I almost said she gets my vote just for being named Zephyr, but thatās stupid - a fascist could just as easily have the same name. Her policies sound pretty damn good. Pity Iām not a New Yorker.
She might also do well in Chicago.
Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
Iām pretty sure that Douglas Adams named her, and I think Teachout/Wu was a big industrial firm in the movie Alien. I wish I could vote for them (policy wise).
Why is it that advocates never seem to run for lower offices and work their way up through Govt?
I feel like Obama and Carter were of this limited Govt background with big ideas, and then they get elected and run into the brick wall of institutional momentum, donāt know how to work it, and then make bad compromises just to get anything at all done.
Change is won in the trenches. Not by a general on a white horse.
Except thereās actually a more awesome gubernatorial candidate.
I would seriously consider voting for her except for the banning fracking thing. I totally understand why weād want to regulate the heck out of a new technology that has potential for external harm, and why we might want to tax dirty sources of energy to encourage the development and use of cleaner sources of energy.
But in a state that relies heavily on coal and imported oil, why would we want to BAN a cheap and far cleaner source of energy than what we use today? Shouldnāt we ban coal and oil first? Itās like those schmucks who want to stop the gas pipeline in the West Village. Stopping that pipeline isnāt going to enable us to start heating our homes with solar power. Itās just going to keep hordes of heating oil trucks running around town, tying up traffic, spewing diesel fumes in our air, and storing toxic fuel oil in our homesā basements.
The New Yorker had an interesting article on her, and on corruption in politics in the US.
Citizen United really needs to be overturned, it is ludicrous that money= free speech and that corporations=people. Uphill battle though. If I lived there, they would both have my vote.
The Rent is too Damn High
You mean other than all the environmental effects fracking has on the places where it is done?
The environmental effects are why there is a need for very strict regulation of fracking. But I havenāt seen anything demonstrating that fracking is worse for the environment than traditional oil drilling/refining, coal mining, chemical production, industrial agriculture, private automobile ownership, or any number of other hazardous but supremely useful things that we regulate rather than ban.
A friend of mineās parents may have to leave their retirement home in Pennsylvania as the groundwater is being destroyed by fracking locally. Folks are already moving out of the town.
Tell me again why people love fracking in their communities?
That really sucks. But drinking water can also get contaminated by things related to agriculture, coal scrubbing and conventional oil. We respond to those kinds of incidents by improving regulations and (where possible) making the companies responsible pay, not by banning fertilizer, livestock, ācleanā coal or oil tankers. We definitely need stronger regulations to prevent leaky fracking wells from contaminating ground water (and maybe funds set aside by the oil/gas industry to pay damage claims to people who are affected if they screw up). But I still fail to see whatās so special about fracking that it deserves to be outright banned.
Fracking is like sitting in a Fiat with the windows rolled up, while someone else smokes formaldehyde. Sure theyāre exercising their right to destroy themselves, but their fumes and crap are AFFECTING YOU directly.
Fracking is the same kind of situation. They donāt just āextract gas by injecting water into the ground.ā They inject water, a bunch of other nasty shit and it COMES UP IN PEOPLEāS WELL WATER. Whole swathes of land are RUINED. Aquifers are DESTROYED FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS. You may as well have stripmined hundreds of square miles or sown salt into the soil or exploded hydrogen bombs over it. Itās that bad. Fracking is one of the most destructive extraction practices ever used. Itās not benign. Itās malignant. Iām all for banning it.
Fuck the frackers. We have the sun, letās use the damn thing.
Iāve seen articles suggesting that leaky wells can elevate methane levels in nearby well water. But is there real evidence that the injected water and other nasty shit actually come up in peopleās well water and that whole swathes of land are ruined and aquifers destroyed for hundreds of years? Iām not asking to be a dick about it. If there is real stuff out there that shows this to be the case, Iād like to see it, because Iām far from an expert in the area.
It does pollute. It doesnāt always pollute. But it pollutes significantly enough to deserve stricter regulation, and thatās not being done.
Iāll just point you in the direction of one article, and then if you are curious, you can take it from there.
Thanks. I searched a bit on my own earlier and that was one the articles I came up with, too, but the article directly contradicts the headline and lede, as it says that two of the four states they surveyed have NOT confirmed any cases of water pollution from fracking.
Obviously youāre not my google slave, but if you (or any other happy mutants) happen to come across any articles that discuss actual scientific findings of injected water and other nasty shit coming up from wells into drinking water, please try to remember to come back here and reply as Iād like to learn more about it.
Pick a different article, then. The facts are that fracking destroys the land. I donāt know what the exact percentage of land it fouls. 20% 99%? But the facts are against the notion that fracking is safe. Go do some additional research instead of leaning on other people for it.
Speaking as an environmental scientist with a really quite good working understanding of the hydrogeology of bedrock and surficial aquifers, petroleum contaminiation, as well as environmental fate and transport of toxins I can say this.
Fracking -can- be done responsibly. And when the price of the product retrieved justifies the amount of research necessary to prove that there is a negligible chance of expose to humans - at EACH WELLHEAD INDIVIDUALLY - backed up with some serious on-site data collection and environmental monitoringā¦ and I mean of a sort that grad students dream of being able to do, nothing like what āmonitoringā is today. Then it -might- be safe. But I am certanly speaking of a research cost in the 100-400K per wellhead range.
So, basically, after all the other oil is gone, oil would be valuable enough to barely pay for fracking to be done safely. Thatās my opinion, and I find and clean up (yeah, right, I manage it) contaminated groundwater.
Itās more valuable than oil, clean waterā¦ You can go a day without oil.
