxes, etc.) Fracking can dramatically change the economic state of a city or town because of all the jobs it will provide considering that there is alot of natural gas to obtain. For others, opposing fracking makes sense. A couple reasons may be because they believe that fracking pollutes the environment and that for some, fracking has changed their small, quiet town into a loud industrial area.

I believe many people have no idea of what fracking is which takes away a number of people's opinions. According to the University of Texas at Austin Energy Poll, 59 percent of Americans say they are “not familiar” with fracking. Among those familiar with fracking, a plurality 47.5 percent support its use against 35.7 percent opposed. Support exceeds opposition in all the shale gas states except New York.

For those who are "unfamiliar"; fracking involves the injection of water, sand and chemicals deep into shale formations to fracture rock, freeing formerly inaccessible natural gas. To be sure, we are still learning about the environmental impacts of fracking, but there is no real support in the scientific literature for the notion that fracking poses greater pollution or health risks than those we regularly accept in connection with our reliance on the primary alternative electric generation fuel – coal. To the contrary natural gas-fired power plants give us electricity that yields half the greenhouse gases (and much smaller fractions of the more deadly pollutants) that we get from coal combustion. That is good for the environment, for all of us.

Therefore, I am a supporter for fracking because Texas benefits enormously from it and banning it would be a bad idea.