Climate Sunday: If it's Sunday, It Must Be Something in the Water

The above haunting image comes to us from North Carolina, where 82,000 tons of coal sludge has been spilled into the Dan River. That's an awful lot of coal sludge, and it is not only chock-full of toxic metals and chemicals (arsenic, anyone?) but damn near impossible to clear out. Happening hard on the heels of the chemical spill in West Virginia (which is still reeling) (Did you know their water bills went up?), this is yet another reminder that coal may be a lot of things, but clean, it isn't.

But let's be blunt--some alternatives are just as bad. Let's take fracking's impact on water.  Although we don't hear that much about fracking spills of contaminated water, there is evidence that people living where fracking occurs are at risk of health concerns, and children born where there is fracking have a greater risk of birth defects. 

But leaving aside whether the practice of fracking leaves hazardous residues in the water, the fact that fracking relies on water at all is problematic, when drought conditions seriously restrict resources, and decisions about prioritization have to be made. Fracking uses water that could be better used in these situations. Take a look at this:

It can take millions of gallons of fresh water to frack a single well, and much of the drilling is tightly concentrated in areas where water is in chronically short supply, or where there have been multi-year droughts. 

Half of the 97bn gallons of water was used to frack wells in Texas, which has experienced severe drought for years – and where production is expected to double over the next five years. 

Farming and cities are still the biggest users of water, the report found. But it warned the added demand for fracking in the Eagle Ford, at the heart of the Texas oil and gas rush, was hitting small, rural communities hard.

We may seriously be making choices about fracking for hard-to-get energy resources versus water to drink, irrigate crops, and water livestock. And our dependence on fossil fuels, after all, like coal and natural gas, are in part responsible for some of our terrible drought situations

We desperately need to make better choices about our resources.